Sermons from the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer

You're downtown. You're on your way to the Bengals game, and you see a panhandler on the street with a sign. Hungry. Please give. You do one of three things. You pull out your wallet and give him a dollar. Or you shake your head to say no. Or you look straight ahead, trying not to catch his eye as you walk by him.

And then you feel guilty and you wonder, Did I just become a goat because I did not feed the least of my brothers and sisters? Jesus told me that when I feed the hungry, I'm feeding the king. And when I refuse, I refuse the king. And as you keep walking with those troubling thoughts, you look up and you see six more panhandlers ahead of you

Is every single panhandler the king who judges us? Are we being tested every time we do or do not help the needy? Does a king really count up all of the times that we give a handout and balance them out against all the times we don't?

The king gathers up everybody and separates the good from the bad. Or as we say in theological terms, separates the keepies from the creepies. The sheep from the goats. Which I kind of object to because I think it's unfair to goats. So, for today, I am going to substitute for the more accurate hagfish. Also known as slime eels. Because hagfish are out only for themselves. And they spew slime at any strangers who come near. Just like in this story.

You all may have heard this story from Jesus described as an economy of virtues. I've heard it that way in the past. God gives us each a spiritual gift some people are special, so they get more gifts, a very convenient translation for all the high achievers in the room. Anyway, everyone gets something and don't worry, God won't give you more than you can handle.


But, just like late-stage capitalism, this story doesn't check out. God wants a good return on his investment? Better read up on those self-improvement manuals because Jesus is coming, so you better look busy.


The end of that story is some idealized version of Streets of Gold and Gates of Pearl, where all the people who annoyed you here on Earth are far away, and you can just sit alone in a big white room, eating bonbons, while angels circle round and sing Latin renditions of Toby Keith songs.


The moral of that story is, use the gifts that God has given you, so you can get that divine pat on the back and hear the words we all long to hear, well done, good and faithful servant.


Today I'd like to look at this Gospel lesson from a different perspective. I'd like to ask, what if? What if this passage is less about getting what you deserve, and more about an impending and uncalendared eschaton that begs us to examine our lives and ask the question, if Jesus stood before me today, would I be ready to give an account for the hope that is within me?

Life is so complicated. It has so many experts, so much advice. We want to live well. We want to do well. So we turn to the experts. And so that's my excuse for telling you about the other day when I went with friends to a Chinese restaurant. I don't usually meet for Chinese. I like my cooking just fine.

When I was a child, my Yaya used to tell us that our Halloween costumes are supposed to scare away the devil. So, the more terrifying your costume, the better. But still, in the midst of it all, I had this overwhelming feeling of being surrounded by terror. It felt like more than just a children's game.


Just then, a familiar tune played in my head. “Let your little light shine, shine, shine. Let your little light shine, oh my Lord. There must be someone down in the valley, trying to get home.”


And I looked up, and beyond the chaos, I saw something that I didn't know I was searching for. In the midst of a people hiding behind masks with weapons in hand and psychological terror in mind. A beacon of light showed up in the form of a red sweater.


While most other people there chose to dress as werewolves and wizards, this neighbor decided to dress as one of the most iconic childhood heroes of my generation. Standing right in front of me was none other than everyone's favorite Presbyterian minister, Mr. Rogers.


Tyler had the costume down to a tee. The khaki pants, the blue sneakers, the salt and pepper hair, and a little lapel pin of the friendly face of Fred Rogers, just in case anyone was confused about who he was dressed as. I couldn't help but think, if the devil is frightened by anything at all, it would be this, a warm heart, a kind face, a welcoming word, and a cheerful embrace.

And we can choose not to allow God to influence our beliefs. We can believe what we already believed and then approach the altar of God and hope to leave unchanged. By saying, these things are the things that God cares about and these are our concerns. We can walk into this space and leave our cares and troubles for the world out there and come in here and just talk about our personal feelings or piety and talk about things like faith and hope and grace and churchy words.

And you can come up to this altar and take bread from some man in a dress and then you can go back out into the world and forget about all this stuff and leave it here and not allow this to influence that and not allow that to influence this. Which leads me to the question. What part of your life does not belong to God?

What part of your life does God not care about? I encourage you today when you go home, take out a piece of paper and a pen and make a list. Or pull your phone out, grab your little notepad on your phone and go ahead and make a list of the things in your life that God doesn't care about.

We recognize authority. We place our trust in the people that we recognize are actually doing the work of love in our lives. Think for a moment about those you actually trust. The people in whom you put your trust. Is it the people with all the best words? Or is it the people that you have seen, time and again, show up for you in love and care.


