Everybody loves it when Jesus talks about love, and they hate it when he talks about work.  

And to be clear: by everyone, I mean me.  

I mean, really.  

There’s that line where Jesus says about how every hair on our heads has been counted.  I love that one. 

In the Gospels, there are all those people Jesus meets whom he looks upon and loves, from the disciples with their nets by the seashore, to the woman he rescues from getting stoned to death by her neighbors, to Zacchaeus the tax collector who starts out by watching forlornly from a tree as Jesus passes by…and he looks at them and loves them and their lives are transformed. 

I love those guys. 

“Love thy neighbor as thyself.” 

That’s a harder one, but it’s still really good.  (MG: look up.) I’m trying.

But when it gets into vineyards and servants and masters, these stories that come toward the end of the Gospel of Matthew…there’s a lot of me that wants to push back.  

Because it’s one thing to set stories of forgiveness and mercy and love among members of a family, or between old friends who have a falling out. 

It’s another when he’s talking about money or about effort or about credit going where it’s due.  

When you get into that territory, the word we’re perhaps most looking to hear is a word that lifts up fairness rather than generosity.  

When it comes to work, at least, we’d like to believe that the advice Jesus has for a Johnny-come-lately is that next time, Johnny-ought-to-come-earlier. 

Work is like that for a lot of us.  

II.

I want to name that this morning, not because Jesus is trying to preach about work in today’s Scripture, but because our own relationship with work, and the challenge we have in collaborating with others, can make the Gospel message particularly hard for us to hear.  

You heard the set up.  

A wealthy man gets up before first light and goes into town, looking to hire day laborers to work in his vineyard.  

The story will later indicate that the day turns out to be not just hot, but scorching – a word that appears only two more times in the entire New Testament.  

But this first set of laborers are the guys who would have filled up their canteens the night before—the ones who splurge on the really good sunscreen—the ones who went to bed early. 

They have their agreed upon spot on the wall for when the owners or the foremen pull up in their trucks and count off how many guys they’ll need that day.  

That’s what happens, and off they go.  

But then a few hours later, the truck swings back through town.  

Now sitting on the wall are the guys who woke up late, missed their bus, couldn’t find their keys.  

It’s more first-come-first-served along the wall now, although maybe some of them know each other…

”Hey, nice to see I’m not the only one who’s late today.”  

“Yeah, man.  Baby had us up half the night.” 

The truck pulls up, they all hop in, and off they go.  

But then a little later, the truck pulls back up again along that wall.  

Now it’s all the guys who had to take a kid to the doctor first thing, who left their canteens and their lunch at home, and who need to stop at CVS on the way home to pick up a prescription and get right back with it.  

They’re sitting there in no particular order, more focused on whether they’ll get enough money to pay for the medicine.  

And so it goes on, with the truck showing up at that wall every few hours, and vineyard owner telling whoever it is who’s managed to find their way there to go ahead, hop on in, and head out with him to the vineyard. 

Finally, just as happy hour is about to start, some of the guys who never really stopped the night before sort of wander out. 

They manage to plop themselves down on the wall, hoping they look a little better than the other guys do, and the truck pulls up again.

Off they go, trying to keep from getting truck-sick, arriving at the vineyard just in time to load a sack or two from the day’s picking before the owner honks his horn to call everyone back in.  

But now comes the hard part.  

Because the foreman of the vineyard hops out from the passenger side of the truck, with his little metal box full of twenties, and he tells everyone to line up, starting with the guys who just got there, past the worried dads, and so on, all the way back to the guys who had been there since dawn, taking the last swig or two from their carefully rationed canteens. 

They’re at the back, so they have a good view of that line ahead of them, and they see each of the charity cases, the basket cases, and the flat-out hard cases getting a twenty and a handshake for doing what looked like next to nothing. 

They’re thinking of the cold morning before dawn…and the scorching heat in the fields…and their faithful effort…and they’re sure that they’re about get the biggest bonus of their lives.  

But when their turns come, the foreman gives them each a twenty and a handshake, just like he had with all the others.  

And it hurts.  

It hurts because, somehow, it seems to mock their faithfulness.  

III.

Have you ever felt that way?  

Has it ever felt like life—or fate—or maybe even God—was mocking your faithfulness?  That being dependable turned out to be something for schnooks? 

I used to think that nothing in the world proved the doctrine of the total depravity, or illustrated the sin-sick soul quite like trying to do a group project in middle school.  

Or you may remember the wonderful play Amadeus by Peter Shaffer, which was also a movie, imagining the career and death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  

The villain, a rival court composer named Antonio Salieri, has given everything to music, which he pursues as a form of religious vocation, only to have himself upstaged by the seemingly effortless talent and mocked by the seemingly bottomless self-indulgence of Mozart.  

Salieri’s envy, and his sense that his faithfulness itself has become a joke, make him more or less murderous. 

The point, as I take it, is not that Salieri is, in fact, unusually evil, but rather that the darkness of his feelings is altogether human, which is to say, common enough. 

I think we see another instance of it in this morning’s parable.  

And the challenge that the parable names is a big one. 

Because it is all too easy…all too typical, at least of our world…to see one another in terms of who deserves what. 

Others deserve less…or maybe what I mean is that I deserve more…

In any case, what we want, more or less, is for God to come to us pro-rated.  

What Jesus is here to tell us this morning is that love doesn’t work that way.  

It doesn’t work that way in the Father’s love for us, and it doesn’t work that way in the love Jesus invites us to offer to and grow into with one another.  

Because whatever they were harvesting in that field, it must not have been love or gratitude or empathy—nothing that serves to nourish a soul. 

If that’s what had been planted in that field, then the ones who’d gotten there first would have gotten the most…and found themselves fortified to offer the most.  

But that’s not what happened.  

Instead, their attitude seems to be first come, first served, and let’s pro-rate all of it down from there.  

IV.

Except that’s not how it works.  

What matters to Jesus isn’t when you get to the center of town and sit yourself on that wall.  

It doesn’t matter if you’re up early, bright eyed and bushy tailed, or if you drag yourself there after sleeping all day in your clothes.  

The point is that if you get yourself to the wall, he will show up in that truck.  

He will find a place for you to join in the work of the vineyard.  

And if we don’t understand the harvest to be lives of love, gratitude, and empathy, not only for those we love but for all those God loves, then…well…maybe we’ve been lining up on the wrong wall. 

If that’s true, then we’d just better hope that there’s still time, that we can still hurry, and that the truck is still going to swing around one more time.  

V.

There are moments in life that test us, even despite our very best intentions.  

There are situations that can seem to mock our dedication to the people and the duties that God has placed before us, or when what we do remains unseen and unsung. 

There are days when it’s just hard, and we get crabby and grabby.  

We know, Lord…we know.  

It’s not always easy to get ourselves out to the vineyard to do what you need us to do.  

The message for me today isn’t about the fairness or unfairness of the wages, although it’s easy for me to get stuck on that. 

The message is about the faithfulness of the truck. 

And may we always rejoice when we’re out in the vineyard and we see it pull up, dropping off somebody else to join the work, recognizing grace whenever it arrives.

Amen.

In the fall of 1984, I went off for my freshman year at boarding school, which was one of the best—and hardest—things I’ve ever done.  

         My mom still isn’t over it, although she forgave me somewhat four years later, when I went to college about 150 miles closer to home and could call my grandmother to tell her that she’d be getting a thunderstorm in about a half an hour so she needed to go out and close her car windows. 

         She’s long said that if she had to do it over again, she would never let me go away so soon. 

         For me, though, boarding school was pretty great, overall.  

         The classes were hard, and there was a lot of work. The weather was lousy.  The food was even lousier.

         But even with all that, the hardest part for me by far was the dorm. 

         You see, I’m an only child, and so there are some basic things I’m not very good at: things like, say, choosing your battles, keeping your mouth shut, covering for each other against grownups…and, well, sharing in general – these were all things I had never had much practice with. 

         Especially the sharing.  

         Not that I was against sharing, or I hope, particularly selfish by nature.  

It’s that I just had no feel for when sharing was expected, or how it worked…and so I was a little bit of a social blunderer as I began my time in this strange, new world which, from what I could tell, was mostly run by kids. 

I should probably also admit here that, like many only children, I didn’t really think of myself as a kid—I mean, I had as much grown up conversation as I liked every single night from the start of forever. 

I could hold my own at a lot of dinner tables. 

I could talk about the politics of the offices where my parents worked like I was a guest on “Wall Street Week in Review” with Louis Rukeyser on Channel 13, which of course, like all people over the age of 7, I watched every Friday night. 

