god

The Devil’s Beatitudes

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Sermon for February 1, 2026

Readings:

Then he began to speak and taught them saying:

Blessed are the rich in pride, for theirs is the kingdom of this world.
Blessed are those who feel no sorrow, for they do not need to be comforted.
Blessed are the bold, for they can just take the earth.
Blessed are those who are self-righteous, because they are already filled.
Blessed are the cruel and inhumane, for mercy is for the weak.
Blessed are the pure in ideology, for they will see God in their mirrors.
Blessed are the troublemakers, for they will be called my children.

Blessed are those who are praised for wickedness, for theirs is the kingdom of this world.

Blessed are you when people praise and adore you and utter all kinds of flattering things to you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your rewards will be great on this earth, for in the same way they praised the great and powerful who were before you.

I sincerely hope that all of you are able to identify what is wrong with everything I just said. I hope that you can recognize that those are not the words of Jesus. What I have just given you is what I would call the Devil’s Beatitudes. Sometimes, in order to see something clearly, it is helpful to take a look at its inverse or opposite. It’s like a photographic negative where light is dark and dark is light. It is only when you shine a light through a negative that you can see things as they really are. All of those things I just said may sound appealing; they may even sound true, but you know…or at least I hope you know and can recognize that they are false. They are not the words and teachings of our Lord. They come from somewhere, or someone, else entirely. 

But when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. 
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 
“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. 
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. 
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

That is a very different message than what I said in the beginning. I can remember vividly the first time I read those words for myself. It was in a bible that my grandmother had sitting on her desk. That part of the Bible, the sermon on the Mount, was illustrated. Baptists sometimes like to pretend that they don’t like images in worship, but don’t you believe it. They just want the images to be in their bibles and not on their church walls. Anyways, I can remember reading those words and just being struck by them. Even as a child I could sense that there was some very deep truth there. I could also sense, that what Jesus was saying and the values that he was teaching, conflicted with the values that I could already see being lived out in the world. Although I wouldn’t learn this word for many, many years, Jesus was being counter-cultural. His words were a challenge to the dominant culture in the world. They were a challenge in his day when he first spoke them to his disciples. They were a challenge when I first read them as a child. They remain a challenge to us today. This very day. Jesus’s words have been a challenge to us in every age, throughout time. Even during those times and ages, like our own, when Christianity made at least a nominal claim of being the dominant culture or religion…even then, Jesus’s words have proved to be a challenge…and sometimes an indictment. 

As a church, we go to great effort to honor what we believe to be the word of God. It is read aloud at every worship service. Frequently much of it is sung, as in the psalms which have always formed the backbone of the church’s daily worship. Jesus’s words are given even greater reverence, being encased in silver and gold, processed into the congregation, and listened to while standing at attention. Hours are spent listening to preachers expound upon these texts with varying degrees of effectiveness. We honor these texts even when they challenge us to be better and to do better. 

Hear, you mountains, the controversy of the Lord,
and you enduring foundations of the earth;

for the Lord has a controversy with his people,
and he will contend with Israel.

“O my people, what have I done to you?
In what have I wearied you? Answer me!

If you attend our Good Friday services, then you may recognize that last line from the Prophet Micah. It is sung by the choir during the veneration of the cross in what we call the reproaches or the Popule Meus. The words are sung as if they are the words of Jesus, but they are much older than Jesus. We believe Jesus to be the incarnate son of God who calls us to new life and a new way of seeing the world. His life was unique in its reconciling power, but as the reproaches and the words of the prophets make very clear, God has been challenging humanity to do better for a very long time. We believe our God to be loving and forgiving and we believe that our God saves us when we cannot save ourselves, but we also believe in a God that calls us to be better and to do better. We believe in a God who calls us to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with him. We have preserved those words of the Prophet Micah, like we have preserved Jesus’s sermon on the mount, NOT because they merely affirm us as we are, but because they challenge us to be better than we are. They challenge us to put more trust in God than we do in the powers of this world or even in ourselves. 