We place authority in others based on what we see in them. We place our trust in people based on if we believe, after watching them in our lives, that we can trust them, that they will care for us, that they will love us the way we love them. The sad and painful thing that we see today in this story is that the chief priests and the elders who are the people who are responsible for the faith life of the community don't recognize the power and presence of God when it is right in front of them.


They have not lived their lives in such a way that they can recognize God's work when it's happening right in front of them. They don't see God's authority in the love and the power and the miracle and teaching of Jesus because they have not constructed their lives in such a way that they place authority and trust in God's love.

The story that Jesus is telling is about a working-class guy who owes his boss 10,000 talents or about 60 million dollars today. Does that sound a little unreasonable? Yeah, it is. Friends, it's not possible. Jesus is telling a story about a person who owes a completely unreasonable and unpayable debt.

It's such a ridiculous number that when the master says it's time to call to account and pay for it, the servant says, I'll do whatever I can. I'll work for the rest of my life. I'll pay you back. I swear. And the master's like, I mean, no, you won't. You're never going to make 60 million. Are you going to play the lottery? Like what's your plan?

In that moment, the master forgives him. And the point isn't that he forgives a big debt. The point is that he forgives an unforgivable debt. The point isn't that he forgives something that the slave would have to spend the rest of his life trying to pay off. The point is that he's forgiving something the slave will never, ever, in all of history, possibly pay off.

So this slave is forgiven, and then he turns around, and he's so excited, and he goes out, and in the middle of his excitement, he sees his other slave friend, who owes him a hundred denari, about 5k today. It's kind of small compared to 60 million. He's just been forgiven an unforgivable debt. He has just been forgiven a 60 millions dollar debt. And he sees someone who owes him 5k. And he goes, put that guy in jail. It's the debtor's prison for him.

This is the story Jesus is telling. Is he telling a story of how often we should forgive? Of how many times? No. Is he even telling a story of how big a sin we should forgive? Again, no. Jesus is trying to change our relationship with forgiveness. How do you and I, how do we relate to forgiveness? What is our relationship with forgiveness? How do we understand it? He recognizes that most of us keep score.

Now working at a coffee shop can teach you a lot about humans. The one I worked at called itself People's Third Place. You have your work, you have home, and you have your third place. A place where you feel like you belong. Where you know that people are looking for you to be there. Where you're loved and you can show up in pajama pants and a messy bun and people are just glad to see you.

Some people though come into a third place and they take their cup and they leave, telling themselves that they know coffee.

But what I've seen is that the people who stay, get comfortable, and settle in, and share their lives together, and tell stories together, and try Sam's weird smoothie concoction he came up with that has espresso in it for some reason, the people who hold the alley door open for you on trash day, those were not just coffee people, but coffee shop people.

What I found is that Jesus is a lot more like a French press than a Keurig cup.

If we pay attention to Jesus fully and we pay attention to the first generation of Jesus followers, we understand that to pick up our cross and to follow Jesus is not to follow Jesus out by ourselves into the wilderness all alone. It is to follow Jesus deep into the heart of community where we are meant to live our lives, building relationships of love. To love one another the way we are loved. To create a space where people can know even an inch, a smidge, just an iota of what it means to be loved unconditionally because we experience it with one another.

We have the audacity to think that that's not radical? What is more radical in this world than to create a space for people where they are told and then they are able to experience true belonging, unconditional?

You and I are not conditioned to believe that it's true. This life does not train us to believe that we are loved like that. We are over and over again taught the message that our value in this world is based on our performance. That how much we are loved will be based on what we bring to the table.

We are told this. by our culture. We are told this by our work. We are told this sometimes even in our families and in our friend circles. We have built communities, many of which are very wonderful, that are based on all sorts of things. Are they based on complete and utter belonging and belovedness?

This week, my boys collectively convened at the kitchen table to discuss a lesson that they had both had in their first and third grade classes. And my ears perked up as I heard little Arlo say, And that's how the world was made. My parental anxieties leapt from my skin. We do live in Ohio, after all.

What are you guys talking about in here? Oh, we're just talking about how the world was made. Intrigued, I pleaded, tell me more. Well, our teacher took a great big balloon and she shook it up and she passed it around and we all got to hold it and squish it and then she took it back and she popped it and glitter went flying everywhere.

And all the particles and atoms and stuff, well they're all over our classroom. And we'll be finding glitter for years. Did I mention I love school? Because they play with glitter there and not at my house.