Unfortunately, when it came to questions like who was “hotter,” Joan Jett or Pat Benetar, I didn’t have as much to say.

 Unfortunately, as it happened, that’s what a lot of kids were talking about in the fall of 1984. 

And unfortunately, as I said, it seemed like they were the ones who were more or less running this new community in which I found myself. 

So there was a lot to get used to. 

In a funny way, a lot of my growing into mature adulthood required me to come to see myself as a kid. 

I had to learn that I was one small part of a much larger whole, and not just the opposite, which is what I was to my parents, for whom I was the sun, the moon, and the stars. 

I won’t detail the battles.  To tell you the truth, most of them were more like skirmishes, anyway. 

But one of the things that was hardest for me to get a feel for was deciding between the things that mattered and the things that didn’t (the phrase is Michael Gorman’s).  

In living together, what was it that actually mattered to me? And why was that again? 

And then on top of that, there was the even harder question for an only child to answer: what is it that matters to these other people with whom I am now sharing my life?  What are their wants and needs…and where am I in all of that? 

Slowly and painfully, I came to understand that life together involves asking those questions over and over and over—that asking them is part of life’s very rhythm.  

II.

Now, I’m not saying that the churches of ancient Rome were full of only children.  

But I will say there’s something that feels a little familiar to me about the challenge Paul seems to be addressing in our Scripture this morning.  

Because these nascent communities were apparently at loggerheads, particularly as they tried to work out the things that mattered from the things that didn’t.  

Two thousand years later, the debates Paul mentions seem ridiculous now.  

In fact, this is so true that it can be hard to make heads or tails of the passage we’ve read this morning, especially if you’re hearing it for the first time.  

I mean, it starts out pleasantly enough. 

“Welcome those who are weak in faith,” he says, “but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions.”  

OK.  

But then he goes on to talk about how some people coming to church will eat only vegetables, while others don’t.  

(MG: shrug.)

Next he goes into this thing about how some people think one day is better than another (hint: he’s talking about the Sabbath).  However, it turns out that other people don’t see much of a difference between one day of the week and another.  

(MG: shrug.)

I mean, thank God we in the churches don’t ever get caught up, anymore, in small things that shouldn’t be divisive but are, right? 

Don’t worry, I’m not about to spill any tea. 

Or correction: don’t worry, I’m not about to spill any of our tea, 2CC.

Because last week, as I was getting ready for this morning, I decided to ask people in other churches about this.   

About if they knew anything about things that shouldn’t be divisive but are, and about where the churches are with that here in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Three. 

Here is some of what they said: 

“Our church took 18 months to decide on a new carpet for the Sanctuary,” wrote one of my dear friends.  “By which I mean, they were deciding between ruby, Merlot, or Tasteful Maroon.” 

Another friend reported that because of a fight over space in the church refrigerator, the Hospitality Committee and the Fellowship Committee were refusing to meet.  

Another talked about the time they decided to use gluten-free communion wafers, which is something a lot churches are doing.  

Unfortunately, somehow someone at this particular church ordered gluten-free Communion wafers that were taco-flavored.  

From the faces you’re making, I see you have apparently had one of these somewhere.

 In any case, that happened, but then there was a fight about whether the church could go ahead and just throw the rest of the wafers away, or if the proper Christian thing to do was still to use them up until they were gone. 

At another place, there was such division around which shade of beige to paint a room that they had to have a full congregational vote in order to decide. 

I could go on. (I’ve got a lot more.)

But I think you will see the point that all these years after Paul’s letter to the churches of Rome, our churches still struggle at times to decide what matters and what doesn’t. 

Today, as it was back then, learning to ask such questions is just part of life’s proper rhythm.  

         What Paul asks us to remember in the asking is quite simple.  

         “We do not live to ourselves,” he says, “and we do not die to ourselves” (v. 7). 

         What’s changed irrevocably for us is that we now understand ourselves as part of a larger whole…part of a greater family…part of God’s universal call to build a world in which all are truly welcome.  

III.

         Of course, that always sounds really really nice.  

         The fact is that it pushes us.

         As the wonderful theologian Willie James Jennings admits, “The single greatest challenge for disciples of Jesus is to imagine and then enact actual life together.” (Belief Commentary on Acts)

         That sounds right to me, naming how much of a challenge it is for us “to imagine and then enact an actual life together.”

         For so long, church was an hour a week that we gave in the name of social respectability and of making sure we had a reservation in the event something awful happened. 

         But its deeper call has always been to something much more transformational than that. 

         It is a call to let our hearts grow. 

         As Jennings says, “Only in life shared, joined, and exchanged in desire of being made permanent, can differences emerge in their deepest beauty—as invitations to the expansion of life and love.”

         In a world which finds solace in its silos, church is a call to find joy and beauty and purpose in life undeterred – and in fact, enriched – across our differences. 

         Which is a very different way to live, but is the way that Jesus makes it possible for us to live.  

         That’s not to say that Jesus makes it easy.  

         To some extent, we are all recovering silo-holics.  

         We are all getting over the temptation to live as “only children of God,” rather than as part of a great family of faith.   

         But I think we all know what it is to long for a more open, more generous, more loving, more accepting way of life.  

         We know what it looks like when someone knows they don’t have to face the hard times alone, or grapple alone with the hard facts about themselves.  

         We know how much we need to know that we’re loved, and how eager we are to be loving in return. 

         This is what Paul wanted for the churches of Rome, and it’s what he wants for all of us today. 

IV.

How do we decide between the things that truly matter and the things that don’t, whether for ourselves or for our life together? 

When can we see some new challenge as an invitation to expand our capacities for life and love? 

Because that is God’s invitation. 

And it’s in those spaces that the Spirit is pleased to dwell.  

May we ever seek to be among them.  

Amen.  

Have you ever taken a red-eye flight somewhere? 

I love a red-eye.  

I don’t get much sleep, and the legroom and the elbow-room of Business Class is always more than I can afford, but I still love it. 

The old movies always make it seem like travel used to be a lot more romantic than it is now.  

When Hercule Poirot was getting on the Orient Express, he was eager to sample what the dining car had to offer.  

That’s not what it’s like, anymore, is it?   

But there’s still romance to the red-eye.  

You gather around the gate sometime after dinner, and once you’re on the plane, there’s the settling in—some people are picking their movies or getting their iPads fired up; you have students getting out their reading for some class; parents traveling with kids putting Uno into the seat back pocket in front of them, right next to the barf bag; executives already unpacked and glued to their laptops before those of us in Zone 4 have gotten that lecture about sharing the overhead bin space.  

At some point after a couple of hours in the air, they turn out the cabin lights for sleeping, and it’s then that you can spot the other night owls, reading light by reading light, all the way up to the very front, as the world of the airplane goes quiet and there’s not much movement along the aisle.   

Of course, at some point, it all starts to feel long.   You’ve had enough of your book.  The person whose movie you were secretly sort of watching has switched to a t.v. show you don’t care about. You look at the little GPS thing and you’re only just approaching Greenland. Your tailbone hurts. There are a lot of miles yet to fly. 

But then the best thing happens.  

Dawn arrives.  

The sky goes from black to blue, and there’s a thin orange line that curves ever so slightly as it hugs the outline of the dark earth below.  

You can hear them in the aft kitchen, getting the coffee cart ready, and people begin to wake up, and it feels like, well, it won’t be long now.  

We’ve almost made it.  Almost there. 

I love the romance of a red-eye flight.  Don’t you? 

II.

The Apostle Paul might have, too, if he’d gotten the chance.  

He was certainly adventurous – though certainly also, he was more of a dutiful business traveler, a professional fixer, of sorts, who would have been hunched over his laptop, working late into the night, being sent by the home office into some new fiasco he had to untangle, rather than someone who was chasing diversion for its own sake.  

But certainly, he understood the power of the dawn. 

He says in his letter to the Romans this morning, “…You know what time it is, how it is now the moment…” which the King James Version translates as “high time,” so: “You know…how it is now high time for you to wake from sleep.  For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first became believers…” 

“The night is far gone, they day is near.  Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” (13:11-12)

For Paul, this journey that had started to feel so very long seems to be finding a different energy. 

That thin orange line tracing the earth has told him that it won’t be long now.   We’ve almost made it.  We’re almost there. 

III.

As it happens, that’s also not unique to Paul. 

All throughout Scripture, there are stories that set apart the dawn as a particular moment when God is at work in the world. 

If you were here earlier this summer, that story of Jesus walking on the water we heard occurs just before dawn.  

When Jesus dies, the women go to the tomb just before dawn, only to discover it open, and the body gone.  

