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Last week, my Rambling was written in the aftermath of shocking events, events we're still collectively processing. I focused on violence, generically, not having had enough time to really sit with my feelings (grief, fear, confusion, etc.). By Sunday, I had gotten some sense of myself and talked to God quite a bit. I offered the sermon below at two of the four services this weekend (Thank you, Fr. Bill Barton for preaching the first two!), and share it here as this week's Rambling. I apologize for its length; it's the classic reality of how some weeks and weekends go: If I had more time I would have written a shorter sermon! I don't write most of my sermons down anymore, and this one was no different. What follows is a transcription from an audio file of the 9:15 am service, using an AI program to get the bulk of it. I have only edited it slightly to make it a bit easier to follow when reading. I apologize for poor grammar and rough edges in advance.
Let's keep praying for each other, for the Church, for our country, and for the healing we all require in our own hearts. It will take courage and trust in God for us to love our way through challenging days, speaking truth, and shining the light of Christ, but I know with God's help we will do just that!
There's a long story that I'm not going to tell you about getting back and forth to Suwanee this weekend for Parents Weekend and Fall Convocation. The part that matters for this morning is the part where I managed to get to Suwanee for 10 hours on Friday so that I could attend the convocation service this fall at which new members of the Order of the Gown were inducted. For those of you who know a little bit about Suwanee, maybe you know that one of the things that's traditional and quaint and lovely about Suwanee is the students who still wear academic gowns to class. Well, you get that when your GPA is high enough and you're encouraged to wear it to class at least two days a week. I think it's Mondays and Wednesdays now.
And originally that was the form of student government at Sewanee before there was a more traditional form of government. Now it operates alongside. Eva was inducted into the Order. And to be gowned at that service, you need to have somebody who's already in the Order, or a professor or an alumni. And there's a tradition of handing down gowns between people, and they end up with initials and lots of graduation years on the back.
So I had to be there to pass on mine.
Didn't see that coming.
So whenever Suwannee has convocation or a big service, we always, in the liturgy, read Psalm 133, which is where the Suwannee motto comes from. And I'm sure with all the Suwannee preachers we have around here, you've heard it before. It comes up in the lectionary. It's in the daily office, of course, and it comes up in the lectionary. It's short.
I want to read it to you if you're somebody who likes to read along. It's on page 787 in the prayer book. But the motto that we use at Suwane is Equa quam bonum, which is as it is throughout our psalter, the Latin translation of the first words of the psalm. Equi quam bonum. Oh, how good, oh, how good and pleasant it is when brethren live together in unity.
It's like fine oil upon the head, that runs down upon the beard, upon the beard of Aaron, and runs down upon the collar of his robe. It is like the dew of Hermon that falls upon the hills of Zion. For there the Lord has ordained the blessing, life forevermore. So normally, since that's such a big part of Suwanee, when you hear it. It's a comfort.
You're used to it. It's like. Like when you sing the hymn that you always love. Like, for some of you, the hymn we just sang may have taken you back to days in a previous tradition where that was sung on a regular basis in your childhood. Who knows?
But the other side of that, besides comfort for me on Friday in the middle of that convocation service, which was a lovely occasion, was that those words sounded instead to me like the noisy gong and the clanging cymbal that Paul talked about in First Corinthians. Because after the week we just had in this nation, unity isn't the feeling that I think most of us have. We don't look around the world about us and say, oh, how good and pleasant it is right now to live in the world we inhabit, because it doesn't feel that way, because it's not good and it's not pleasant. And the trouble with where we have fallen in our nation is that we are so polarized and so easily manipulated into being polarized that to try to talk about what happened this week runs the risk of further polarizing us. Because to talk about a political assassination like that of Charlie Kirk or to talk about another school shooting that happened almost at the same time that he was being assassinated, to talk about Charlie Kirk and his life, to talk about his assassin, to talk about school shooters and all the rest of it, any one of those things we don't want to hear about in a sermon because we've already made up our minds.
We already knew who was responsible for these kinds of things before investigations were even over. So to say something is to make people angry and to have them tune us out. And to say, you're wrong, you're just missing the mark, and this is not what we need to be doing. We've moved beyond the place where national tragedies bring us together. And it's sad to say that national tragedies used to bring us together, now seek to divide us even further.
So what do we make of that? We, who are people who have always looked to unity as something of great importance, the mission of the church is built around unity. The commission of Christ to the disciples is built around unity. What do we do with that? Well, the thing that we can say that I hope does not upset anybody is to say any kind of death, murder is wrong.
