I’m told that at some point after World War II, one of the Roman Catholic seminaries in the northeast was in the midst of a tremendous expansion. 

Vocations to the priesthood were off the charts; new facilities were urgently needed.  

At this one seminary, in particular, there was a plan for a new large, three-story dorm. 

It came together quickly – so quickly that, in fact, it wasn’t until they were finalizing the blueprints that someone noticed that, somehow, they had neglected to design any bathrooms in the new building. 

Whoever caught the error, one of the priests, had scrawled a question in Latin with large handwriting on the corner of the top blueprint: “Qui hic habitabunt, soli angeli?”

O.k., so maybe your Latin is a little rusty.  

It means: “Who will live here? Only angels?”

Well, I gather that they made a point to revise the plans for the new dorm.   

But the story reminds us that, even for those who squarely believe in angels, there is a clear understanding that an angel’s reality and our reality are different in many fundamental respects.

It’s also true that, if you go into any Christian gift shop, bookstore, or online space, you’ll encounter a lot of angel merch. 

Many people, some very involved in a formal church and others not so much, seem moved and grounded by the idea of angels.  

It’s well beyond anything that any of our denominations are teaching, which, to be perfectly honest, is probably some of the appeal.  

Angels offer a way – a non-technical way – of imagining some version of “up there,” where we hope that it’s better, as opposed to “down here,” where we know (all too well) that it’s complicated. 

In addition, angels stand for the promise that life up there is still intent on lifting the general tone everywhere, and that, sometimes, along those lines, life up there has a message, even a specific message, for one of us.  

The Bible talks about this.  

Angels come to announce many of the great moments of salvation history.  

Their ongoing hold on the imagination of so many is that angels seem to announce far more personal moments and far more granular salvations, whatever their ultimate source.  

Make of it what you will, any existence is so much bigger than what we know. 

You can’t help but be simultaneously inspired and humbled by those moments when that manages to make itself known. 

But, you know, as a pastor I have also known someone who wasn’t into angels, at all.  

Her thing was gargoyles.  

She lived at home with her parents, having had to move back in with them as an adult for medical reasons.  

Her disability disallowed her from working beyond a set number of hours, but even so, there was enough for the occasional new gargoyle for her room.  

Over the years, she found some in antique shops, others online or at a poster store.  

Actually, two of her favorites, to whom she had given particular names, were garden statues that came from McArdle’s Garden Center here in town.

To hear her tell it, she liked to see the beauty in a seemingly ugly creature.  

Yet I suspect that, in her own way, she also knew a thing or two about darkness, and the gargoyles seemed to share some of that knowledge.  

At one point, I was surprised to read somewhere that medieval churches put gargoyles on the outside, not to frighten people, which is what I’d always assumed, but rather to scare away the bad spirits – to make a safe space…a truesanctuary…for the vulnerable. 

The gargoyles were protectors, not tormentors.  

I was excited to share this. 

And when I did, it resonated strongly with her. 

Somehow, in the great mystery of ourselves, her gargoyles seemed to make her feel a little less alone, a little safer in her shelter, a little more comfortable with what life seemed to be requiring at this stage.  

While she waited for an angel’s bright message to arrive, the gargoyles stood beside her in symbolic vigil.  

That may sound strange and gloomy.    

As creatures of the semi-darkness, maybe a gargoyle can’t even imagine the brightness that an angel must know.  

Angels may always be more popular.

But in their own way, I suspect that gargoyles know things, too…they sit waiting in circumstances that an angel cannot know.

They know what it is to fend off all the bad messages in order to make space for a good one. 

I think my friend was right to see the beauty in that, too. 

Similarly, the Letter to the Hebrews understands who Jesus is, not simply in terms of the light he brought into the world, but in his deep understanding of what it is to dwell in the darkness.  

“He himself has suffered, you see, through being put to the test,” as it says in our reading this morning.  “That’s why he is able to help those who are being tested right now.” (2:18)

What makes the Christian story most different than other faith stories is not that it promises a God who is somehow above suffering, hovering demurely but impassively like the angels, bearing a message of light.  

Instead, it finds God’s presence, even in life at its hardest, even in suffering at its deepest, and our faith says that God’s love is such that He shares even this fully with any of His creatures. 

As we await salvations at their grandest or most granular, God is not above anything we go through, and anything we go through points to something worth saving…worth holding onto…precious to a God who knows all too well what the cost of living can sometimes prove to be.   

His example might inspire us to try our hand at being angels where we can.  

Or maybe it will teach us to be gargoyles, doing our part to make those around us feel a little less alone, a little safer in their shelters, a little more comfortable with what life seems to be requiring of them at any given stage until the light may come.  

Amen.  

There is an old adage I’m fond of quoting that says, “When you go to a school, how you can you tell who’s the Principal?”

And the answer is, “They’re the person who’s pushing the chairs back in place after the meeting.” 

Maybe it’s because I have known a school principal first hand, and she’s like that. 

I suppose I’m also thinking of Mrs. Maguire, the principal at Julian Curtiss, here in town, where our girls went to elementary school.  

For years, on Sunday afternoons, when I was out walking the dogs, on snow days when we went sledding on that hill by the little observatory, or in the middle of summer when we were heading over to my in-laws to grill burgers and swat mosquitoes, you could always see Mrs. Maguire’s car parked on the ellipse in front of the school, and lights in her office, shining brightly.

It reminds me of my father when I was young, who loved to go into the office on Sundays because it was the only time when the phone wasn’t ringing, and he could actually get things done.  