In the Old Testament, it is just before dawn that Moses parts the sea and the Hebrew people escape from bondage into freedom. 

The new day is constantly affirmed as a time for renewed possibilities—as God shows across the generations that the works of darkness…all the works of fear and greed and the fruit of all our worst inclinations…will not stop God.

Because even in the midst of darkness, for those with eyes to see, God is constantly bringing new life and new hope into the world. 

Things are getting untangled.  Liberation is near.  Rescue is near.  

IV.

It may seem like a bit of an odd message for Homecoming Weekend, when so much of the point is to invite you back into the tangled routines of three-season life, and most especially to the rhythm of church-going.

I mean, let’s be honest: for a lot of us, liberation may not seem quite so near now as seemed was a week or two ago.  

I remember walking our daughter Grace to her first day of Kindergarten some years back. 

I was watching her happily skipping along, ready for this new adventure.  

Meanwhile, I was a puddle – like, unable to see because of the tears (and thank heavens I wasn’t driving) – because there I am with this wonderful little kid holding my hand, and now for the rest of her life, starting that day, she was going to be working for The Man. 

Isn’t that the reality of this season? 

Isn’t so that, while some of us may be the joyful Kindergartener, eagerly starting a new adventure, plenty of us are not that, and are getting back to commutes and commitments we didn’t necessarily miss all that much while we were away. 

And actually, that brings us back to Paul.  

The first audience for his letter in Rome probably wasn’t a group who had much experience by way of vacation.  

Leisure time really hadn’t been invented for anyone but Emperors.  

But that first audience knew what it was to be tangled. 

They shared one of the great challenges we often have as a people of faith, which is to be sitting in the middle of demanding, back-breaking, sometimes even heartbreaking days, yet also trying to live for the greater good, trying to remember to be patient and forgiving, generous and kind, and everything else that comes with being the people that Jesus invites us to be. 

That didn’t fit easily into the world of the Christians of Rome, any more than it seems to fit into ours.  

V.

But as Mahatma Gandhi once counseled, “We must be the change we want to see.” 

And Paul’s message this morning is along those lines: he names the mysterious paradox that, in hoping, we bring hope into the world. 

Because, of course, what dawns in us is ultimately what dawns in the world.  

It’s the armor of light that finally cuts through any tangle if we’re willing to follow the ruthless logic of love and care and of living for something greater than ourselves. 

Now, I will date myself and remind a handful of us about a sitcom from the early 80’s, called “The Greatest American Hero.” 

It wasn’t my favorite, to be honest.  If you don’t know it, that’s probably just as well. 

Just about the only thing memorable about it was the theme song.  

But its premise is instructive, in its way. 

A regular Joe sort of guy randomly encounters aliens one day, and they give him a special suit – a superhero sort of costume – that is full of capabilities beyond the bounds human science.  The ability to fly, for example. 

Unfortunately, they give him the suit, but at the moment when they are about to hand over the instructions for the suit, they are interrupted, and the aliens fly off, leaving the guy standing there with the suit…and whatever it might do. 

The point of the sitcom is, of course, how does he learn to use the suit?  How will he awkwardly learn to discover, much less master, what it can do? 

How does he come to terms with its powers, which are, by extension, his powers? 

In some sense, the armor of light can be like that.  

How will we come to terms with its powers, which are, by extension, our powers?

How can we move, with so few instructions, in the direction of the dawn, as it breaks as a thin orange line hugging the dark surface of the earth? 

Most of all, we move by moving.  

We move by untangling ourselves—by investing less energy, by awarding less time, by directing fewer resources, fewer excuses, and fewer of our aspirations to those necessary evils that cannot possibly bring out our best.  

Actually, maybe that’s just it:  maybe the most important lessons faith has to teach us are just how few of the evils we face are actually “necessary,” for us or for anyone else. 

Maybe what’s necessary for us is to become more serious in loving.  More serious in caring.  More serious in listening.  More serious in letting ourselves be claimed by our neighbors, and so, more serious in helping. 

Paul’s hope is that, with the help of God, and following the example of Jesus, we will be bold enough to live as those who have been rescued, and bold enough to stand up for our deepest selves – our best selves. 

And in that, to bring those best selves into the world.  

That’s what he means by “putting on the armor of light.” 

VI.

I love the romance of a red-eye flight.  Don’t you? 

Don’t you love the settling in, the slow quiet, the companionship of the vigilant, and then, wonderfully, the arrival of the dawn? 

Dawn tells us that we are almost there. 

And as we settle in to a new church year together, and dawn seems so far away, may we learn to live as those who are ready, even now. 

With God’s help, may we put on the armor light, and go forth untangled.

Amen.

When I was first moving to Philly and was trying to find my first city apartment, my dad went with me.  

Ostensibly, it was to write the deposit check for the first month’s/last month’s rent.  

The fact is, he didn’t trust me.  

He didn’t trust me not to end up getting schnookered.  

And fair enough. 

He knew that there was a high chance that I’d take a shine to some nice old character in some little office filled with papers all over every surface, or maybe a dog. 

In ten minutes, I’d know their whole life story, maybe their birthday, all that…which didn’t mean they weren’t still willing to schnooker me just the same. 

He’s a smart guy, my dad.  

So we went around looking at apartments in Philly for a day. 

They all looked fine, and after a few hours, we decided on one. 

The real estate agent took us back to his office.  It was, indeed, filled with papers all over every surface.  It was August and the guy turned on an old fan for us and put on a little sweater for himself.  I loved him immediately.  Mr. Katz, his name was.  

But we weren’t done.  

Because suddenly Mr. Katz was sitting across from an officer of the Chase Manhattan Bank.  

They were hammering out the terms of my lease like they were negotiating building a gas pipeline across Turkey.  

I think they were both enjoying it, actually.  I was horrified.  

Finally, it was over.  

Mr. Katz got out the keys to my new apartment and spun the lease around on his desk for me to sign.  

“Oh, just one more thing,” said my father.  “I’d like to add one more term. He dictated, “The lessee shall have the ‘right to quiet enjoyment’ of the property.”  

Mr. Katz looked annoyed.  I looked annoyed.  

Unfortunately, I intervened. 

“Dad, I really don’t think that matters,” I said. 

“You should listen to the kid,” said Mr. Katz. 

My dad shrugged, we signed the lease, I got my keys, and off we went. 

Well, the kid should have listened to his dad.

The kid should have listened to his dad because the guy upstairs turned out to be a drummer who liked to practice before work.  

The guy downstairs turned out to be having a tough go of it, and sometimes you’d find him sleeping in the basement by the washing machine because there was something in his apartment that frightened him, and sometimes he just wasn’t up for it.  

It was one thing like that after another.  

There was a payphone on the corner and I saw someone from another building run out in his pajamas and bare feet with a hacksaw because it kept ringing in the middle of the night and was done with it. DONE.  

It was impossible not to enjoy Philly – I loved the city.  

But there was nothing quiet about that apartment.   

II.

I’m telling you this because many of the early churches, including the communities founded or visited by the Apostle Paul, would have been “house churches.”

That is, they were churches that might meet in someone’s apartment in an ancient building where a moderately successful artisan with a family and a workshop—maybe even a couple of slaves—might live cheek by jowl with newly arrived immigrants trying to gain a foothold in the community, or above a small tavern with a backroom where a barmaid might sleep, and not necessarily alone, or right by an apartment for a widow with a son in the army, etc.  

There wouldn’t have been much by way of “quiet enjoyment” in such a place.  

Every triumph, every tragedy, every family squabble, every creep in the stairwell, every chattering toddler, everybody’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner would have been common knowledge. 

It was a hard and not very private life, even as some might really be getting ahead and others might be barely hanging on right there on the same stairwell.  

No wonder, then, that it got their attention when Paul arrived in town and began to describe a different way of living. 

No wonder that they listened when he said that it didn’t have to be this way—or, not to put too fine a point on it, that it wasn’t supposed to be this way. 

The life he talked about wasn’t necessarily quieter, of course, but it was certainly more gentle.  

He helped them picture lives with less servile bowing and scraping, and room to love more authentically.  

In Ancient Rome, “honor” was a kind of social currency that the low offered the high in exchange for patronage, to which Paul says, “what if everyone gave it to everyone?”  

“What if we tried to one-up each other in kindness or in helping out?” he asks. 

“What if we learned to live, not in a mutually respectful silence, but in harmony—in tune—with each other?” 

Doesn’t that seem like how it’s supposed to be?  

Paul thought so.  

No wonder they listened.  