I love that my children get to wonder and explore and expand their minds, their world views in this diverse environment of thought and experience. I really do love that the two creation narratives we find in the book of Genesis are not the only way that they will understand God's marvelous work in making this world.

I love that science and faith are not mutually exclusive in their minds. And I love that they get to see glitter everywhere.

Now, I don't know exactly what the opposite of glitter is, but I think I saw it this week, too.

I don't think that he was just doing a sort of a performative act of false humility in front of us. 'Oh, I'm just very young.' What I realized was that he was orienting himself in the truth of his infancy in God's eyes, because for him, that was a proper perspective on how to approach the whole conversation of his relationship with God.

You, right now, as you are, imagine for a moment that you are, in fact, only in your infancy when it comes to your understanding of the power of God's love in your life and the power of God's love in the life of this creation. Many of us, I'm only 44, and I already am starting to do the thing where I'm like, I don't want to learn that thing.

Like, cars without drivers, I hope I die before it happens. I'm down in my 40s, and I'm already picking the things that I don't want to learn. And so many of you were like, 'I'll never get online,' and then the pandemic happened and you're said, fine I'll learn Zoom, but you don't really want to.

We're already saying, I've learned enough, I'm old enough, I've gotten far enough. I'm done, I'd like to kind of coast a little bit. And yet wherever you are in your life, whatever age you are, however, close you are to the end of your life on this Earth, you are still in your infancy when it comes to learning the power, the magnificence of God's love.

As humans, we are constantly making choices that require separation. We cannot have everything, so we are forced to choose. We cannot do everything, and so when we do anything, we must decide not to do something else.

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur once wrote, Ugh, if only I could grasp and embrace everything. And how cruel it is to choose and to exclude. And, of course, sometimes life chooses for us. No one would choose to grow up and become an adult. And yet, here we are. No one would choose to have their children leave home, and yet... There they go.

At the very heart of what it means to be human is the inevitable separation from the things and people that we love most in this world. Life is hard. Distress, and hunger, and suffering, and being laid bare in all of our weaknesses. These are all a part of the human experience. Suffering is for us. a predestined condition, and the Apostle Paul knew this all too well. He himself enacted unimaginable suffering on some of the first followers of Jesus Christ. He stood there and watched as Stephen was stoned to death for proclaiming Jesus as the Son of the Living God.

Paul's not trying to get us to be fixed. And he's trying to get us out of the mentality that we are fixable. Or that Jesus came here to fix us. To solve us. There is a difference between being solved and being saved. There is a difference between being fixed and being loved.

God loves you. God lives for you, dies and lives again for you. God saves us as we are, not fixes us so we can be savable. And those are different things. Now many of us, many of us in this room, have been quite successful at solving problems. And I want to say, there's a place for it. It's not bad. Well, Phil told me today that problem solving is bad.

Now we got to solve problems, I get that. There's a bunch of things we got to work on, I understand that. Us being ourselves is not a problem to be solved though. And there are things that we cannot muscle our way through. We cannot use our bodies and our minds so strongly and so perfectly that finally we will be acceptable to God because we are already acceptable to God, the God who loves us and is faithful to us. Thanks be to God in Jesus Christ

To have a mind set in the flesh is a mind set in the belief that you can use your body to make yourself perfect. And Paul says that leads to death. Death, when you try to make yourself perfect in relationship with others, when you try to make yourself perfect in relationship to God, when you think you've just got to keep working or else you cannot love and be loved, you are killing yourself, my friends.

Concerned that people would not just see it as a free ride, but a joy ride, a license to sin. Not exactly. To Paul's way of thinking, saving grace has ethical implications. And to do that, to make that explanation, Paul uses the analogy of slavery. It's something that everyone in the Roman world could relate to.

One out of five folks in the Roman Empire were slaves. It was commonplace. Paul makes reference to it, like eight times in today's short reading. So, the Jewish contingent in the Roman Church would recall, of course, the exodus. Their escape from slavery in Egypt and the lessons learned while they wandered in the wilderness as lost souls, and then finding the promised land, the challenges, and the responsibilities of what it means to be free. Now, they would've certainly been relieved of not having to perfectly meet the law, the Old Testament Ten Commandments and all the many burdensome, oppressive, interpretive rules and regulations that went with it. They've been relieved greatly. But so that we don't get the wrong idea, The New Testament summary of the law to love God and love your neighbor as yourself well, that's not a cake walk either.

As a matter of fact, that may be even more difficult to comply with to meet as a goal. And that is because no one is perfect, and therein lies the conundrum of being a human. Paul reminds us therefore that grace is possible because of the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ.