As many of you know, the familiar mental image many people have of being in charge – all the perqs and privileges and deference – are only a small part of the picture when it comes to being in charge.  

Mostly, it’s a lot less glamorous.  

Along those lines, it’s obvious enough what Jesus must mean when he says, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” (v. 35)

The work to which he summons us is often far from glamorous, and yet, part of taking responsibility for the world means becoming someone who stays behind to push in the chairs. 

It is just one among all the other necessary tasks that quietly support the making of a life together. 

In fact, I wonder if Jesus’ even more famous words about children are trying to make the same point.  

You know this part.  

Jesus, frustrated with how the disciples don’t seem to get it, goes and picks up a child and brings it into their circle.  

Then he says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (v. 37)

It is a beautiful, inspiring image, except for one thing.  

You see, I know children. Actual children.  

We have two of them, ourselves.  

Bear with me a second on this. 

The other day, I saw an online article about a panda bear being flown from China to Japan, where it was going to live in a zoo. 

And supposedly, rather than put the panda in a cage in the cargo hold, they put it in business class in a diaper, like any other rock star.  

Its handler clicked its seatbelt. Handed it some bamboo shoots to snack on.  

That was it.  

I think it is a hoax, though an appealing one, for sure.  

It made me remember the first time we were taking our own baby human on a plane. 

And our beloved pediatrician said to us, “Now, I’m not saying you should dose your infant with Benadryl to make it through your flight, but if I were saying that, it just so happens that the correct dose would be….”

We were horrified, of course, but we dutifully took notes and grudgingly packed the Benadryl. 

We got on the plane, and before the main door was even closed, we realized that our doctor hadn’t given us a prescription. 

It was more like a lifeboat off the Titanic.  

If your kids are different, and that sounds bizarre, God bless.  Truly. 

Now, getting back to Jesus, it may be that when he saw children, he imagined something like a bunch of pandas, sitting in business class, quietly enjoying their bamboo shoots as the plane wings its way east.  

But I take him to be making just the opposite point.  

Because what is it to welcome a child into your midst? 

It is to welcome joy but also chaos, profound fulfillment but constant need, aching beauty but more diapers than seem as if it could be biologically possible for one small human to require. 

And to whom does all this fall?  

To the one who welcomes the child, and who in that welcome, welcomes Christ, and then in welcoming Christ, by extension, welcomes the Creator.  

He means, again, that in taking on this care (which is what he means by welcoming a child), we take on all the necessary tasks that quietly support the making of a life together. 

This is what it looks like to build the Kingdom of God.  

With their focus on who among them is the #1 disciple, the likely successor, it seems as if Jesus’ companions are not really prepared for the work ahead. 

A lot of that work, he suggests, will be downright invisible in many circumstances and often thankless even when it doesn’t escape notice.  

Being in it for the glory is like being in parenting for the glory.  

What makes it truly glorious is very different than whatever it is they’re expecting.  

Writing about Florence Nightengale, the Anglican theologian, Rowan Williams notes: 

“…caring changes us.  Caring is not simply something that we do: put on, put off, switch on, switch off.  It changes us as people.  And one of the hardest challenges for those in the ‘caring’ professions is to know how to cope with that in ways that are not invasive and crippling or crushing; to let the reality of what is there change them and not to devour them.” 

He goes on to say that Nightengale “ought to remind us that it is quite simply possible, if your eyes are fixed on an uncompromising love, to see more clearly and to love more exactly; possible to be changed, and changed in such a way that everything is changed around you.” ^[1]

It seems to me that this is what Jesus is trying to invite the disciples to take hold of—a kind of caring that isn’t a pose or a strategy or an argument of some kind, but a way of life that can change us and the world around us.  

It is an invitation to the unglamorous work of making a life, and in time, a world, together, and learning to see how glorious it truly is.  

Amen.  

---

^[1] Rowan Williams, Luminaries: Twenty Lives that Illuminate the Christian Way, 97-8. 

Dear Friends of Second Church,

A couple of weeks ago, I think I mentioned the inconvenience of having the Parsonage dishwasher break.  

Well, we fixed that.  

Then the refrigerator broke. 

And then one of the dogs did.    

O.k., the dog didn’t really “break.”  He has a hot spot on his tail, which in the grand scheme of things is not all that bad for a dog, and especially not for this one, who has long track record of things that have gone wrong (although he’s still a wonderful dog, and less of a worry than his little sister, who runs off if you’re not looking). 

Nevertheless. 

I am sick of things breaking.  

Whenever they do, whether it’s the dishwasher or the refrigerator or the dog, I am reminded both of just how much I depend on them, and of how quickly I seem  to take them for granted.  

In the case of appliances, that’s probably obvious enough.  But admitting that it’s also true of my relationship with a fellow creature is more embarrassing.  

I’ll never love our refrigerator (although I sure do miss it) — but I sure do love that dog.   

And yet, there’s no question that I am watching and noticing him more right now, worrying about his comfort, sensing that he’s suspicious of me whenever I try to get close to that tail to see how the healing is going.  

Narrowly, this is part of the great humanizing power of pets.  They can’t tell you how they’re doing or call from the other room when they need something.  If you’re going to care, you need to initiate, and you need to push yourself to notice much more deliberately than usual. 

It’s humanizing because it demands openness and sensitivity from us.  It is also humbling to realize how easily we can be distracted from the high calling of all care.  

In Mark 9, there is an account of one the most powerful healings in the gospels.  Jesus meets a man with a gravely ill child who begs for his help.  Jesus says to him, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.”  