No wonder that vision called to them, and when they found someone who shared it, they felt they’d encountered a brother from another mother…a sister from another mister.  

Right?  

Into a world which taught people to keep their heads down, Paul was teaching them to lift up their eyes and look for a whole new world that God’s Word in Jesus was bringing into existence. 

Imagine that Word slowly climbing up that ancient stairwell, with each resident…each life…learning to live so differently than any of them had been taught they might live.  

Imagine them coming together in the artisan’s workshop – the biggest, nicest apartment in their building – and the barmaid is cleaned up and sitting there next to the widow, and the slaves are actually sitting, themselves, and the widow’s son is home visiting from the army, not at all sure what to make of it, but chatting pleasantly enough with the artisan and the immigrants.  And everyone’s passing around the baby.  

There wouldn’t have been anything quiet about their enjoyment, of course, but what a world.  

Their needs and their realities are so different from our own, but I think we can still feel how extraordinary and beautiful it must have been… 

…How nearly unthinkable until you saw it.  Were part of it.  

We know a little bit about how, sometimes, it isn’t until we receive answer that we realize that we’d had questions.  

We know how, sometimes, it isn’t until we feel loved that we fully realize just how lonely and longing we’ve been.

We know about how life still trains us to keep our heads down.  

But the head-down life isn’t what God wants for us, any more than it’s what God wanted for those early Christians living in Rome.  

III.

What keeps us from saying yes? 

If this life is as extraordinary and beautiful now as it was then, why don’t we seem to reach for it? 

It turns out Paul has some thoughts on this, too. 

You may have caught that his tone seems to shift in this morning’s reading.  

What begins as this evocative description of what a faithful life looks like and about how blessedly immersed and enmeshed we might become in one another seems to lurch a little not far from the end.  

He begins to speak a little more ominously about vengeance. 

“Do not repay anyone evil for evil,” he says, “but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.” 

That’s not so bad.  But he’s not done.  

“Beloved,” he says. “never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine.  I will repay,’ says the Lord.” 

Still not done. 

“If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this, you will heap burning coals on their heads.”  

Ok, still not quite done, but you get the idea.  

It’s like someone changed the channel: now we’re watching “The Godfather.” 

So why get into that…and what could it possibly have to do with us? 

I think it starts back in that Roman house-church we were talking about.  

Because heaven knows, faith is not easy to live into.  

In recovery, they talk about sobriety as a journey, not a destination.  It’s a walk to be walked one day at a time.  

I think faith is like that, too.  

And so I imagine these neighbors on that ancient stairwell, now learning to see one another and sisters and brothers, and I wonder: what did the widow on the third floor make of it when she saw the barmaid crying again, sometime after welcoming another stranger behind the curtain to her bedroom? 

What did the artisan make of it when now there were all these new folks who needed his generosity and could never hope to repay it? 

What did the immigrants make of it when the slaves had more to eat and nicer clothes than they did?  

They must have had moments when they wondered why so much hadn’t changed even though, of course, so much had.  

As much as anyone shares with anyone else, there are those moments we keep private, when that sense of “why you and not me?” or “why me…and not you?” takes hold of us.  

We can be tempted, perhaps not to full-blown, Godfather-style “vengeance,” but to something more subtle and much harder to notice in ourselves. 

There is still a part of us that is immersed in the ugliness and unfairness and violence of the world that Jesus promises us is already passing away. 

That world can still convince us now and again that we’re looking down at the ground and not up at the heavens because we want to, because the ground is where there’s something to see.  

It has a lot to say about keeping and settling whatever scores we have in whatever ways we might. 

And so, as extraordinary and beautiful as our lives might be, we look away.  

Paul is affirming for us that our faith is a journey we walk day by day, reminding ourselves to look up and to take in the view.  

Our God is the God who wants nothing less than for all people to see that view for themselves.  

IV.

Ever since my first apartment in Philly, there have been plenty of times when I’ve wished I could whip out a piece of paper and assert my right to quiet enjoyment, not just of some apartment, but of jobs, of relationships, of Supreme Court decisions, of my own conscience – you name it.  

But that’s not the life that Gospel invites us to live.  

It invites us to live gently rather than quietly. Powerfully rather than helplessly.

Each day, we receive that invitation once again.  

Each day, we feel some of the impulse to keep our eyes on the ground, just the same.  

But God calls us to look up and to find our way in a new world – a new world where, finally, all of us know what it is to belong.   

Amen.  

A couple of weeks ago, there was an article in the New York Times about Americans visiting Europe this summer.  

It’s an article I feel like I’ve read a thousand times before – I mean, truly, no summer would be complete without Europeans remembering just how much we Americans get on their nerves.  

So in this summer’s version of the same old story, remember that it’s been uncharacteristically hot in Europe. 

For the first time since the pandemic, it’s also been quite crowded. 

And it seems the Americans are spoiling it for everyone (this time) by doing things like asking for the air conditioning to get turned up when there isn’t any, by wearing flip flops and crop tops in the presence of great art, and what have you. 

“Here in Italy, people dress up just to take their garbage down the street,” explained one hotel manager in Florence.  “You wouldn’t dare put on flip flops.” 

Along those same lines, it seems that asking for an iced coffee at a caffe in Italy is like going into a restaurant and asking the maître d if their marinara tastes like “Ragu” or if it’s closer to, say, “Prego.” 

Even for the best-intentioned of visitors, it turns out that visiting Rome is full of pitfalls. 

When it comes to living in heat, we and the Romans begin from fundamentally different places.  

II.

So when I tell you that for the next three weeks, we’re going to be looking at some key moments in the Apostle “Paul’s Letter to the Romans,” you may want to begin by settling back and lifting a word of thanks for our air-conditioned chapel.  

If you want to bring in an iced coffee, show up in your flip flops, go right ahead.  

No pitfalls here. 

That said, Paul’s letter itself can be tricky. 

It has a lot of purposes.  

One careful scholar of Paul, Michael Bird, identifies six distinct tasks at work: he says that the letter is a theological treatise, a summary of Paul’s teaching, a letter of self-introduction to the notably multicultural churches of Rome. 

It’s also a fundraising letter, an attempt to pull a specific church community together internally, and then even suggest some ways to work with the larger Jewish community in Rome, which really wasn’t sure what to make of this strange new sect that had started to give them a bad name with the locals.  

A lot is going on with this letter, most of which we’ll have to take up another time.  

But in the section we’ve heard this morning, Paul is trying to tell this congregation what the good news means for them.  

And the central point he wants to make is that, as you really start to be drawn to the Good  News…as God’s way really begins to shape your imagination: the more you begin to realize that more and more, you and the world around you just seem to be starting from fundamentally different places.  

III.

For Paul, a holy life for a Christian meant seeing that again and again. 

For Paul, it meant that, for starters, a holy life for a Christian was a constant process of unlearning the false promises of a broken world and then relearningwhat it was to find genuine hope in a more durable vision of life.  (The terms are Michael Gorman’s.) 

And that strikes me as so important, and not entirely obvious. 

For starters: what is it that we have to unlearn about a broken world?

Doesn’t so much of our most important learning involve unlearning? 

A few weeks ago, Rev. Cydney Van Dyke was with us, and she preached wonderfully about “The Barbie Movie,” which has been a notable feature of the culture this summer, complete with people – gosh, even guys! – dressing in pink to attend each screening, as a form of homage. 

I feel like “The Barbie Movie” could launch a hundred different sermons, each one of them important. 

All I want to say this morning is that it is a movie that is thinking very deeply about the relationship between unlearning and learning. 

As one cultural reporter (James Dusterberg at the website, The Point) puts it:

Barbie’s premise is as wonderfully simple as the doll herself. Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, lives in Barbieland, a utopian world where everything is made of plastic and every day is like the previous one and the next one: “perfect.” But one day, inexplicably, things start to go wrong. Barbie trips, has a bad hair day, discovers cellulite on her thigh. The invisible water in her shower is the wrong temperature; in the middle of a slumber party in her Dreamhouse, she even has “thoughts of death.” 

Pause there. 

Barbie is in the middle of her umpteenth slumber/dance party with all her friends, another day in the life, somewhere between ad nauseam and ad infinitum, and she blurts out, “Do you guys ever think about dying?”  

The record scratches, the dancing stops, and the room falls totally silent. 

Of course, they haven’t. 

A little after that, her feet, which are permanently shaped for stiletto heels, fall completely flat. 

In the next days, Barbie discovers that more and more “errors” (the word is from Brittany Schultz in the National Catholic Reporter) are creeping into Barbieland. 