Preserving that message and sharing it with the world is a part of the vital task of the church. And the church is criticized sometimes for not appearing relevant to the world we live in. People don’t get us and what we do. The rituals seem arcane and unimportant. People wonder what church is even for. Some people think that the church is too politically active; others think it is not politically active enough. Well, I think that our faith should inform our politics and not the other way around. Our faith should inform our politics; our politics should not inform our faith. But so often that is what we see on both the left and the right. Well, I have no sworn allegiance to any political party, but I do have a sworn allegiance to Jesus. Partisanship is never going to save us. But Jesus will. We need to be bigger than the stupid, petty partisanship that surrounds us. We need to be witnesses to a better way. That is what makes us relevant. We are relevant because the God of the Jesus and the prophets is still God, and is still calling us to do better and to be better. 

Very often churches like Ascension, that are very intentionally traditional in style and worship, are accused of being museums (as if that is some sort of insult). I was reading an article this week about the Anglican Priest Percy Dearmer. He lived at the end of the nineteenth through the beginning of the twentieth century. He was something of an antiquarian and had a bit of style. I wouldn’t have agreed with him on every liturgical point, but he thought that worship should be beautiful and he thought that traditions should be preserved and there we certainly agree. He was criticized for fostering what was called “British Museum religion.” I have no doubt that there are some who think that that is what we are about. But if that is true, then it is not in the way that the critics mean. The author of this article I was reading wrote that “The museum metaphor becomes apt only when one recalls that museums are not cemeteries of the obsolete. They are classrooms, treasuries, and places of encounter. They invite us to listen to voices that would otherwise be lost.”

Museums invite us to listen to voices that would otherwise be lost. Think about that the next time you go to the Met. Museums invite us to listen to voices that would otherwise be lost. Think about that the next time you come in here. Because if that is what a museum is, then I am proud that that is what we are. We are a classroom, a treasury, a place of encounter. We are a place that invites people to hear voices that the world would rather drown out. And the most important voice of all those voices that the world would like to silence and forget is the voice of our Lord. We need to be a place where his voice is heard. We need to be a place where his words, his actual words, are proclaimed and remembered. Because the world is always going to want to forget, or twist, or warp, or misunderstand. We need to hear his words so that we can recognize when we hear words that are not his. 

Righteousness

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Sermon for January 11, 2026

I want to rewind Matthew’s gospel for a few minutes this morning, back to the beginning. I want to go back to the very beginning of the story, before Jesus is born. One of the things that we are told in the very beginning of the gospel is that Joseph, Jesus’s adoptive father, was a righteous man. He was a righteous man, and when he discovered that Mary was pregnant (and not by him) he decided that rather than publicly shaming her he would put her away quietly. He wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. He wasn’t going to go through with the marriage, but he would find some way to handle it discreetly. 

Now you need to understand that this is NOT what the law commanded. He didn’t HAVE to do that. Under the law, Joseph would have been completely justified in having Mary publicly shamed and even stoned. That was the penalty for adultery. And yes, we know that Mary was not an adulteress, but there was no way that an unmarried pregnant woman could have proven that to anyone’s satisfaction. Nobody other than Mary knows the real truth yet, not even Joseph. So, under a strict reading of the law, Joseph could have had Mary put to death, and he would have been justified under the law. The law was on his side. But Joseph didn’t do that. Even before Joseph had a revelation of the truth about Mary’s condition, he had already decided that he would be merciful to Mary and deal with the whole situation as quietly as he could. He didn’t HAVE to do that, but that is what he did. And that is why Matthew calls him righteous. He did something that he didn’t have to do. He sacrificed some of his own pride. The law gave Joseph the right to just walk away, but Joseph decided to do more than the law requires. And Matthew calls him a righteous man. 

So being righteous, according to Matthew, is NOT just about being on the right side of the law. It isn’t just about fulfilling the letter of the law. It is about doing MORE than the law requires. It is about doing more than you have to do. It is about putting mercy before justice. It is about being more concerned with what is right, than you are with what your rights are. It is about being more concerned with the needs of others than your own needs. That is righteousness. I wanted to go back to that moment earlier in Matthew’s gospel, because we encounter that righteous word again in today’s passage and it is helpful to understand what the author means when he uses that word. Righteousness is about more than just being right. It is a self-sacrificial way of relating to others. When we understand that, I think we will better understand what is happening when Jesus is baptized in today’s gospel.