“Lord, I believe,” the man replies. “Help thou my unbelief.”  

I think we don’t do this moment justice if we treat the “belief” it refers to as a set of specific doctrine or as some sort of well-intentioned power play by Jesus.  

Instead, I think it points to the experience of finding ourselves opened and made vulnerable by our love for another — and humbled by how helpless this can manage to make us feel.  

The profound humanity of such a realization is, surprisingly, what makes so much healing possible — so sacred.  

We have every right to get sick of things breaking, or at least, I hope we do.  Yet the mending that follows can be a vision of how things are supposed to be.  

See you in church….

A couple of summers ago, we were up with my parents near New Haven and got socked in by a rainy day.  

Fortunately, Liz was not without a backup plan, and we ended up taking the girls to one of those “Escape the Room” places.  

Do you know about these? 

They’ve been around for a while now, but that doesn’t mean that it’s been on your particular radar, so no points deducted if you’re not familiar with them. 

The basic idea is that you and your friends are locked in a room.  There is a countdown clock above the door which is set for one hour.  

You have an hour to solve the puzzle of how to get out, which requires sorting through a million different little things that turn out to be clues.  

A number on the wall written in graffiti turns out to be the combination to a lock, which opens a box which has a key which opens a door which has a rabbit’s foot hanging on a rope…and the rabbit’s foot makes no sense, until suddenly it turns out you need the rope, but not the rabbit’s foot.  Except then later on down the line, you realize you actually do need the rabbit’s foot, but it’s for something else, entirely.

You get the idea.  

It’s all very clever.  

And for the first ten minutes, it’s really really fun. 

Then comes minute eleven. 

Minute eleven is when everyone starts getting driven completely berserk by the way everybody else is trying to solve the puzzle.   

Have you ever tried to put together Ikea furniture with a loved one? 

It’s like that.  

Because there are two kinds of people in the world: the people who dutifully read and then carefully keep the owner’s manual for each of their appliances so they’ll know what to do when something breaks…the people who think things through patiently and sequentially…and then there are those of us who just sort of eyeball it.  

So how do these two great tribes of humanity approach the task of escaping a room?

This is what comes to a head in minute eleven, when suddenly it’s as if everyone is in everyone else’s way.  

You’ve got to figure that the people who work in these places are just living for that moment, right? 

They’re in some other room nearby, following each group on a closed-circuit monitor, watching as suddenly the rules of polite society and the courtesies of love just collapse before their very eyes like sandcastles, and everyone turns on everyone else.  

And yet, even they do not want you to be stuck there, fuming, for the next 49 minutes.  

They have ways of passing along hints from afar to get you back on track, to help you realize how, in fact, each person in their own way probably is ontosomething—how each one is coming up with some important piece of the puzzle—and that there is a way forward if you can manage to work out a joint way of proceeding, learning as a couple or a group the give and take of life together.  

In our Scripture this morning, we’re invited to imagine another scene in which tempers appear to be flaring and nerves seem particularly raw. 

The words come from the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament, as a scene in which wisdom is imagined as a character, almost a person with all the answers not watching from afar, but instead locked in a room with us, watching helplessly while we try to dope out how to escape.  

“Wisdom cries out in the street,” it says. “In the squares, she raises her voice.  At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates, she speaks. ‘How long, O simple ones [she cries], will you love being simple?” (1:20-22)

She is enough like us to experience some of our own exasperation, and yet mostly, the thing that is getting to her is not our ignorance, but really our complacency—at how unwilling we are to act differently, to change our approach to lives that we have managed to make into a kind of prison for ourselves.  

“I have been dropping clues left and right,” she says, “I have been trying to throw you a line…hand you a map…but whatever I offer doesn’t seem to matter, because you won’t take it.” 

The situation has finally reduced her to stark raving in the middle of the village.

This is a different way of imagining God—or imagining the activity that flows from the will of God—than we may be used to.  

At face value, it is a hard vision to square with the church’s more familiar ways of talking, particularly about Jesus, who mostly seems to put loving way ahead of judging.  (Though it’s not quite so simple, still….) 

So many people have left and are leaving the church as they struggle with its – our – tendency toward judgmentalism. 

Surely focusing our effort on love and acceptance is a long overdue corrective. 

Indeed, in many ways, it is.  

And yet I wonder if this passage doesn’t speak to something else—namely, that God does not want any of his children sentenced to life in a prison of their own devising.  

The sin of judgmentalism is by no means unique to the church.  

But wherever our diminishments and heartbreaks come from at first, the thing about them is how they don’t just linger, but manage to get heavier and heavier, until without realizing it, we have locked ourselves in rooms (circumstances) we can’t escape, at least not by ourselves. 

There are the prisons of our fears and phobias, our rants and rages, our vulnerabilities and insecurities, not to mention our addictions and misplaced desires.  

Meanwhile, all around us are the signs, the clues we need in order to do what comes next, or to do whatever it may be that moves us one step closer to the great lock falling open at last.  

And yet, if we are not careful, we can spend our lives stuck at minute eleven, with everyone in everyone else’s way, and nobody learning the give and take of life together, or the ways that God’s love and the human love (that points to God) continually unlock us, if we let them. 

 As for my family, we did not end up escaping the room that day in New Haven.    

I think if there had been another ten minutes on the clock, we might have.  

But it took us awhile to listen to the clues and learn the give and take we needed to follow where they tried to lead us.  

As for Lady Wisdom, she is sure of where all that must be pointing.  

Her frustration and her urgency are her way of insisting that joy and freedom remain possible. 