It’s happening because (here’s Schultz again) “the girl who is playing with her in the real world is sad, and her sadness is bleeding into Barbie, causing her imperfections and making her question the world she knows.” 

And thus begins Barbie’s quest.  

To set her world right, she needs to unlearn some of her unrecognized assumptions about that world – she needs to come to see how things “bleed into” that world.

She needs to recognize a much bigger world. 

IV.

This is what Paul is trying to talk about in this morning’s Scripture.  

He’s saying: what happens? 

What happens when the music stops, when our feet fall flat, when we can’t ignore the errors that seem to be creeping in, and we have to unlearn however the world seems to explain or ignore these things and relearn a more durable vision of life? 

Paul says this is what happens when faithful people encounter the Good News. 

It’s God’s invitation to recognize a far bigger world. 

…A world in which so much seems to bleed into our lives: situations and people and ideas and hopes that are, it seems, so far away.  

Except that they’re not.  

They’re right there.  Right there.  That’s part of what we come to recognize.  

And Paul’s point is that, when that happens to you, you might tell someone.  

And a certain person might say, “Yuck.” 

And another person might say, “Whatever.” 

And a third kind of person might say, “Huh?” 

But for Paul, a Christian person will say, “Yeah.”  And then they’ll say, “Welcome.” 

They’ll say “welcome” because, like them, now we are on our way to recognizing a bigger world. 

Now we are learning to live with a more durable vision. 

We are re-learning how to live. 

V.

This is what Paul means when he calls the members of that early church in Rome, and when he calls us now, saying “Present your bodies as a livingsacrifice.”

He means, live with a willingness to die to the old and rise to the new, unlearning and relearning as you go, with an open mind and an open heart.  

From that first inkling…that first clue that the world and you might be starting from different places in some way…all along the course of that red thread that weaves in and out of view, leading us into the unfamiliar—that place where the answers aren’t so clear—provided we are willing to follow.  

He wants us to follow.  

He sees a Christian as someone whose mind is constantly transforming, constantly renewed and whose life is now pointed toward a very different understanding of who God actually is, and of what God actually wants.  

And again, his emphasis is on the living…on the notion of offering ourselves day by day…moment by moment…interaction by interaction…following that red thread.  

The gift in that is a life where we get to be ourselves, not “someone else,” not some person that we’re told the world expects us to be.  

For Paul, this is one of the great gifts that God offers in the Good News. 

And he even dreams of what it would look like if we all got to be ourselves together – a world in which we connect across all our specificity…all our personality…all our unfamiliarity to the world into a larger vision of people together.

He imagines us as a body.   A body with different parts but comprising a larger whole. 

He does that in other places throughout his letters, but here, again.  

With the idea that, with God’s help, we might relearn how to balance our own immediate needs and our own immediate gifts — the world of our own immediate circle — with the needs of a larger world, and the gifts that others might offer if we manage to make some room. 

God calls us to belong to one another, just as surely as we do to ourselves, and to Him. 

VI.

Along the way, there are always things we will need to unlearn in order to relearn how to live. 

There is a rhythm of letting go and taking hold, a pattern of dying and rising again to new life.  

Time and time again, we find ourselves like those Americans in Italy this summer – or like those Italians faced with the expectations of all these visiting Americans.  

We find that we are just beginning in a different place than the people before us.  

Maybe that starts as something very small, like expecting a pitcher of ice water for the table in a restaurant on a blazing hot day. 

Or maybe it’s already something much more important, like the discovery that you no longer fit the expectations and easy assumptions of those around you.  

But the new life beckons, if we learn to watch for it. 

Paul’s hope for us this morning is that we will learn to claim that life each day with renewed joy.  

Amen.  

When we last left Jesus and the disciples, they were sailing slowly on the Sea of Galilee, headed in the direction of Gennesaret on the western side.

You’ll remember that it had been a dark and stormy night, although that’s all behind them now. 

Now, the sun is coming up, and between the disciples’ sense of awe at Jesus and their own exhaustion from sailing through the storm, I’d have to guess that everything is pretty quiet on that boat. 

One of the former fisherman takes the tiller just to give the poor helmsman a break, and as the western shore gets closer and closer, it’s not just the landlubbers who start to seem brighter and brighter. 

As they sail up to the shore, there’s the bus they’d chartered, waiting for them, with its driver absorbed in the newspaper and completely unaware of any storm, any peril, any anything. 

Even so, he sees them as they hop on.  

No smiles, no nods, no good mornings.  

They climb aboard wearily. 

Jesus is the last one on, sitting in that front seat on the right that’s just over the driver’s shoulder. 

But the driver can’t help but notice that Jesus is sitting there by himself and not chatty in his usual way. 

This time, there’s no Peter sitting next to him with maps and a clipboard. 

No Judas trying to get him to go through his receipts.  

No Thomas peppering him with questions.  

After a little while, they pull over for breakfast somewhere, and as so often happens, Jesus ends up getting into it with some hotshots from Jerusalem – something about how the disciples are an insult to the faith. 

The driver knows that it’s standard enough stuff for this crew, but this time, it seems as if it gets to Jesus.  

When they get back on the bus, he starts talking about how ugly words can be…how some people make religion into a bunch of rules about things like eating, when it’s clear that what comes out of your mouth says a whole lot more about you than any morsel you decide to put into it. 

He says that, the master, and it turns out to be kind of conversation stopper for the whole bus, because who’s going to venture a comment after that? 

And besides, they’d piled on from the boat, all tired and wet and lost in thought to begin with.  

II.

This is all a pre-quel to this morning’s Gospel, of course. 

I offer it as a way into one of the oddest and most unsettling stories about Jesus that we have in all of Scripture.  

It’s a story that some Christians find hard to read, and most find even harder to square. 

The Jesus who loves sinners…the Jesus who stands on the side of the forgotten and the dispossessed…the Jesus who sees through the superficial labels that the wordl puts on people…heck, the Jesus who teaches kindness and patience and humility…well…you wouldn’t get him confused with this guy. 

This guy gets approached by a desperate woman with a sick girl back at home, and at first, he ignores her.  Then he calls her a name that polite folks don’t use on Sunday morning. 

Who is this guy?  

If it were Peter or one of the other disciples, the story would make more sense.  

We’re used to their lapses as if they were our own. 

I mean, just last week, we were talking about Peter and the storm and the boat and the sinking in the water and the ye of little faith, and all that.  

But what are we supposed to do with this? 

III. 

That’s why it seems so important to begin with how exhausted they all are, even Jesus.

It hadn’t always been like this. 

Back in the early days, when they’d all been brighter eyed and bushier tailed, Jesus wound down the Sermon on the Mount by criticizing the very things that seem to be coming out of his mouth this morning. 

Back then, he’d preached, “You’ve heard it said, ‘Do not give dogs what is sacred.’ You’ve heard it said, ‘Do not throw your pearls before swine.’” 

And he went on, “But I tell you: ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened for you.  For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:6-7). 

That was then.  

It seems as if the shoe is on the other foot, now. 

It seems like now, words are allowed to be ugly, after all.  

Or, at the very least, as one commentator puts it, in this story, Jesus “gets caught with his compassion down.” 

IV.

Who hasn’t been there? 

“Caught with our compassion down”? 

Who hasn’t felt that urge to pull away from all of the everything? 

I had a pastor friend years ago who was driving a U-Haul from Virginia to a new position in Connecticut in the days before you could plug in your cell phone and talk “hands free.”  

And all along the way, every fifty miles or so, his phone kept ringing and ringing with people from back in Virginia who somehow hadn’t gotten word that he and his family were not only leaving, but in fact, had left—and these people were calling about this and that, with each concern something it was now squarely on someone else’s shoulders to do.  

Each time, he would dutifully answer, driving the truck with one hand and cradling that phone in his ear as he hurtled north on 95.  

Each time, he would dutifully explain.  

All things considered, he did quite well. 

He made it as far as the Palisades in New Jersey before finally pulling over, taking his phone and throwing it off the side of the cliff and into the Hudson River.  

But up until that point, hey: he wasn’t going to let anyone catch him with his compassion down.  

V.

It seems odd, I guess, to say that when we get caught with our compassion down, we need God.  

In moments like that, we need so many things. Most are closer to hand and far easier to provide. 

After all, why bring God into it when a nap would do it?  Or a day away from our screens? Or a chance to vent for an hour to a willing ear? 

And don’t get me wrong: such offices are holy enough. Bless each one of them. 

But the thing that gets my attention is that it’s not just those things by themselves, restorative as they are.  

It’s that, as the writer Francis Spufford puts it, there’s something that “breathes and shines through” them, if we have eyes to see. 