Drowning didn't make me perfect, but I think it did maybe make me a little bit better. I was more conscious of what was going on around me, more thoughtful around water. I trained in CPR, the same thing that saved my life and became a lifeguard, helping others to be safe in the water.

I didn't altogether throw out though the notion that you only live once. YOLO is what the kids call it these days. I've heard this phrase ad nauseam in our culture. Live life to the fullest. Take the trip, try the thing, go out there. Spend all that money, just do it. And while I, I understand the sentiment, Yolo, you only live once, I think our focus on Paul's letter to the Romans today is asking us a deep and abiding question about living. And about what we're living for. It asks us, are you just out there living your best life so that you can have more than your neighbor? Is yolo your excuse to spend your entire paycheck on a new car or a bigger house, or the latest Chanel bag? We're all alive, thank God, but what are we living for?

...she like flung herself backward and I was like, whoa. I gotcha. that's where I saw God. I saw God in her throwing herself in my arms.

I listed a couple other places that I'd seen God and then, My spiritual director came back to that one and he asked me a question that maybe some of you are asking or thinking as well, he said, so I assume in that story you saw God in the way that you caught your daughter, like you saw God as the one who catches you when you fall. Except that is not where I had seen God in that story. I surprised myself because I was not trying to be thoughtful or interesting, that's just not where I saw God. I said, no, I saw God in my daughter throwing herself into my arms. It sounded a little bit like that.

That was a moment for me where my faith began to be transformed because my understanding of what having faith began to change in that realization. You and I spend so much of our spiritual thinking about how we are supposed to be faithful. What kind of people are we supposed to be?

There's a man whose daughter has died, that's the height of desperation. He doesn't say he believes in Jesus. He doesn't say he's going to follow him. He doesn't say anything about faith. He just shows up and says, can you please do something? And Jesus doesn't say, well, here's what I'm going to need from you. I'm going to need you to follow the seven-point Faith Plan, and I need to see you grow in your discipleship, and then I'm going to see what I can do for you. No, he heals the daughter. And then the woman who's been bleeding for 12 years is in isolation. She's seen as untouchable and disconnected. She's afraid, she is alone, she is marginalized. And what is more desperate than, if I can just touch, as the old hymn goes, the hem of his garment, I believe I'll be made whole.

What's more desperate than, if I can just touch the tip of the robe, I might be okay. That's desperation. Desperation is faithful too. Can you be desperate? Can you bargain? Can you argue and shout? Can you bring your doubt and shout that at God? Can you take your anger and throw that in front of God as well?

Can you keep at it even when you're not sure if it matters? That's faithfulness.

In our reading from Genesis this morning, we meet them, the original they, them, theirs. The one who was in the beginning before anything else ever was. When the earth was a formless void the rush of a violent wind swept forth from God and formed the land, water, and light and life were made, and God was in all of it.

Speaking and seeing, and blessing and making and calling it all very good. Before humans ever came into being, God was there. And billions of years later, human beings began to tell one another what they thought God was like. Some of the very first human writings that ever attempt to explain God, still struggle to profess that God was a small and simple little thing.

How could God be that way? Have you seen how complicated and beautiful this creation is? Even in Genesis, God is plural in form. Let us make humankind in our own image, according to our likeness. So God created humankind and God's own image in the image of God. They were created, male and female, God created them. Plural, and yet one.

Peter interpreted the events of that Pentecost in the light of his tradition and his experience of following Jesus, but not everyone welcomed the message, and it's not hard to see why. It meant that these devout people would have to significantly revise their ideas about what constituted faithfulness to their God.

We're not told what was spoken and heard in all those different languages. Only that it had something to do with God's deeds of power, that God was a powerful God They could accept. But the egalitarian and universal nature of this revelation was a lot to take on board. And what did that Galilean troublemaker Jesus have to do with anything?

How do we recognize the movement of the Holy Spirit and become a part of God's work in the world in our own day? Many of us, myself included, picked up our ideas about what it means to be Christian and about the Bible in our early years, explicitly from Sunday school or church school, or perhaps implicitly from the behavior and attitudes of our parents and grandparents. Yet, the day that we realized that we were never going to graduate from the School of Christian Learning was a blessed day indeed. In this lifelong endeavor of discipleship our Christian faith calls us to be ready to open our hearts and minds to the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. And from the vantage point of seven decades of life, I can tell you that this can be an uncomfortable experience. We know that society is changing very rapidly, and it can be tiring, even painful to be asked frequently to reexamine our assumptions. It may even feel like a betrayal of our heritage.