With each cherished clue, we get closer, until the moment when we realize that the door was open all along, and we walk through. 

Amen.  

Dear Friends of Second Church,

The anniversary of 9/11 comes on another beautiful morning, much like the one many of us remember from 2001.  

23 years later, the shock of it is hard to explain — “explanations” don’t convey the feelings of it very easily.  

The photographs do a better job at expressing the shattering humanity of it, and some have become iconic (from what we would come to call Ground Zero, there were “the falling man,” “the dust woman,” “the twisted cross,” “the fire department chaplain,” to name a few).  

As time has gone on, those images have gone from being almost unbearable to indispensable, at least for me.  

Within our faith communities, the conversation has also shifted.  

Especially in the first year, there was a lot of reflection about where God was—should have been? Must have been?— on 9/11, including how we could even possibly speak about God in the wake of such a tragedy.  

There are no simple answers to such questions, and time has not offered much new clarity along those lines.   Many gestures toward an answer risk taking someone’s pain too lightly, as if preserving our ways of talking about God should matter more than the lives of our neighbors, both those who survived and those who didn’t.  

I don’t want to do that, either.  

But with each anniversary, faith communities come face to face with a central task of our own vocation: what it means to be communities of memory.  

In particular, Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities — the People of the Book, as we are sometimes known — have always understood ourselves in relation to a God who enters into human history, and the act of gathering in worship to be one of remembering loss as well as victory.  

What makes us faithful is, to some extent, our profound refusal to forget.  This is what tells us who we are and guides us toward what we will be.  

For Christians, we don’t remember the joy of Easter without the devastation of Good Friday.  

We don’t remember the blessings of the moment without the memory of the women and men who came before us and lived in faith as best they knew how. 

That commitment to memory is large part of what gives us “eyes to see” the presence of holiness among us now.  

Similarly, it is the memory of those 9/11 firefighters walking resolutely into the towers that has taught me to look at first responders with ongoing gratitude and concern.  Few of them were probably perfect people, or “saints” in the usual sense of the term.   But memory teaches us to see depth of what it takes to do that work, and sometimes asks of those who do.  

I respect the sanctity of that.  And thank God for it.  

May their memory guide us in ways of healing, peace-making, and new life–and the vocation of being the church.

See you in church….

If you have any history as a church person, whether it’s here at 2CC or with some other special place, you’ll know without being told that “Homecoming Sunday,” or “Rally Day,” as some other places call it, can be a kind of Church-ese. 

In some places, “Homecoming Sunday” might be translated as: “We know you are home, so you’d better be coming” Sunday. 

Maybe Rally Sunday is Church-ese for “Rally yourselves back into your blazers, fellas” Sunday, or something like that.   

My childhood church was sort of that way, at least on the surface.  

But whether you were elsewhere for a big part of the summer or not, the church offers a deeper call home that still gets you. 

You’re driving south on 95 and over the Mianus River bridge and there it is, especially at night.  And you can’t help – or at least, I can’t help – but look over and say “wow.”

Or maybe it’s the very end of winter, the part I find the hardest, when everything is brown and windy, and you drive past Put’s Hill just over there, going about your daily round…and then one day, you see the crocuses…sometimes even pushing right through the snow, which they do because they know what’s what, and they will not be deterred, which is just to say: neither should you.  

What a blessing it is to call this place home. 

Some of you have told me about finding your way here, not so much because you’d left another church, but because you came to feel like another church, a place you loved, left you…and yet, painful as that was, you decided that weren’t going to let go of God without a fight.  

You’re in good company. 

The Bible tells us that the word “Israel,” means “struggles with God,” and it’s a name that debuts in the context of a literal wrestling match. 

It’s an experience both fundamental and familiar enough to name a people after it.  

And while there are those who read that and say, “what a great story,” there are also some of you who read it and go “yep,” and know it for having lived it, yourself.  

Because that’s how it was for you until one Sunday when you came here, and your heart told you that the search was finally over. That the fight was finally over.  That you were home.  

That whatever else you still had to wrestle with, it didn’t need to be God.  It didn’t need to be church people.  

It still doesn’t. 

How appropriate, then, that our Gospel for this morning is the story of two healings, which are precisely what a true home makes space for.  

The first happens as Jesus takes a short and rather unsuccessful vacation of his own, up in the region of Tyre, outside the boundaries of Israel.  

It’s unsuccessful because, whatever his own needs may have been, the needs of the world still manage to find him there.  

And it’s not just the emails from the office that he can’t resist checking.  

It’s a whole new situation that seems at first as if it should be none of his concern.  

A woman pushes her way through the door of his hotel room, and it’s brazen enough that even Jesus, who is no shrinking violet, is like, “really?” 

Except that the woman is desperate.  

Her daughter has an unclean spirit, which is to say, something so wrong and inexplicable to everyone around her that it didn’t seem like just an illness, but more like a curse.  

And as mother and daughter have wrestled with that illness, they’ve found themselves abandoned by whatever god they’d been taught to worship and by whatever church where they’d been told to pray.  

They’re fluent enough in the local Church-ese to know when they’re being told to hit the road.  

At first, Jesus doesn’t make it any easier. 

But the more important point is that eventually he hears her.  He sees the look on her face.  

He sees all the fear and fierceness of a parent in full mama bear or papa bear mode.  

He recognizes a soul hanging on by its fingernails.  

His heart opens.  And the words he speaks are words of healing and of home.  