In fact, as he says, there is something that “breathes and shines through us if we let it.” (Unapologetic, 197, my italics).

And that is the thing we need most of all.  

Spufford describes the church’s work as being, like Christ himself, “a channel by which mending enters the world.” 

And it seems to me that what Jesus needs most in this moment we’ve been talking about is just that: some kind of mending. 

And for that, he needs God. 

He needs a way to reconnect to what it is that breathes and shines through all of the things, even the ones that have brought him to this point…this point where it seems like he’s ready to throw his cell phone off the nearest cliff. 

VI.

And at that very moment…right at that cliffside moment…it’s this woman, this mother, made bold by love and desperation, who reminds Jesus how to be the Son of God.  

Because at that moment, something shines through her. 

Whether it’s her earnestness, her daring, or just her plain sass. 

She’s not Jewish, they’re not in Israel, it wasn’t a proper woman’s place to speak to a man in public without being spoken to. 

At first he ignores her, then he outright insults her, but she won’t fold.

“I’m not trying to talk my way into your party,” she says. “I’m here for the crumbs.”

VII.

I may have mentioned this before; if I have, I apologize. 

But a few years ago, Liz and the girls went to an event in Stamford where, it turns out, Paul Simon was invited to come on stage and play a song.  

It was outdoors somewhere.  One of those little stages where you hop up one step and stand on that industrial fake green grass. 

Anyway, when it was time, Paul hopped up with his guitar in a beat up old guitar case, gave it a quick tune, adjusted the mic, tapped it to make sure it was working, sang and sat down. 

I’m sure Paul was great.  

But what was more striking was that, in those short moments, what shined through was that he wasn’t carrying himself like a superstar, surrounded by folks to take care of things for him.    

He was just a guy with the band. 

VIII.

Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not suggesting that in this morning’s gospel, Jesus is holding out on the woman like some sort of temperamental superstar.  

But something shines through her.

In this moment where he finds himself falling back on all the old rules in order to make her stop, it’s as if he hears himself talking – really hears himself – and he remembers that he’s never been much of a rules guy. 

When it comes down to it, he knows a whole lot more about scrounging for crumbs than he ever will about fine dining. 

He knows who his people are.   

Maybe he remembers the mountaintop, so many miles ago now, where he’d spoken about a whole new set of rules and given a vision of a new people.   

Jesus comes back to himself.  

He comes back to the love of God. 

Whatever it is that shines through her, in response, something comes to shine through Jesus once again.  

In some sense, it’s not just the sick girl back home who is healed.  

Both Jesus and the girl’s mother are healed, too – all three of them are mended in this exchange – and all three of them depart, rejoicing.  

IX.

It’s an unsettling story at first, isn’t it?   

It’s unsettling to imagine Jesus feeling fed up with being Jesus-y. 

Like everyone else, we count on him for that. 

But its deeper message is to look below surfaces—to look below our superficial impressions, whether they’re impressions of someone very different than we are, or even our superficial impressions and expectations of God.  

Look below the surface for what shines through. 

Because when life seems hardest and most depleting, there’s something there if we’re willing to look.  

Something shines through to remind us how much God loves us and to help us find our way. 

When we see it, we come to recognize ourselves again and find it in us to go forth, rejoicing.  

Amen.  

There have been a couple of times when I’ve been caught in a storm that came out of nowhere.  

Has that ever happened to you? 

Let me be clear: I’m not talking about moments when you’re like, “whoops, guess I should have brought an umbrella” – those times when you get caught in a downpour while walking the dog, and the dog looks up at you like, “You jerk. How could you let this happen?” 

No, I mean storms.  

Like the time there was a small tornado in downtown New Haven one summer day while I was coming back from getting an ice cream. 

If you’re a New Haven person, I was going up York Street right near where the JPress and the Wawa used to be, and it suddenly occurred to me that it was oddly—actually oppressively quiet for a midafternoon in July.  

No birds, no buzzing critters, no nothing.  Strange.

Then, looking up, I saw that the sky had turned the electric yellow-green of a jar of pickle juice.  I’d never seen that before.  Again: strange.  

Maybe if you know about tornadoes, there were other strange and alarming signs, but I didn’t know about tornadoes, and so if there were any, I didn’t pick up on them.  

Truth be told, I was in a kind of “whoops, guess I should have brought an umbrella” place. 

And then there was this enormous boom. 

It sounded like someone had just blown off the top of the Chemistry building, and all of the sudden, I realized that I was being pelted by hail.  

And by “pelted by hail,” I mean pelted like someone was emptying a dump truck of golf balls on my head.  

The wind went from zero to sixty faster than a Porsche.   

But it was not until the next moment, when I saw the metal street sign go zinging down the street past the post office and on toward the New Haven Green, that I actually remembered to be scared.  

I ran across Broadway and pounded on the door of the pizza place that used to be on the corner, but the guy in the apron just put up his hands like “I’m not opening it,” and I just ran on, making a little hat with my hands in case one of those hailstones turned out to be more of a baseball than a golf ball.  

I am sorry to say I forget who took me in – someone did, but only for a few minutes. 

Suddenly, the storm was over.  The rain had stopped.  

By the time I was halfway back to my dorm, the store owners along Broadway were already out with their enormous push brooms, sweeping the hail off the sidewalk.  

There were a couple of dueling car alarms.  Some gnarled uprooted trees.  And the birds were back. 

That was it.  

But…that was a storm.  

I don’t know if they’d be willing to tell you their story, sometime, but Dorothy and Gerry Mayfield were young parents when they lived in that part of the country they call “Tornado Alley,” which goes from the top of South Dakota to the middle of Texas.  

Let’s just say Dorothy and Gerry know very well why somebody decided to name it that.  

In his book The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger notes that, “There are houses in Gloucester (Massachusetts) where grooves have been worn into the floorboards by women pacing past an upstairs window, looking out to sea.”  

If you asked them, they could tell you about storms, too.  

I say that because, when Jesus fishes Peter out of the sea in the middle of the storm, and he holds Peter up by the collar and says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” – I’ve got to admit that I’m pretty much on Peter’s side.  

Or what I think of as his side, anyway.  

Not everybody is.  

Sometimes, preachers act as if Peter’s doubt is just silly.  

It’s kind of the “Well, duh” school of preachers. 

As in, “Well duh, Peter! He’s Jesus! He’s out there on the water! Who wouldn’t be out there with him?” 

That seems like Monday morning quarterbacking, though.  

Like a guy sweeping hailstones off the sidewalk when the tornado is over, who says, “I don’t think it was really all that bad.” 

Well, ok, if you say so. 

The King James version always gives Jesus’ words that slightly formal touch: “O thou of little faith,” it says, “wherefore didst thou doubt?” 

Or as a more current translation of this same moment, by Sarah Ruden, Jesus puts it: “…You with hardly any trust! Why did you waver?” 

But honestly: who wouldn’t waver? 

It’s dark, and the waves are as tall as houses, and the wind is screaming, and it’s raining sideways, and somehow it turns out that you’re out in it.  

Don’t pooh-pooh the power of a storm.  

II.

By and large, Scripture doesn’t.  

However, it does put some space between the violence of storms and the presence of God. 

Probably the most famous example focuses on the Prophet Elijah.  

He has a particular grievance against God, or thinks he does – that’s not our focus here.  

Elijah’s words to God have a kind of “are we there yet?” quality that parents of young children will recognize right away.  

Abruptly, God decides to demonstrate the divine presence, probably to show Elijah that God has been with him all along.  

God says: “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.”  

The story continues: “Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; 

and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; 

and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire, the sound of sheer silence.  

When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.  Then a voice came to him that said, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’” (1 Kings 19:11-13)

For Elijah, despite the power of the storm, it is the sheer silence that tells him that he has stepped onto holy ground—and it seems to remind him that God’s silence is not the same thing as God’s absence. 

If anything, that profound quiet is a particular sign of God’s attending presence.

III.

For a while, when Emily was very small, she would have trouble falling asleep at night.  

Like me when I was small, she was also an early enthusiast when it came to conversation. 

So it took a while for her to settle, even after umpteen stories, talk about her day, and a trip to the bathroom for a small sip of water.  

Even with the lights out, she would often announce that one of her stuffed animals wanted her to sing them a song.  

It took her awhile to enter into that particular silence that was a comforting presence and finally made rest possible. 

IV.

For me, this is what the “Well, duh” school of preaching tends to overlook – the sense of God’s comforting presence as something it takes a certain kind of quiet in order to reach…a particular kind of stillness, or as Elijah encountered it, “a sound of sheer silence.”