Jesus meets John the Baptist in the river Jordan. John is baptizing people for the repentance of sins. People are asking to be washed clean and to start a new life in God. Well, if Jesus truly is the sinless Son of God, then this makes no sense. Why would someone who is without sin need to be baptized. It doesn’t make sense. Jesus is sinless, why does he need baptism? It doesn’t make sense to John the Baptist either, because when Jesus approaches him he says “I need to be baptized by you…why are you coming to me?” 

And Jesus’s response is: Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness. There is that righteous word again. That is our clue that this is about a holiness that goes beyond the letter of the law. This act or ritual that Jesus is participating in, it isn’t about just doing what the law requires for himself. This is about doing more than the law requires for others. This is about compassion and mercy. Jesus doesn’t enter into the waters of baptism for himself; he does it for us. We just sang the hymn “Christ when for US you were baptized.” The law doesn’t require it for him. He does it for us. He does it to set us free. You may know that the gospel writer Matthew loves to draw parallels between Jesus and Moses. Well Moses was free, but he went back to Egypt to save his people. Jesus was free from sin, but he enters into it to pull us out, to save his people. He does it to be united with us in our sinfulness, ultimately so that he can redeem our sinful human nature. He unites himself with us so that we may be united with him. That is baptism. It is the place where divine love and forgiveness meet human sinfulness.

There is a prayer that I say to myself during the mass that happens when we are setting up for communion. As I bless the water that is about to be mixed with the wine I say “through the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” We are blessed to share in the divine life, because God was humble enough to share in our humanity. That is what baptism is about. That is what communion is about. That is what the whole Incarnation is about. Jesus was humble enough to be baptized, even though he didn’t need to be. Joseph was humble enough to care about Mary’s life and future, even when he technically didn’t HAVE to. That is Matthew’s understanding of righteousness. Sacrificing your own needs for the needs of others. Doing more than the law commands. Putting mercy ahead of justice. Jesus in his preaching and teaching, and in the example of his life, doesn’t negate or dismiss the law; he encourages us to go beyond it. Jesus isn’t baptized for his sake, he is baptized for our sake. And Matthew makes it clear that that type of sacrificial love is something with which God is well pleased.

Looking up, without looking down

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Sermon for August 31, 2025

Readings:

Sirach 10:12-18
Psalm 112 
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Luke 14:1, 7-14

In 1885, when this church was founded, it was founded to be a free church. What that means, is that it was the intention of our founding families that this church would not charge pew rents, but instead would rely on the voluntary donations and pledges of the congregation. Many of you are aware that there was a period of time, especially during the 1700s and early 1800s, when churches had box pews with little doors that were rented. It’s how churches paid the bills. A lot of you have “your pew” that you always sit in now, but back then your pew really was your pew. You paid for it and nobody else could sit there. And of course, just like going to a Broadway show, the best seats cost you more. So if you wanted to sit down front where you could see and be seen, you would pay a premium for it. There were usually some free seats, but they were in the balcony or in the back. If you visit many historic colonial churches, you will find just this setup. 

It really was a disgraceful practice, especially in the light of the plain reading of the gospel, but for so many years it was so common that it really was unquestioned. You just assumed that the fancy, rich folks in church got to sit up front, and the poor folks would sit in back. One of the later reforms that came out of the Oxford Movement, which was a church reform movement in the early 19th century that was started by my hero, John Keble, was the movement away from this pew rental system. Our founders were influenced by that. I think that we may justifiably be proud of our parish, and our founders, for wanting to abandon this pew rent practice. It is a good thing to be proud of. The bible has lots of warnings about pride, but we need to remember that there is good pride and there is bad pride. There is a pride that is born out of love and gratitude, and there is a pride that is born out of self-righteousness and disdain. We can embrace one, hut we need to be very careful of the other.