And political violence of any kind going in any direction is wrong. And it is evil, and it is not what God wants for God's people. God does not like violence. We don't believe that God calls us to violence. We don't believe a death of innocence is ever appropriate.
And when we disagree with one another, we are not to make each other into our enemies. We are to find ways to love one another. And that is what we are given in the church. Because we're so broken at the moment, that doesn't seem to offer much hope. So we watch headlines and we feel this sense of fatalism and say, well, I guess this is where we are.
We want to say this is not who we are, but in fact it is who we are. And the question is, how do we become someone else if we don't want to be that group of people, that country, that nation in which these things can happen?
In the gospel today, we get the first two of three stories about lost things and the importance of our being lost before God. The first two are the lost sheep and the lost coin, which is Jesus' way of saying we are so quick to call each other sinners and point each other's faults out that we need to be reminded how. How we all look in the eyes of God and how much God cares for us despite each of us being broken, that all of us is the lost sheep at some point and in some way, that all of us is the lost coin. In this story, when we hear the story of the prodigal son and the prodigal Father, that we all are to some degree, one of the sons in that story, both of whom are lost in different ways, one of the things that occurs to me is we lose all kinds of things that are valuable to us. And the assumption that Jesus makes, tongue in cheek, who wouldn't go after the one sheep, who wouldn't sweep the whole house for one coin when they had nine more, assumes that when we lose something of great value, we will go in search of it no matter what.
I think we've lost something important and valuable in our common life. We feel it. That's why it feels hopeless. But I wonder, are we even looking for it? Do we know where to look?
Do we know who's looking with us? Or how to invite people to join us in looking forward? Because we're losing something if it's not lost already. And there is for us also in this gospel about the redemption of sinners and the love of God for all of us, the reminder that, yes, we are to go after the things that matter, because they matter. Don't let them stay astray, don't let them continue to be lost.
Find a way to bring them back and rejoice when we do.
So what are we going to do? Go back for a second to Psalm 133. And it's beautiful brevity. Everybody likes the short psalm when we compile at Vestry because nobody wants to read 27 verses, but they like ones that are short. And this one's very short.
It's only five verses. Most of it is archaic, though, that when we talk about how good and pleasant unity is, it's likened to. To oil being on the head, running down upon the beard. It is not some social media campaign for beard oil, but it could be. It could be somebody trying to sell you a subscription for beard oil and soap that smells like a campfire.
I don't know. But it's not. It's very specific. It's the beard of Aaron, the beard of Aaron attached to the face of Aaron, who is the first great high priest that was anointed to lead God's people at a time when they were united under that one great high priest. All of the 12 tribes, as we come to understand them in a place of unity.
And we liken that moment of anointing, of that role of God's chosen people, to say, this is amazing and powerful and holy, and it's good and it's pleasant. And that doesn't mean that whether this psalm was written, if it was written by David, that there was a moment of unity that lasted. We know that if it was David who authored this particular psalm, that, you know, there was not constant unity in David's life, but to be able to know it and to see it was both aspirational and something to celebrate when we did. And for us, we know of another anointing story that isn't a direct parallel to this one of another person in the New Testament whose head is anointed with costly oil when the bottle is broken and it's poured over his head, and we can assume it ran down into his beard as well, and God on the collar of his robe as well as he became another symbol of unity for a new generation of God's chosen people. For those of you who are forgetting the story, it's Jesus at a dinner party when Mary Emily.
Our place to look for unity is in Christ. That is what and who unifies us. We've taken to looking for it outside in the world around us, where it's very hard to find and very hard to manufacture. But for those of us who follow in the way of Christ, Jesus is always going to be the source of our Unity and the unifying one who brings us together. Jesus, who ultimately brought together Jews and Gentiles in that messiness of the early church, who were trying to follow his teaching when Peter and Paul had to battle it out and ultimately realize there's room for us all, for you to be Jews who follow Jesus, for us to be Gentiles who follow Jesus, for us to find ways to do this together, which we are all inheritors of.
The more we can be like Jesus and seek Jesus and unify with others who share that as our unifying force, the more chance we have at unity overall. That dew of Hermon that we hear about is Mount Hermon, the highest point in the Holy Land, that was so high that even during warm weather it was cool enough on top of the mountain that moisture would condense. And you usually find refreshing dew in the mornings, at least because it was cooled off and it would form there. And in the midst of a place that was full of lots of desert life, that was incredibly refreshing. And you can't miss the imagery that being on a mountain is akin to being closer to God.