Scripture seems to admit quite willingly that, in the moment, that sound can be quite hard for us to hear, even for the most faithful of us.  

V.

With all this in mind, then, I wonder if there isn’t a deeper point to this morning’s Gospel.

You know by now that we Christians aren’t supposed to pooh-pooh the storm.  

You’ve got that, right? 

Well, while we’re at it, let’s not pooh-pooh that Peter, caught in the storm, still hops out of the boat and takes a few steps toward Jesus.  

He doesn’t get enough credit for that, if you ask me.  

The point shouldn’t be that he didn’t make it all the way that time.  

The Gospels make it clear that there would be many, many other times when he wouldn’t make it again.  

But all along the way, there would be moments when he knew he had stepped onto holy ground and felt God’s presence.  

The point isn’t that he started to sink, and that, well duh, he shouldn’t have.  

The point is that he took those steps.  

Just like dropping his nets to follow Jesus had been just a first step.  

Just like passing around the water turned to wine at the wedding feast at Cana was another step.  

Just like following Jesus in the rooms where sick people lay suffering and witnessing their healing were other steps. 

There were a lot of steps. 

So now, in the heart of the storm, having taken those earlier steps, he hops over the side of the boat in the thick of the storm to take his next few steps.  

And, God bless him, it takes him quite a few until the waves loom large again, and he remembers to be scared.  

VI.

What do you and I need to do so that we can take our own next step toward Jesus?  

Better yet, whose storm might we resolve to step into, in the name of love, hoping to offer some of God’s own peace, so that someone else might find shelter? 

And when someone tries to tell us about a storm in their life that’s come out of nowhere, how can we make sure we don’t somehow pooh-pooh what they’re trying to tell us? 

As we go along, there are times when even the bravest of us remembers to be scared.  

But one step at a time, we learn to live into God’s love.  

And as the waves subside, and we are surrounded by the sound of sheer silence, we’ll remember something else: that God’s love has been with us all along, teaching us to walk through the valley of every shadow.  

The sound of sheer silence will be joined with the peace in our hearts. 

Amen.

Dear Friends of Second Church,

Hope you are finding ways to stay comfortable during the heat!

I know it’s hotter than it should be because of our dogs. 

Most of the time, they would spend the whole day in the backyard of the Parsonage.

What dog wouldn’t?  There are squirrels to chase, dogs on leashes happening by who need to be told off, preschoolers on the adjacent playground to sniff — there’s a lot to do out there.  

Winter also poses its own set of challenges, but even so, they’d rather be out there more often than not.  

So yesterday, when I came back from schlepping a kid from softball camp and went to let the dogs out, I was surprised to see them barrel to the door, stop, stick two paws out, and then turn around with a solid “NOPE.” 

Of course, being them, they still expected a treat as if they had gone outside. 

“I mean, technically, dad, isn’t sticking paws beyond the door ‘outside’?” one said. 

“I mean, I certainly think so,” said the other. 

“Yes, so do I,” the first one quickly agreed.  

“Oh come on, go out, go out,” I said, trying to shoo them. 

“We’ve been,” they both said at once.

Then the older one added: “Let’s have treats now.” 

There was no convincing them — I might as well have been asking them to take a ride on the vacuum cleaner.  

Treat gobbled immediately, one lay down in the door.  The other gazed at contemptuously like a teenager and wandered off toward the dining room.  

As I said, I was surprised, but I know how they feel.  

Sometimes conditions are just not conducive.  

Yet there’s a lesson here.

Our faith seeks to remake us of somewhat sterner stuff.

After all, there’s not much use for a “fair-weather Christian” — fair weather doesn’t require compassion, forgiveness, or patience in quite the same way.  

Those qualities are always nice to have around, of course, but it’s in the hard times, when conditions aren’t conducive, that they become truly transformational.  

That’s when they bring something new and necessary into a situation.

I need to remember that.

Like my dogs, I tend to wilt pretty quickly in the heat.  

My ongoing project is to become someone who still offers the fruits of the spirit even when it’s not so easy. 

In fact, especially then.  

See you in church,

So, like everybody, there are things I’m pretty good at, others that I’m not as good at, and a handful of things that make me truly bananas.  

High on the “bananas” list are those automated checkout lanes at the supermarket.  Those are not for me.  

Along the same lines, there are those restaurants that have you order on an iPad that they have bolted to the table.  Yuck. 

I don’t like how the gas pump talks back to you now.  

That chip they put on your credit card? Yeah…not a fan.  

Ok…so maybe it’s a little more than just a handful of things. 

But the thing that makes just come completely unglued is calling on the phone to try to make an appointment or deal with a bill. 

I am a really nice guy.  I am actually a pretty patient guy.  When it comes to doing unto others as I would have them do unto me, I am a committed guy.  

The whole phone thing tests All. Of. That.  

Every time.  

“Please enter your twenty-digit personal i.d. code followed by the pound sign.” 

“I’m sorry, Richard, I didn’t get that.” 

“To return to the main menu, say ‘Main Menu.’” 

There’s a scene in the old Charlie Chaplin movie, “Modern Times” when Charlie is working in a factory and somehow he falls into a machine and just keeps going around and around and around the gears. 

Anybody remember that? 

This is pretty much how I feel whenever I call Citibank.  

It’s an experience I truly dread.  

But there are times when, like it or not, you just have to.  

There’s the tuition payment that gets declined.  

There’s the Christmas shopping you absolutely need to get done this weekend.  

There’s some sort of mysterious charge that doesn’t look right.  

Yesterday, I couldn’t figure out how to make a payment for one of my cards. 

Which is to say: I was trying to give them money.  

Couldn’t do it.  

And you just feel so helpless as you’re stuck there, right? 

Finally, after forever, you get a person on the phone—but as you know, even that doesn’t mean that you’re exactly out of the woods.  

Oh no.  

I feel like I can tell within the first five seconds if I’m finally saved or if I’m just taking another turn around the gears of the big machine.  

I find that so interesting.  

Because you know that everyone at the company received the same training.  

You know that when the call really is being monitored for quality assurance, it’s the same supervisor who’s checking the same group on all the same stuff.  

You know that wherever these folks are, they’re all sitting side by side with their headsets and their computer screens, punching in and punching out at the same time.  

And yet the difference between Danielle at USAA Savings Bank and Anthony at USAA Savings Bank is like the difference between Dolly Parton and Lurch from the “Addams Family.” 

Danielle is going to talk you through it.  Danielle is going to figure things out. Danielle sees you down there in that ditch, and she actually wants to get you out of it.  

Anthony…not so much.  

By this, I don’t mean that Danielle will solve your issue and Anthony won’t.  

I mean that, in solving your issue, Danielle makes you feel cared for.  Cared about.  Seen and heard.  

Whatever it is about life that seems to grind us down hasn’t managed to grind her down one bit.  

She doesn’t treat you like a customer.  

She treats you like a neighbor.  

II.

Our story from Luke’s gospel this morning is trying to get its hands around just what it means to be a neighbor. 

Clearly, he sees it as much of the ancient world and much of the current world (in other places) do, which is to say, as far more than just an accident of proximity.  

To be neighbors involves a certain amount of obligation to one another.  A certain sense of a shared destiny, somehow.

That’s why Jesus tells the parable in the first place. 

A lawyer has approached him and asked “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus puts the question right back to him, saying, “What do you read in the law?”

The lawyer replies, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus commends that answer.

But the lawyer persists and says, “But who is my neighbor?”

What being neighbors ought to entail does not seem to be his question, although it is a key part of where Jesus takes the parable.  

The lawyer is more focused on who rather than what. 

And by way of response, Jesus tells this story about a man who is attacked, robbed, stripped, and left half-dead in a ditch along the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.  

He tells it in a way that if you’re focused on who rather than what, the story becomes particularly hard to hear. 

Not one, but two emphatically “religious” men…men of a certain consequence and reputation…men who, not for nothing, have business in Jerusalem related to the Temple itself…they take one look at this crumpled figure in the dirt and cross to the other side of the road without stopping. 

The one who does stop is, of course, designed to have kind of a maximum yuck factor for the lawyer. 

The one who stops is a rich Samaritan—a person who would have been hated, and if at all possible, avoided—someone for whom the feeling was, in most cases, mutual.  

Except that, in this case, it’s not mutual.  

Not at all.   

And this is the whole point.  

The two who might have been expected to stop do not stop. 

The one who would have been excused by everyone for not even slowing downnot only does that but does so much more.  

Shocking as it is to imagine, he goes far beyond any formal expectation of what care requires. 

Because what he sees is a person who needs care. 