Is it any wonder that, as he calls off the rest of his trip and heads back to Galilee, the very next healing he offers shows that he still has that woman and her daughter in mind? 

Jesus encounters a man who can neither hear nor speak, and according to Mark, he looks up to heaven and sighs and says, “Ephphatha,” a Greek word which means, “Be opened.”  

It’s something between a blessing and a command. 

It’s as if he says to the man: “As God and life have opened and healed that woman and her daughter back in Tyre…as God and life have opened and healed me, may you also be opened, and may you also be healed.” 

The blessing comes quickly.  

…And as any truly serious Christian can tell you, living into the command both takes a lot longer and asks a lot more. 

In fact, quite often, it asks more than we knew we had in us, which may only prove how little we actually know ourselves.   

Because faith argues that to know ourselves truly takes three things: it takes space, it takes time, and most of all, it takes God. 

If we are to “be opened,” as Jesus promises and instructs, it takes all three, like plants in good soil, which find their fullness only as they slowly reach up for the sun. 

That’s why we need church.  

And not for nothing, it’s why God needs us to be the church—to offer time, and space, and the example of our own hearts reaching up for God, so that others might finally be opened, and all life might begin to blossom. 

Welcome home, church.  

And with open arms and open minds, may we learn to live with open hearts.  

Amen.

For the youngest among us (not to mention all our teachers), the new school year is either already under way or just about to be. 

On Labor Day, summer solemnly lowers its flag and marches off, never mind that the warm days aren’t quite over and, astronomically speaking, we’re a few weeks short of the equinox. 

Our neighbors and many of us are gearing up for what’s next.  

Our presidential candidates are busy and seem to be appearing at every state fair and professional convention happening anywhere, even as they gear up for the debate, which is coming in a little over a week. 

In our own church family, in addition to our students and teachers, we have people gearing up lots of things – big moves, helping a parent begin medical treatment, a new job.  

Of course, how you gear up for a new season can look very different, depending on how new it is.  

I think I’ve talked about when I was getting ready for ninth grade and my father took me to the Boys’ department at Brooks Brothers to get all my stuff, now that I was going to a school with a dress code. 

Once I actually got to school, of course, I quickly realized that when it came to dress code, the name of the game was actually about flirting with the edge of documentable non-compliance.  The louder and rattier, the better.  

The freshman who only brought one necktie on purpose and wore it every day for the whole year was considered a hero to the whole student body.  

Needless to say, at the end of the next summer, when I was getting ready to go back as a tenth grader, I was on the lookout for very different gear.  

In any case, whether in such a literal sense or a larger one, as summer ends, here many of us are, once again gearing up for a new season.  

And yet, it’s interesting to consider how we do that.  

We spend a tremendous amount of time procuring all the items we’ll need to take or locking down the calendar this next season will follow. 

Those are important things to do.  

But left to our devices, as we enter a new season, I’m not sure we give much thought to the kind of people we will seek to be.

A million years ago, there was that book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  

It was a good book.  

And yet, it can’t help us much with the reality that effective or not, successful or not, having friends and influencing people or not, life needs to be lived, and the measure of a good one isn’t just a matter of getting and staying organized, or what have you.  

At any moment, who we are is the most fundamental element that we bring into it.  

I think this is what the Apostle Paul is driving at in his famous words to the Ephesians about “putting on the whole armor of God.” 

Clearly, he understands the importance of gearing up for a new season, with all its challenges.  

Being Christian was politically risky then in a way we modern people may struggle to imagine. 

For the first three hundred years of the church’s life, Rome’s distaste for and suspicion of Christians were served by a state apparatus of remarkable efficiency and violence.  

Danger was predictable.  What might bring it down upon anyone could be the smallest thing, said to the right person at the right time…perhaps with the right incentive. 

How can anyone live under such conditions? 

For Paul, this isn’t something you can buy your way out of or plan your way around.

It comes down to who you are.  

He is scathing when it comes to the ways of the world around them all, but his letter takes a playful turn when he invites his audience – the Ephesians first, and now us – to imagine girding themselves for battle.  

I guess he could have said to go get a really big sword and a really mean dog. 

That’s not what he says.  

Instead he says something far gentler and, frankly, much harder.  

“Though you once were in darkness, now as Christians you are light. Prove yourselves at home in the light, for where light is, there is a harvest of goodness, righteousness, and truth.  Learn to judge for yourselves what is pleasing to the Lord; take no part in the barren deeds of darkness, but show them up for what they are.” (6:8-11)

And then he talks about armor. 

“Therefore take up the whole armor of God,” he says, “so that you may be able to withstand on the evil day and, having prevailed against everything, to stand firm. Stand, therefore, and belt your waist with truth and put on the breastplate of righteousness and lace up your sandals in preparation for the gospel of peace. With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.” (6:13-18)

Our belt of what now? Our breastplate of huh? 

Paul’s point is not that we can slash our way to safety – he’s seen enough to know that never works.  

More importantly, he knows the power of someone truly committed to being a force for good.  

He knows that, for a God-breathed life, there’s just not much they can throw at you, no matter how desperately they may try. 

And so, as the church at Ephesus gears up for a new season, they may not be feeling quite that strong yet, or quite that confident in the people that faith is showing them how to be.  

Nevertheless, Paul tells them, it is time to try.  God needs them to try.  The example of Jesus is clear.  

“Prove yourselves at home in the light,” he says. 

Don’t just check the box of being Christians.  Live out what you believe.  

Whatever you may be facing, bring yourself into that moment, remembering that you are loved by God and that your heart is held by God, and then look for what good you might do, just as Jesus remembered, looked, and did.  