It is good to be proud of our parish and our founders for wanting to abolish pew rents, but in being proud we need to remember that we weren’t the first parish to try that, not by a long shot. We weren’t the first; we weren’t the only ones; and there were times when we seriously considered implementing pew rents because finances were so tight. So, we can be proud of what our founders did accomplish while at the same time recognizing that they weren’t perfect. We can love our parish without having to feel that it is necessarily superior to every other parish that ever existed. That is healthy pride, good pride. That is pride that is born out of love. And I think that all humans need that sort of pride. It is a pride that makes you raise your head and look up. You raise your head and look up to people who might be a little better at this thing called life than you are. You raise your head and look up to elders, and heroes. You raise your head to recognize superior skill, superior values, and superior wisdom. You raise your head to recognize something superior to yourself. Healthy pride involves looking up, not looking down, and to look up you need to be able to recognize that there must always be someone or something above you. And if you can’t do that, then you can’t know God. That is when the other kind of pride gets in the way.

Negative pride, pride that is born out of self-righteousness and disdain, looks down. Negative pride is about feeling superior to others. This unhealthy type of pride is presumptuous, it takes the high seat at the table. It assumes that it must be the best, the greatest, the wisest, and therefore does not strive to be better than it is. That is why this type of pride is so deadly. It alienates you from God above and from everyone else below. You have no need for anything above you and you are too good for anything beneath you. Negative, unhealthy pride is isolating and it leads to destruction. That is the type of pride that the scriptures are talking about in the first reading this morning:

The beginning of human pride is to forsake the Lord;
the heart has withdrawn from its Maker. 

For the beginning of pride is sin,
and the one who clings to it pours out abominations. 

Therefore the Lord brings upon them unheard-of calamities,
and destroys them completely. 

The Lord overthrows the thrones of rulers,
and enthrones the lowly in their place.

Be very careful if you think the throne is yours or if you think the best seat in the house belongs to you. You may just find yourself turned out of your pew when the true owner of the house arrives. Take the lower seat our Lord advises. Assume that there are others that are better than you. Look up and show respect. Remember that you still have things to learn. We may think that charging rent for pews is a totally abhorrent idea that is contrary to the gospel, but 100 years from now there may be some practices that we simply ignore or take for granted that future generations may be scandalized by. We can be proud of our ancestors, we can look up to them, but we needn’t be self-righteous in doing so. We can look up, without looking down, if you know what I mean. 

The funny think about learning to always look up to those above you, is that in doing so you learn to hold your own head a little higher. Learning to respect others goes hand in hand with learning to respect yourself. So healthy pride, pride that is born out of love, pride that is born out of admiration for that which is good walks hand in hand with humility. We can be proud of ourselves and our accomplishments, we can be proud of our children and our families, we can be proud of our church, our country, our heroes, and we can be proud of our cultures. We can be proud of all these things and we can love them without thinking that they are superior to all others or completely faultless. Humility isn’t about looking down in shame; it is about looking up in admiration. When we learn to look up to others, our own status rises as well. Those who exalt themselves will be humbled, but those who humble themselves will be exalted. 

A matter of perspective

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Sermon for August 17, 2025

Readings:

Jeremiah 23:23-29
Psalm 82
Hebrews 11:29-12:2
Luke 12:49-56

I remember one time when I was a little boy, we were traveling through the sugarcane fields of South Florida. If you go inland, away from the beaches, in the region around Lake Okeechobee, you will find miles and miles of sugarcane plantations. Or at least you could when I was little. I don’t know what it is like there now. If you have never seen sugarcane growing, it looks a lot like bamboo: thick growths of big, tall stalks that can be 10 feet high or more. When you are driving through it, it’s like there is a wall on either side of you that you can’t see through. 

Anyways, I can remember driving past these sugarcane fields, when I noticed that some of the fields were on fire. And I remember thinking, “that’s terrible! those poor farmers! All that sugarcane is lost!” And then, as we drove a little further, I was even more upset when I noticed some people walking alongside the fields with torches in their hands, actually setting fire to the sugarcane! How horrible. This wasn’t just an accident; this was intentional destruction. Well, at some point I expressed my dismay about all this, and someone in my family explained to me that they weren’t destroying the sugarcane; they were preparing it for the harvest. 