And being closer to God is the place of refreshment. And refreshment comes when we are unified together, that if we can seek the unity that we have now attributed to Jesus Christ and make ourselves more and more into the image and likeness of Christ in our lives, that we are going to find ourselves on a mountaintop of sorts, closer to God and more able to access God's refreshing life giving water that is good and is pleasant and is what we are called to pursue. For Christians, Christ is our starting place, which sounds like, duh, there's a reason we talk about it again and again when we go about this world and we are definitely disunified in the world outside of the church. We could have another sermon about disunity in the church. One of the problems we have is we are too quick to make each other our enemies and to allow other people to tell us who our enemies are or who our enemies should be.
And if you tell somebody long enough as many times as you can that somebody's their enemy, eventually they might just start to believe you. And it's problematic for the Christian, though it shouldn't really matter why, because we know specifically what Jesus expects our response to our enemies to be. What is it? Love. Love your enemies.
So go ahead, make all the enemies you want, but you're still going to have to love them. We don't get out of that as followers of Jesus just by saying, well, you're my enemy? No. Jesus covered that base for us completely, wholly. If you consider them an enemy in every level, you don't get a pass on treating them the way you're supposed to treat them.
You are supposed to love them. In our tradition today, that manifests itself with reminders like looking for Christ in all persons, respecting the dignity of every human being. A reminder that we are all siblings and brethren in Christ who are called hopefully towards some semblance of unity with one another. What that means in moments and weeks like the one we just had, is as Christians, no matter what we feel and how our heart breaks and where our fears come from, we have to work our way towards the love for others, regardless of who they are, because they are our siblings. God's name and the image of Christ.
You could flip that away and say we're siblings in Christ's name, in the image of God if you want. It can work both ways.
That means we have to find a way to love and see Christ in Charlie Kirk and Charlie Kirk's assassin alike. We have to learn to respect the dignity of Republicans and liberals, sorry, liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats and even libertarians to find the dignity that exists in all those people, to love the immigrant and the ice agent and see how we respect the dignity of those two groups, to love police and protesters and find a way to find dignity to respect in them as well and to serve that in them because of who we follow and who we proclaim to be a result. We don't get to write off any part of those dyads and triads because we disagree with them or because somebody tells us we should hate them or that they should be our enemies. We know better. We just have to try to do better and follow that way of love.
Jesus goes out and brings people back into the fold again and again, the way each of us has been, in essence, brought back into the fold. Sometimes Jesus has to go bring out the people that we kicked from the fold back into our midst. And it's not a word game. It's not a game at all. It's not as though we in the flock see others, that Jesus is calling back in and saying, sure, Jesus, open the paddock.
Let him in. We'll be nice to him. And as soon as Jesus turns back, we kick the sheep next to us because we don't like them. You've seen sheep, they do kick each other and they headbutt each other. It's part of being a sheep.
It's part of being human. But it's not the final word, and it's not how we're supposed to be. We don't lower the bar to act like sheep. Actually, we try to raise the bar to act like the one who brings us together and who seeks the unity and the love of all. That's what we are to be about.
And if it feels like we've lost that, we've certainly lost it in our communities. And the weird thing about the modern era is that while church used to be the thing that held us above those kind of divisions, that our faith was primary and we could be alongside each other in our differences, more and more, we're finding that's no longer true. The speaker who I wrote about in the rector's rambling last week, who's going to be with us in October, part of his presentation to us is going to show how, in fact, what's going on out in the world is reshaping our churches instead of the other way around, where we now choose not to worship alongside each other and break bread together and come to this table together and kneel side by side with people who think differently, as across the entire spectrum, we end up wanting to only be with the people who we agree with. Where churches like this one and the Main Line have always been places to unify people of difference under one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. And that's still our mission to this day.
And if we've lost it, you need to go in search of it. Because we are so polarizing ourselves, we're being pulled and pushed in directions we do not want to go that do not lead to the fullness of life, but lead to death of spirit and even physical death.
We don't have to live on the extremes where if you're on the right side of the spectrum at all, everybody on the left is on the other pole. If you're on the left side of the spectrum, everybody on the right is. Is on the extreme side of that hole. We could try to remember and discover what it is that unifies most of us, because the middle is still the biggest. The people who do want to love their neighbor and find ways to do that and solve problems together.