This is what Paul understands as “gearing up.” 

It may not sound like much at all.  

But to those with eyes to see, it is the transformative presence of God in the world.  

Just ask the person who needs a little kindness just then, or a little patience, or a steadfast voice for fairness. 

Just ask the widow, the orphan, or the stranger—or their more modern equivalents, the unloved, the loner, or the person who’s not supposed to be there. 

Just ask because, to them, you being there and you being you are everything.  

So we enter a new season, with all that we have to do, and whatever familiar or unfamiliar roles we are being asked to play. 

Who will we actually be? How are we trying to gear up for that? 

“Take up the whole armor of God,” is what Paul counsels.  

What a world it would be if we Christians decided we would.  

Amen.

One night this past week, I had a bad dream – that particular kind of bad dream that replays an actual memory you have…something that really happened. 

It was from the spring of my sophomore year in high school, in my Algebra II class.  

I think I’ve mentioned before that math was never my thing—well, this happened a week or so after the math department at my high school decided that they agreed with me about that and assigned me a peer tutor.   

We’d been meeting regularly.  Taking it seriously. 

And now, on this particular morning in my math class, we were taking a test.  

I was good.  I was loose.  I’d had breakfast.  The night before, my tutor and I had worked from dinner to check in.  

I was ready. 

None of that was in the dream, though.  I just remember it.  

The dream kicked in without any backstory, but it didn’t need any.  

I knew exactly where I was.  

It was right at the moment when the teacher said, “You may begin,” and we turned over the test, and I looked it over and realized that I knew absolutely nothing.  

That despite my best efforts, my heroic efforts, I was not ready.^[1]

Why it was I had this dream – this memory – this week is something I have not yet worked out.  I’ll have to get back to you on that.  

But I relived that awful, sinking feeling…that particular kind of sudden, horrible dread that I haven’t thought about in ages, but that I don’t think I could everforget.  

Has this ever happened to you? 

If it hasn’t, the only thing I can compare it to was the time, more than ten years later, when I was living in a not so great neighborhood, and I was woken up in the middle of the night by this weird squeaking noise.  

I got up to investigate, and it turned out that my front door and, as it happened, the street door downstairs, were both wide open, and just sort of waggling in the breeze, each one softly squeaking back and forth.  

(Max: face)

That’s what it felt like being not-ready for that Algebra test: a swift journey from the land of unpleasant surprise into the territory of existential danger.  

I know I’m exaggerating.  

Or, I should say, now I know that I’m exaggerating.  

In the moment, it is not so easy to know.  

The other thing about that moment is that you feel so alone. 

II.

Our reading this morning finds King Solomon at a similar moment, although the particular way it’s excerpted does not make that entirely clear.  

He’s given the chance to ask God for anything, and he asks for wisdom, which, coming from a king, is refreshingly humble. 

Even God seems to think so. 

But it helps to know that Solomon wasn’t David’s only son.  

It helps to know that he wasn’t the eldest. 

It helps to know that David lost one son, Absolom, to civil war, and that as David is entering his final days, another son has been lining up supporters and getting ready to make his own move for the throne.  

Some are already calling him king. 

So when David declares Solomon as the one true heir to the throne, the only rightful king, it isn’t just that Solomon suddenly has big shoes to fill, or simply that he’s young (though indeed, he does, and indeed, he is).  

He isn’t cut out to be a general—he knows it. 

But how can you be a king without being a general, or at least a warrior?  

He doesn’t know how to be a king in those terms or any other. 

All he knows is that he is not ready. 

He’s not ready for what the moment requires, much less whatever the future may hold.

Although he has friends and supporters, in a deeper sense he has nobody—nobody to guide him into being the man he will need to be. He is all by himself.  Except for God. 

And it’s here that Solomon does a remarkable thing. 

He prays for wisdom.  

Not for power.  Not for money. Not for more friends. Not for a copy of “Warfare for Dummies.”  

He prays for wisdom, which is the capacity to see things as God sees them, to the extent that any human can. 

It was particularly wise to do that, of course, which may be the Bible’s way of signaling that much of what he needed was actually in him all along. 

But whether it was there before or just sort of washes over him now, it changes him definitively from then on. 

Wisdom offers a sense of what actually matters and what really doesn’t…an eye for what is permanent and what is temporary.

And that awareness shapes him into a very different kind of king—one who will turn out to be just the man they need for an hour that nobody could have anticipated.  

III.

The Bible has great faith in wisdom.  

It argues that any of us can learn to see something as God sees. 

Even in the moments when our lives seem to shift between unpleasant surprise and existential danger, we are never alone.  

When I was a student, I didn’t have a sense for the way in which doors open and close in our lives—that sometimes, God says yes; other times, God says no; and also – and this is the crucial part – that with God, there are a lot more possible answers in between.  

So much of the weight and loneliness of not being ready is that feeling of being smushed by what seems like God’s immediate and irrevocable “no.” 

Wisdom reminds us of how relatively rare that “no” really is. 

God takes way too much delight in the “not yet,” and in the “well, not this way” for any verdict of “no” to have much force. 

God is forever attuned to even greater life and possibility still to come than we can imagine, and if we can give God a little time and room to work, what follows is almost always a blessing in some way. 

Wisdom reflects God’s own patience when it comes to deciding what events really mean, remembering well that the moment itself often cannot tell us.  

But it also means that if God does the divine part, we have to do ours.  

It’s no good to let the blessings fan out before us, like a hallway of doors unopened, while we sit there “waiting for God to do something.”