What I learned that day, was that THAT was the traditional way that sugarcane had been harvested for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. There are new harvester machines that do it differently now, but the traditional way is that once the cane is fully grown and ready to be harvested, you set fire to it. And the fire burns through the field, and burns away all the leaves, and the dead grass, and along the way it drives off all the snakes and other nasty creatures that might be living in there, and what it leaves behind is just the pure sugarcane stalk, ready to be harvested. The sugarcane itself, and the sugar within it, is unharmed. It’s all the bad stuff that gets burned away. 

I saw smoke rising from the field and thought it meant destruction; someone wiser than me knew that it meant it was harvest time. 

The image of those fields burning came to my mind this week as I was reflecting on this gospel. Jesus said that he came to bring fire to the earth. Jesus said that he came to bring division. To hear Jesus say those things, it really rubs against the popular image of Jesus the nice teacher. We are told that Jesus is the Prince of Peace, and that he is all about love and forgiveness, and living abundantly and sharing and being kind and caring, and Jesus IS all of those things, but he is also more. Our situation as humans is more complex than we sometimes want to imagine. We need more than just a nice teacher. We need more than good advice and a helping hand. We need a savior. We need rebirth and transformation. There is much good growing within all of us. God put it there. It is his image. But there is a lot of dead stuff clinging to all of us too. And there are snakes in God’s field as well. If we are ever going to have peace; if we are ever going to know true love and forgiveness; it we ever hope to live in God’s kingdom, then some of the stuff that is growing in us, around us, or on us has to go. There are things that we need to be divided from. I will say that again, there are things that we need to be divided from. There may be people that we need to be divided from. There may be attitudes that we need to be divided from. There may be substances that we need to be divided from. You might even need to be divided from your money and your material possessions. Division can be a good thing. Fire can be a good thing. And the bible often associates fire with God. There was the fiery pillar in the desert, and the burning bush on the mountain, then there was the fire of Pentecost. Fire is powerful. It can be uncontrollable. But fire is transformative. It can destroy things, but it can also make new things. Fire transforms, and God transforms, and we need to be transformed. There are things in this world, there are sins, that need to be burned away in order for God to gather us in and make us into something better than we currently are. We need God’s fire to change us and Jesus said that he came to bring fire to the earth. You can see that as bad news, or good news, it’s a matter of perspective.

If you are a snake in the grass, it is definitely bad news. If you desperately want to cling to old dead things in your life: material things, bad habits, old grudges, past hurts…it might be bad news. If you are content with this world as it is and don’t feel any need to change, or grow, or be transformed into something better…then God’s fire is probably bad news. But if you are ready to be transformed, ready to let go of some things, ready to be gathered into God’s arms in God’s kingdom, ready to let that which is sweet within you be divided from that which is bitter, then God’s fire is good news. 

You can see God’s fire and think that it means destruction, or you can see it and recognize it as a sign of God transforming a field and preparing it for the harvest. Again, it is a matter of perspective.

Mr. McBeevey

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Sermon for August 10, 2025

Readings:

Genesis 15:1-6
Psalm 33:12-22 
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

Many of you know that the Andy Griffith Show is one of my favorite shows of all time. I have preached about it several times. If you are a younger person and don’t know the show, go and watch it. You can stream it online. If you are an older person and grew up with it, it is worth watching again. The show is an intentional throwback to a different time and place, it is idealized and sanitized, but it is nonetheless a reminder of personal qualities and values that could use a revival. 

I think my favorite episode of the show is called Mr. McBeevey. Opie is out playing in the woods and he comes back to the sheriff’s office all full of stories to share with his dad, Andy, and deputy Barney Fife. He tells them that he met this man named Mr. McBeevey, who spends all day up in the trees, wears a fancy metal hat, jingles when he walks, and can make smoke come out of his ears. Andy and Barney naturally assume that Opie is telling a fantastic tale about a made-up friend as children sometimes do. And then Opie says, “and he gave me this quarter.” And as Opie holds up a real quarter, Andy’s demeanor changes. It is one thing to make up a make-believe story, but it is another thing to tell an outright lie, and Opie seems to be crossing the line. When Opie insists that he is telling the truth, Andy drives out to the woods with him to find this Mr. McBeevey, but of course there is no sign of him. Opie refuses to change his story though. Mr. McBeevey is real. Andy and Opie drive home and now Andy is getting very cross. Make-believe is one thing and that’s fine, but Opie needs to understand the difference between the truth and a lie. Andy is resolved that he is going to have to punish Opie. 