He sees what all of us really ought to see…what we hope we’ll see…at a moment like that.

Of course, if you’ve ever had a “Good Samaritan” moment of your own, you may remember that it wasn’t entirely easy to see. 

Or, to put it differently…you may remember that it can be easy enough to seesomeone who seems like they are having trouble. 

Even if the moment happens suddenly…as such moments often do…you can see it.  

But alongside that, there are other things.   

Hesitations that rush in. 

Things that can be hard to see past for one reason or another.   

And the point is that Jesus suggests that this is not seeing, but a deeper kind of blindness.

It gets in the way of the good that needs doing – the good that is ours to do in that moment. 

But the Samaritan does not hesitate.  He is not blinded in this way.

He sees a neighbor in distress.   So he responds.  

Because whatever it is about life that seems to grind people down hasn’t managed to grind him down one bit.  

III.

What’s that supposed to teach us? 

Faith is often described as a kind of innocence – a form of naivete.  

Even Jesus describes it that way, as he warns his followers that he sends them out as sheep in the midst of wolves.  

Life can be very hard on our hope in redemption, or at least, on our hope in easyredemption.  

There are some things we can’t do, even if we want to.  

But if life teaches us to stop wanting to, then we’ve learned the wrong lesson.  

Because if we stop wanting to help – if we stop trying to see – if we stop opening ourselves up to the claims of our neighbors, then the wolves win another round. 

The vulnerability of faith is the thing that makes it strong.  

It’s what makes God’s transformation possible…what gives Jesus some room to work.  

It’s not a refusal to see or face the facts—it’s an argument about what the facts really are.

If you’ve ever been out there, lying half-dead in one of the ditches of life, you can hear the sound of the people who pass by. 

You come to have a very different understanding of the relevant facts.  

You can hear the abrupt silence when they notice you…and the sound as they do their best to tiptoe away swiftly.  

What you’re praying for is the sound of the person who comes to help…the approaching footsteps of the one who comes in peace. 

You’re praying for someone who will see you as their neighbor.  Who will remember that fact. 

The best of us do. 

In a world that seems so determined to grind us down, there are those who have the courage to live differently.  

To stand for something else. 

To believe that something better is possible for us all.  

This is who Jesus calls us to be.  

“Go thou and do likewise,” he says.  

Whatever our own burdens and frustrations…whatever we’re pretty good at, not so good at, and whatever it is that makes us truly bananas…may we heed that call. 

May we remember the Samaritan and go and do likewise on any road we travel. 

Amen.  

A few days ago, the New York Times ran a piece about a new trend you may not have heard about.  

It seems that all across the country, and to some extent, the world, people are choosing to remember their relatives by carving one of their cherished recipes on their gravestone.  

As in: “Mom’s Christmas Cookies: cream one cup sugar, half a cup oleo, add two beaten eggs and one teaspoon vanilla”…etc. 

It’s not clear that mom’s name or her dates are even on the stone at all – though maybe they’re on the other side. 

Of course, if your recipe specifically calls for “oleo,” then a lot of us can pretty much guess your dates, so maybe the specifics don’t matter.  

But as the Times reports: 

“In cemeteries from Alaska to Israel, families have memorialized their loved ones with the deceased’s most cherished recipes carved in stone. These dishes — mostly desserts — give relatives a way to remember the sweet times and, they hope, bring some joy to visitors who discover them among the more traditional monuments.”

Of course, there are also issues.  

In one case, the gravestone company apparently made an error on a fudge recipe which nobody caught until twenty years later, when the other grandparent died…and so for twenty years, anyone who actually gave the recipe a try had been making runny fudge.  

If this were a movie, don’t you think that the family would be terrorized by the ghost of fudge-making past, or something? 

Well, now they’ve fixed it.  

The memory is secure. 

Still, it is an interesting trend.  

If you were going to be known in perpetuity for just one recipe, what would it be?

Do you know? 

Mine would probably be the phone number for Panda Pavillion.  

But in all seriousness: if you were known for just one recipe, what would it be?  

And what would your hopes for it be?  

What would keeping it alive mean to you?  

Does it mean the generations will follow it exactly that way forever?  

Or does “keeping it alive” mean that each generation gets to build on it…introduce variations…go with “an experiment” in some years and put that before the family jury?   

The handing down of recipes is a powerful legacy. 

When my parents were married, my dad’s mom sat down and dutifully copied her recipes into a composition book for her new daughter-in-law.  

My mom not only still has it.  She still uses it.  

There are slight differences in the copy my grandmother made for my mom and the copy she made for my Aunt Wendy, and this has meant fifty years of phone consultations and verification and penciled-in corrections.  

They’ve also added different recipes of their own.

Other families don’t work that way.  

When the parents of a friend of mine were married in India, the bride’s mother-in-law came to live with them for six months for the express purpose of teaching her the recipes.  

That the new bride was already a medical doctor with a lot to do was sort of an irrelevant detail.  

She needed to learn to make things correctly.  

II.

This seems to be especially worth pondering on a holiday weekend – and all the more so on this particular holiday weekend.  

The Fourth of July is the most important of our civic holidays, and replete with tradition.  

Keith Lockhart is the conductor of the Boston Pops now and has been for almost thirty years.  

But to me, it’s like Arthur Fiedler just passed the baton yesterday.  

And when I hear the Boston Pops, it might be the new guy up there swinging his arms around, but it’s Arthur Fiedler that I think I hear.  

Somehow, he’s still part of my recipe.  

More deeply, July 4^th is the day when we remember how the Founders left us a recipe.  

Their own moment was powerfully experimental.  

It had to be.

Their circumstances were chaotic and, at times, terrifying.  

If what they built could not endure, the future would be bleak, indeed.  

So when Thomas Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” it is important to remember how little else actually was.  

Yet he and the Founders believed that to be human itself was to be endowed with certain rights, among them, as Jefferson notes, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” 

That particular phrase is closely associated with Jefferson but comes from the English philosopher John Locke.  

The Founders agreed that whatever followed needed to start from those principles.  

Any vision of a workable future needed to begin there.  

And throughout our history, when things have become less than self-evident, we have returned to that recipe.  

We have tested our understanding of the way forward by going back to this particular affirmation of who we are.  

We argue over its meanings.  

After all, what is it to “pursue happiness”?  

But we come back to the question because it’s always a good question, though rarely an easy one.  

And it is in our capacity to wrestle with it that we are equipped to move forward. 

III.

Similarly, in our Gospel this morning, Luke describes a moment when Jesus sends out 70 of his followers to proclaim the Good News throughout the countryside.  

It is another story of equipping.  

And what comes through so powerfully is how carefully Jesus is trying to prepare them. 

He knows it won’t be easy.  

He knows they will be rejected by many and scrutinized by everyone.  

He not only thinks he’s sending them out as sheep into the midst of wolves, he even tells them so.  

But he knows that he has to start getting them ready.  

He knows that the transformation of the world depends on him, but that this can only happen as the world finds a way to find him—and that this will be the work of many hands, and many generations. 

He knows there will be failures alongside of the successes—that’s already happened to him, too.  

And so he gives them this recipe—these steps to follow as they go out on the roads in his name.  

What is that recipe? 

It’s interesting that he doesn’t say much by way of what they’re actually supposed to preach.  

He’s not all that specific about that part.  

According to Luke, Jesus just says to tell everyone that “the Kingdom of God has drawn near.”  

Maybe that’s a little bit like the idea of the “pursuit of happiness,” which is to say, maybe it’s not supposed to be limited to just one very specific thing.  

It’s a touchstone.  

It gives you a way to name something you see—or feel—not once, but continually.  

It leaves the people in each town with something to debate and discover together, even find new meaning in, well after the missionaries have moved on.

It imagines a life in which people evolve and discover and meander, but always with something fundamental to return to. 

To reorient themselves by.  

A bit ominously, Jesus says: 

But whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go out into its streets and say,

10:11 ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off in protest against you. Yet know this: the kingdom of God has come near.’

That means, offer people these words, knowing that they may not mean much to those people now, but in the hope that someday, they will. 

Someday, their capacity to guide you, to remind you who you really are, might finally kick in.

IV.

Recipes have the power to remind us where we’re from, who we are, and the great legacy of all that has been done for us. 

They are alive—growing and changing, as we grow and change, but always seeking to call us back should we stray too far.  

They are a central expression of the love and wisdom of families…the love and wisdom of nations.  

But most of all, they are a central expression of the love and wisdom of Jesus. 

May we join the work to which they call us. 

May those who follow receive it from our hands with gratitude and joy.  

Amen.