Wisdom also means seeing clearly just how much God is doing.   

Solomon could have sat tight—or consoled himself in comfort—until God got around to saving the kingdom and finding a way to bail out its king.  

He doesn’t.  

Solomon asks for the capacity for good judgment so he can take part in his own life and become someone that others can depend on.

Let’s not forget that.  

We know that our lives hold many moments for which we may not be ready, and that these can be far more serious and lingering than a failed algebra test.  

God’s promise to us is the same one made to Solomon. 

“I now do according to your word,” God says to him.  

May we learn to promise God the very same.  

Amen.

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^[1] The germ of this sermon comes from a key moment in a much better one, “Skills and Gills,” by Rev. Dr. Tim Boggess, delivered August 16, 2015 for Day1 Radio.  https://day1.org/weekly-broadcast/5d9b820ef71918cdf2003ca9/skills_and_gills

On Friday, I learned that the City of Paris has a motto. 

You probably thought it was “The City of Lights,” just like New York is “The Big Apple” or Philly is “The City of Brotherly Love.” 

Trenton doesn’t necessarily have a motto.  I mean, they probably do, but it isn’t on anything that I could track down. 

However, they do have a slogan, which is “Trenton Makes, The World Takes.” 

You can see it from the train as you chug through. 

Truth be told, I find it sort of menacing.  

Which, if you think about it, is kind of a bold choice.  

Paris has lights…I guess New York has apples…and Trenton has …menace.  Ok.  

But back to mottos.  

Those seem to be a little more aspirational.  

The City of Boston has one which we Congregationalists can really get behind.  

Boston’s motto is “Sicut Patribus, Sit Deus Nobis,” which means, “God be with us as he was with our fathers.” 

Philadelphia’s is, “Caritas fraternitatis maneat in vobis,” which is from Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews and means, “Let brotherly love abide with you.” 

That’s another good one.

Anyway, on Friday, I learned that the motto of the City of Paris is, “Fluctuat nec mergitur,” which turns out to be rather poetic.  

It means, “She is tossed by the waves, but does not sink.” 

That’s nice, right?   

As you can imagine, during the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics, which were held on the river in the middle of the pouring rain…I mean, this motto seemed especially a propos. 

And true enough, the Olympics did not sink, and neither did Paris. 

Good mottos remind us like that, don’t they? 

In just a few words, they remind us that, even in the midst of tossing waves, we won’t sink.  

That the city will make it.  That humanity will make it.  

Someone may hand you the Olympic flag, and you may be the person who raises it, only to learn that you’ve managed to raise it upside down in front of the entire world and in a way that will be preserved for the full course of digital time…don’t worry: the city will make it.

Humanity will make it.  

You may not keep your job, but you know what? 

You’re probably going to make it, too. 

At some point, it might become a funny story, even to you.  

As Christians, our scriptures give us ample occasions to reflect on these things. 

They are forever reminding us that the things that abide and the ones that pass away are not to be anticipated outside of the presence and purposes of God. 

Our stories are always telling us how so many of the things that seem permanent turn out not to be, while the most precarious and seemingly jury-rigged of solutions turn out to be the most durable, capable of withstanding the slings and arrows of fortune at their most outrageous. 

To many in the ancient world, our very notion of the one we called savior was ridiculous in just this way—he was like something out of those movies where some schlub gets put in charge of something important and ends up turning everything upside down.  

A jury-rigged savior at best.  

By contrast, the City of Rome’s motto, if you’re curious, was apparently “Roma Invicta,” or just “Invicta,” which meant “unconquered Rome.”

That one seemed like money in the bank.  

Here’s an example of an inscription from a government building in modern day Turkey, that we think dates from 6 BC: 

“the birthday of [Augustus] has been for the whole world the beginning of the gospel (euangelion) concerning him.”

It continues: 

The most divine Caesar . . . we should consider equal to the Beginning of all things . . . for when everything was falling (into disorder) and tending toward dissolution, he restored it once more and gave the whole world a new aura;  Caesar . . . the common good Fortune of all . . . The beginning of life and vitality . . . All the cities unanimously adopt the birthday of the divine Caesar as the new beginning of the year . . . Whereas the Providence which has regulated our whole existence . . . has brought our life to the climax of perfection in giving to us (the emperor) Augustus . . .who being sent to us and our descendants as Savior, has put an end to war and has set all things in order;  and (whereas,) having become (god) manifest /PHANEIS/, Caesar has fulfilled all the hopes of earlier times.^[1]

So when the Christians said no, no, it wasn’t Augustus, but rather their schlubby, jury-rigged nominee for savior of the world who was the one, that was a hard sell.  

When the Christians went on to say how their savior had told them that what abided was not Rome, not Jerusalem, not force of arms or efficiency of social control, but rather, God’s love, the Christian message became an even harder sell. 

Except it turned out to be true.  

It gave dignity to the downtrodden and hope to the hapless, teaching them to see the world as so much more than just this present moment, and as so much more than however things might appear.  

Because there was something more in them, the world held far more promise for them—and God was inviting to live into that infinitely richer way of being.  

We hear that this morning in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.

He writes: “I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Eph 3: 16-19)

The presence and purposes of God cannot be separated from His great love for us.

When he writes about power, this is the power that most interests him: the power of what love can do, both within us and through us.  

This, he suggests, is the source for what truly abides. 

It’s especially worth remembering in this moment when love seems to be in such short supply. 