So Andy goes to Opie’s room for a father-son talk which is just one of the best scenes ever. He explains to him the difference between the truth and a lie and he tells him what the consequences will be if Opie persists with this Mr. McBeevey story. But Opie says (crying), but Mr. McBeevey is real, and if I said he wasn’t I would be telling a lie. Don’t you believe me pa? And you see this change come over Andy’s face. Before he had looked stern and disappointed, and now you could just see this sense of bewilderment and love. So Andy goes back downstairs. And Barney, who is always a little too eager to act in every situation, says to Andy: well, aren’t you going to punish him? And Andy says, no. Barney replies, you don’t mean to tell me that you actually believe in this Mr. McBeevey do you? And Andy says, no….but I do believe in Opie. No, but I do believe in Opie. 

I love that scene so much. Andy cannot comprehend the story that Opie is telling. It seems magical, nonsensical, unbelievable. Andy has serious doubts or questions about this Mr. McBeevey, what he doesn’t doubt though, is his son. Andy’s relationship with Opie and love for Opie his him the strength and the courage to say, I don’t understand this, I don’t know how this can be true, but I am going to trust you. My friends, that is faith right there. That is how faith works. Faith is not about certainty. Faith is not about seeing is believing. Faith is not about understanding. Faith is not as much an act of the mind as it is an act of the heart. Faith is a response to a relationship. It is an act of love. 

Our second reading this morning is the eleventh chapter of the Book of Hebrews. I remember once when I was in college I met a guy who had memorized the entire chapter and would perform it and I supposed if you are going to memorize a chapter of scripture this is an excellent choice, because it is all about faith. The passage talks about the faith of Abraham and Sarah, believing that God would do the impossible for them. There are a few verses missing there this morning that also talk about Abel and Enoch and Noah, and later we hear about Issac and Jacob. And we are told that “All of these died in faith, without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.” The great patriarchs and matriarchs of our faith, they had to trust in God and in their relationship with God, more than they trusted in themselves. Abraham and Sarah had doubts about where or not they would ever have a child, I assure you, but they trusted in God anyways. To be a person of faith means to be able to believe in things that you cannot yet see. To be a person of faith means to lean on love more than you lean on understanding or your own perceptions of things. 

You do not have to understand the meaning of everything Jesus ever said in order to love and follow him as the son of God. You don’t have to have a clear blueprint of heaven in order to believe in it. You don’t need to comprehend every single article of the creed in order to stand and say it will all of us every week. You don’t need to be able to explain why bad things happen to good people, or why good things happen to bad people. You ought to read the bible and pray, but you don’t need to be some great theologian to be a great person of faith. All you really need to be a person of faith is love. You need to love God and the more you are able to love God, the easier it will be for you to believe and trust in the promises that God makes to you. Love God, love Jesus, love whoever it was that first shared their faith with you. You don’t have to wait for a miracle or a sign to start loving God. You don’t have to see in order to believe, you have to love. When we stand every week and say the creed, we are not proclaiming things that we ourselves have seen: we weren’t there when God created the earth, we weren’t there when Jesus was born or when he suffered and died; we weren’t there when he rose from the grave; we may have encounters with the Holy Spirit, but we weren’t there when it spoke through the prophets, and so far none of us have seen Jesus come again to judge the quick and the dead, we have not experienced the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. Most of the things we proclaim in the creed have nothing to do with our own personal experience of God. It is the accumulated experiences and witness of countless generations of faithful people that have loved God, and experienced God’s love in return. The creed is a witness to the God we love and worship. We worship a God who creates. We worship a God who sacrifices and suffers. We worship a God who inspires and warns. We worship a God who judges, forgives and redeems. 

Living in relationship with this God means learning to use your heart as well as your mind. Sometimes love and relationship can open your heart to believe things that your mind cannot comprehend. At least, that is what happened to Andy when he decided that while he struggled to believe Opie’s story, he still believe in Opie. 