And I have a church example for you about that. When I came here in 2013, one of the issues that had caused some kerfuffle in the previous era was what do we do with our endowment and how do we use it? Part of the problem was it wasn't technically an endowment. It was a pot of money in an account. It was invested.
It was managed by a group of people, but there was no agreement on what it was or how it was to be used. Some called it a trust fund, some called it a savings fund. And I was warned when I got here, don't talk about it, don't touch it. It's a third rail. It's going to tear this place apart.
But I didn't listen to those voices because I realized that was one of the things that wanted to keep tearing this place apart. Regardless of whether we talked about it, it was in the water. Every time there was a vestry meeting, every time the finance committee was trying to figure out what our life would look like financially, there was this big cloud of questions about what about this and how we use it and everything else. I realized we had to do something about it. And we had started to make plans to do that.
And we had a consultant come in for our vestia treat, as we sometimes do. And he was informed that this is one of the things we wanted to work on so that it wasn't a point of friction, but something we could come together on. And so I remember he asked the vestry, and of course, I was there at the retreat, two questions. He said, okay, how many around this table think that Christchurch should spend every penny in its endowment to go do ministry out in the world until all the money is gone? Raise your hand if you think we should spend it all.
Nobody raised their hand. And he said, okay, well, I want you to raise your hand if you think we shouldn't spend any money out of the endowment. It should just sit there and grow, but never be used to further God's kingdom. If you think we shouldn't spend a single dollar out of it, I want you to raise your hand. Nobody raised their hand.
And he looked at us, he said, so what's the problem?
You've all just admitted you're somewhere on the spectrum, that you know the endowment should be used to do ministry. All you have to do is figure out how much you are not as far apart as you think you are. And he was absolutely right. We brought in the Episcopal Church Foundation. We turned that pot of money into an endowment.
We created a permanent endowment alongside it. We had met with the congregation and said, this is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it. What do you think? No one got angry.
No one shouted. Some of the people that we were afraid were going to be bringing their pitchforks and torches to vestry meetings thanked us for coming to a place where we could be in agreement and say this money is to be used and it's to be protected and treasured at the same time, which is how it's used today. And the point is not about our endowment. The point is it is so easy for us to assume we are at odds with each other and enabled to move beyond that when somebody somehow has to remind us we're all in this together. We just need to navigate how and not trust that we are representing some extreme position that cannot give quarter to other ideas.
And if that's going to come from anywhere in this culture of ours, where is it going to come from if not the body of Christ? Who has more practice than any nation on this planet at trying and failing at times to be unified under Christ and what Christ stands for? To not let ourselves listen to false prophets and those who would lead us down the way of death, but to keep us focused on the way of life, building relationships, seeking the good of this world and God's kingdom together. Even when we disagree.
We've heard in this church a lot about love, and some people just sort of roll their eyes and say it's a lot more complicated than that. Yeah, but it's not any harder than that either. The way of love that we know is not the way of power. It is not the way of right in terms of winning an argument. The way of love is the way of love.
The way of love is the way that says, I see Christ in you. I see that God is at work in you, that I am a redeemed sinner, that you are a redeemed sinner, and that together we can try to do what God is calling us to do.
If we don't want to do that, if we can't even try to do that, we have to be careful when we call ourselves followers of Christ because Christ doesn't call us to perfection to make sure we get it 100% right all of the time. But at the very least, as followers of Christ, we are called to try to not give in to hatred, to not let people force us into making enemies, to find Christ in each other and respect the dignity of every human being. That is not going to solve the problems we have overnight. The cycle of political violence, I am sorry to say I don't believe is over. It's terrifying.
It's scary. It's heartbreaking. This is what Christ came to the world to do. We sit in dark times and we wonder about hope and where it's going to come from. And in a few weeks.
When we begin the season of Advent, we will hear that people sat in great darkness and on them a light shone. Light doesn't just show up in Advent, it shines all the time. The darkness doesn't show up just in those weeks of preparation for Christmas. It's an acknowledgement that there's always darkness in the world, but that the darkness can never overcome the light. We know the light.
We have the light within us, and the light is the love of God in Jesus Christ. If we are feeling lost and hurt and scared, we don't know what to do. We don't know where to search for what we've lost and what we want to find again, we need to start there. The One who unifies us, the One who shows us we're all in this sheepfold together. Despite our brokenness, we are all worthy of God's love.
Behold how good and pleasant it can be.