But it’s also an important reminder, simply not to be quickly taken in by how things appear, forgetting that what truly matters is that vast world that lies below the surface—a world that constantly ends up revealing the strength of the apparent weakling and the wisdom of the supposed fool. 

Because that’s the world where the Holy is most alive, and the Kingdom of God is putting things right side up. 

The city will make it.  Humanity will make it.  And with God’s help, so will you and I.  

We may be tossed by the waves, but we will not sink. 

And as we learn to love ourselves and one another, we lay claim to the fullness God has wanted for us all along.  Amen. 

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^[1] https://nickcady.org/2019/01/09/the-gospel-of-caesar-augustus-what-it-tells-us-about-the-gospel-of-jesus-christ/#:~:text=The%20“gospel”%20of%20Caesar%20Augustus,for%20all%20people%20on%20Earth.

Our Gospel this morning begins by naming exhaustion—a deep fatigue that Jesus knows first-hand and sees quite clearly in his closest disciples. 

When our reading opens, they’re all beginning to filter back from their first solo experiences in bringing the good news to the places Jesus hadn’t managed to get to by this point.  

Fortunately, by all accounts, all these forays have gone very well – and being the ones who get to do the preaching and meet the people has been inspiring and energizing for the disciples.  

Some of us can probably relate. 

Have you ever finished a great meeting—maybe even delivered the slam dunk presentation that seals the deal—and you shake hands and say you’ll be in touch and you go the airport figuring that on the plane you’ll work straight through three time zones…only to fall dead asleep until just before landing? 

Parents of small children may remember how toddlers often respond to overstimulation and exhaustion, not by simply falling asleep, but by running and running and running around, like the Tasmanian Devil from the old Bugs Bunny cartoons…which is a lot to handle until (MG: bump noise), they managed to fall asleep in the middle of the kitchen floor or next to the radiator with their feet still planted, as if they fell asleep literally in the middle of running.  

It makes me wonder if Jesus is greeting all these people coming back and he’s hearing all the tales of their success, and yet, wonderful and encouraging though these tales all are, and important as it’s going to be for them to learn the ropes of preaching and caring on their own, Jesus is standing there, wondering how for right now, he’s going to get everybody down for a nap. 

We don’t like to hear about our limitations…and especially about the unshakeable limitations of our own creatureliness. 

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating that in Alcoholics Anonymous, I’m told, one of the ways they teach themselves to keep track of moments of temptation is through the acronym HALT – which signifies four creaturely realities that can lead to relapse. HALT, or being Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired.  

So if Jesus is calling a halt, of sorts, he’s almost certainly right to do that.  

And yet, they don’t manage to get much of a break, do they? 

You probably noticed that the people run after them.  It doesn’t matter that Jesus loads his friends in a boat and sets sail; the people run the long way round by the shore until they reach the same destination.  

What’s more, it seems like anyone who sees the people running by ends up following along, like a marathon you can join wherever you feel like joining.

Also, they’ve apparently all heard about that lady from a few weeks ago who just needed to touch Jesus’ cloak to be made well, and so they’re pressing in, hoping at least for that. 

In the face of something so claustrophobic, you would half-expect Jesus to send his crew straight back to the boat so they can get all out of there, but that’s not what he does.  

Instead, he responds with patience and compassion, kind of taking back the reins while the disciples get to watch again for a while. 

And if you think about it, maybe that’s where the lesson is.  

Because it is a joy and a privilege to serve God. Clearly, the disciples have experienced that in a whole new way. 

But there’s a risk there, too. 

It’s loaded to describe it as a “temptation,” but not inaccurate.  

Because serving God is one thing.  

But trying to “play God” or, in our own minds, to “be God” is something very different.  

Part of the reason that Jesus wants to get the disciples away is so that they learn to pace themselves – to steer clear of the pull of this kind of temptation, and out of the echo chamber of their own self-congratulation.  

Learning what they are capable of is so important, for good and for ill. 

Which is why they must learn to keep their eyes on God.  

Along those lines, you might have seen the Internet meme that seems to get renewed just before every Olympics—there is a person out there who is lobbying for each event to begin with a normal person, by which they mean, anyone who is not an elite athlete, to do whatever the event is as most of us would—say, run a 1000 meters, or lift a lot of weights, or try doing vault. 

They wouldn’t need to land on one leg, like Kerri Strug did that time —just do it so the average person can get a feel for just how skilled the Olympic athletes really are at what they do.  

Try running 1000 meters as fast as you can and see if you don’t get a better feel for what it requires.  

It would probably be revelatory in a lot of ways, right?

It would offer a window into what our limitations are and aren’t, and while we’re at it, what our particular graces are and aren’t.  

Of course, we all know people who are wonderful at what they do, but who are also sort of terrible people.  

There are many gifted people in the world—God is remarkably generous in that way—and yet not everyone comes out truly ennobled by their gifts.  

At their best, our gifts offer us an enduring sense of gratitude or joy, and a sense of life as something held in common with other people. 

Sadly, not everyone receives them so graciously. 

Instead, it’s all about them and what they can do…and what they need from us so that they can keep doing it.  

It’s not “how can I help you?” It’s more like “How can I help you…meet my needs?” 

Jesus wants something better and more durable for his disciples, then and now.  

He knows our actual needs and our actual gifts. 

He invites us to look to him to see how we can manage learn to live in the creaturely reality that both needs and gifts are always before us and that both need to be kept in view.   

But most of all, Jesus steps forward to remind us that he is always with us.  

As we learn to rest in him, the peace that passes all understanding rises to still the storm and show us the stars.  

Amen.