I guess I should add that at the end of that episode, Andy is wandering around in the woods trying to figure all this out, when he just utters the name “Mr. McBeevey.” Suddenly a voice from above says “Hello? Is someone calling me” Andy is completely startled and he looks up and down from the pole beside him climbs a telephone repairman with a metal helmet, and tools dangling from his belt that jingled when he walked. Andy was never happier to meet a telephone repair man in his whole life. Mr. McBeevey was real, and yes…he even had a trick to make smoke come out of his ears. 

Respect for God can be contagious

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Sermon for March 3, 2024

The Third Sunday in Lent

Readings:

In the year 63 BC (so more or less 60 years before Jesus was born), the Roman general Pompey laid siege to the city of Jerusalem. Sadly, this was a scenario that Jerusalem had already experienced many times in its history and would experience many times more, even unto our present day. Well the city put up a good fight, but eventually Pompey and his troops figured out that if they tried to fight the Israelites on the sabbath day, they would indeed fight back, but if they didn’t directly fight them, but instead spent time building bridges and ramps to get over Jerusalem’s fortifications (in other words, doing the work to support the invasion), then they would be left alone because the Israelites would only break the sabbath if their lives were immediately at risk. So, Pompey used this to his advantage and eventually broke into the city. 

And when he came in, of course the first place he went was the temple mount. He wanted to understand what power this temple and this God had over these people. He wanted to know what it was that they were sacrificing to and that they were willing to lose their lives to protect. No doubt he also assumed that there would be untold riches inside as well. So, he strolls into the temple, walks right past all the priests who are begging him and pleading with him not to go any further. He pushes them aside and marches right into the temple building itself. And when he goes into the temple, the first thing he sees in the outer room is the golden lampstand, and an altar of incense, and a table with bread on it, a few nice things, but he assumes that the real wealth of the temple must be in the inner room, the Holy of Holies that is just beyond the veil. Only the high priest was ever allowed in there and then only once a year. 

So, Pompey pushes the curtain aside, walks in…and discovers an empty room. The holiest place in the world for these Jewish people, the thing that they were dying to protect, was an empty room. Now Indiana Jones fans, I am sure you are thinking “But what about the Ark?” The Ark of the Covenant, which contained the stones that the ten commandments were written on, that was in the sanctuary of the First Temple, the temple that King Solomon built. But that temple was long ago destroyed by the Babylonians and the Ark had ever since been missing. So, in the Second Temple, the Temple that Pompey walked into, and the Temple that Jesus would know some decades later, there was no Ark. The Holy of Holies was just an empty room. 

Pompey was completely perplexed at this. These Jews, he thought, were a strange people. Not only were they unwilling to do any work one day a week unless their lives were immediately at stake, but also the holiest place at the center of their faith was not a great golden statue of a God carved with human hands, but an empty space. An empty space that these Jews claimed, belonged to God. Pompey didn’t understand it. He certainly understood sacrifice. Pagans sacrificed THINGS all the time, but these Jews were sacrificing time and space. They were sacrificing their own creative powers. It was odd. Pompey didn’t understand it, but he saw something in it that he respected. He could have torn the temple down, but he didn’t. He could have looted the temple of its wealth, but he didn’t. Jerusalem would lose its freedom and become a Roman province, that was true. But Pompey let the worship in the temple go on. He didn’t understand this Hebrew God, but he understood the power of respect. He saw the respect that the Jews had for this empty room, and something about that was compelling. So, he let the priests go back to work. Respect for God can be contagious. But then again, so can disrespect for God. Both can creep up on you, you know. 

When Jesus entered the temple some decades later what he witnessed was a creeping disrespect for God. The Holy of Holies was still there and set aside as sacred, as God’s space, but the areas around it, in the temple precinct outside, were becoming more and more profane. God had become big business for many of the temple authorities. And you may know that business and busyness in our language come from the same root word. People were busy. There was a lot of human activity going on. People were busy making things: making transactions, making a buck. For many people, God was their business, and I say that fully recognizing that I am a priest, who is also paid to do this work. God is my business too, so I can say with good authority that priests often get distracted by the business of worship and the business of church administration and are prone to forgetting that at the heart of our faith is time and space that belongs to God and no one else. There were a lot of people there in that temple in Jesus’s day that were more focused on monetizing God than on worshipping him. They weren’t worried about what belong to God; they were worried about what belonged to them. It had happened before in the time of the Prophet Jeremiah; it happens now in our own day. Disrespect for what belongs to God can creep in. Inch by inch, the money changers get closer and closer to the Holy of Holies. 

I assure you that God knows that we are like this. God created us in his own image, and a part of that image is the power to be creative. We can imagine things, and create things, and that is a God-given gift, but you see in order to remember that this gift is God-given, we must remember that we were created by God. A man can create many things, but he cannot create himself. All of us were created by something, or someone, else. None of us called ourselves into being. We get so caught up in our own creative powers that we forget that. We forget that we are creatures. So, God reminds us. 

Think about some of the commandments that we recited and heard this morning. Think about the commandment to keep the sabbath day holy. How does God command us to keep it holy? By filling it with activity? No. Just the opposite. By keeping it empty. Empty. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks says that we keep the sabbath day holy “by renouncing our own status as creators. On Shabbat, all melakha, which is defined as “creative work,” is forbidden. On Shabbat, we are passive rather than active. We become creations, not creators. We renounce making in order to experience ourselves as made. Shabbat is the room we make for God within time.” 

And likewise, the Tabernacle that the Israelites make in the wilderness, the holy tent, which in time becomes the Temple and the Holy of Holies. It could have been filled with the wonders of human creation, with golden statues carved by human hands, but no. It was God’s space, not ours. The more we filled it with human stuff, the less room there would be for God. “The Tabernacle is the room we make for God within space,” Rabbi Sacks says. He goes on to say that “Holiness is the space that we make for the otherness of God – by listening, not speaking; by being, not doing; by allowing ourselves to be acted on rather than acting. It means disengaging from the flow of activity whereby we impose our human purposes on the world, thereby allowing space for the Divine purpose to emerge. All holiness is a form of renunciation.”

Renunciation. To say that this isn’t mine, it belongs to something or someone else. That is what holiness is all about. Holiness is recognizing that something belongs to God and not to you. Giving God more space and not less. Doing the opposite of what the money changers in the temple were doing: not filling God’s space with our things. Leaving space in our lives and in our world for God. Obviously, this is something that God knows we need to be commanded to do, and continually reminded to do, because from day one humans have been prone to taking things that don’t belong to us. We don’t just steal from our neighbors; we steal from God too. 

We steal from God when we fill every moment of our waking lives with productive activity. Brothers and sisters, I confess to you that I love to make daily to-do lists, and I love crossing things off of those lists. I get a little high when I feel like I am being productive, like somehow I am worth more to God now that I cleaned that closet out, or wrote that letter, or got that thing crossed off of my list. I like to be productive and I like to be creative, but sometimes I need to remember that I was created. I need to remember that I was precious to someone before I could do anything for myself. I need to remember that this world was created and existed long before I was in it. I need to leave space in my life for God. In need an empty room that God can fill. We all do.

That means learning to do less sometimes, and NOT more. It means putting busy-ness, aside. It means emptying ourselves of all the stuff that just creeps in so that God has some space in our lives that belongs to him. The pagan world has never understood sabbath, and in case you were wondering, it is still a pagan world out there. But even those of us who know the commandments and have asked God to write them on our hearts, even we need to be reminded that God still makes claims to time and space in this world that he has created. We still need sabbath. And keeping sabbath is just as much a commandment of God as not stealing, not committing murder, and not coveting your neighbors property. 

Some things still belong to God. There is time that belongs to God. There is space that belongs to God. And there are people that belong to God. That is what makes them holy. Later in John’s gospel Jesus tells his disciples that the “will of him who sent me, is that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up at the last day.” Jesus’s body was God’s body. It was holy. We tried to take it from God, but God took it back. He raised it up again. It was a temple like no other. And it belonged to God. But there are other temples in this world still. There is still time, there are still places, and there are still people that are called to be holy. And not only is God watching how we respect that which belongs to him, so are the people who don’t know our God. So how we treat holy things matters. Disrespect for God may be contagious, it may creep up on us, but respect can do that too. Respect for God can be contagious.