Archives: Proper 11

The Present Sufferings, The Glory to Come

What a blessing it is to me to be with the people of Grace Church today, a congregation that has been so good to my family.

I feel grateful to be with you at this particular moment in your journey as well.

You are in a season of transition, and so am I. Everything seems unfamiliar and strange.

For me, it’s a new job; for you, it’s looking for a new priest.

These transitions would be difficult enough during normal times, but we are tackling them in the midst of a global pandemic, an economic downturn, and God’s clarion call to grapple with racial injustice.

If you’re feeling a bit at sea, you’re not alone!

So how can we navigate this time of change together?

Where do we turn when it’s so difficult to see the next steps on the path ahead of us?

Continue reading

Siblings: Fighting With Them, Fighting For Them

Everyone loves a good dose of sibling rivalry.

Mary and Martha are among the most famous sibling rivals in the Bible, and Christians for generations have wondered what to do with them.

Many of us identify more strongly with one or the other of them, and then feel slightly guilty about it.

Team Martha feels like she gets a raw deal, being gently corrected by Jesus when she complains about Mary not helping her. “Where’s the love for Martha?” we ask. “Marthas make the world go around, especially at church!”

Others of us know we’re Mary. We love being spiritual and contemplative, thinking deep thoughts and feeling very religious, but sometimes we’re hard to be found when it’s time to get down to real work. Oops.

As often as I’ve wrestled with this text and its clear call away from busywork and into the peace of God’s presence, I heard it differently this time as I thought about it in the context of the whole Bible.

And what I realized is the Bible is all about sibling relationships, and most of those relationships are troubled at best.

Continue reading

Celebrity Jesus

One of the reasons the gospels have endured as scriptures that give shape and meaning to our lives is that they consistently speak directly to our cultural moment.

In every era since they were written, the gathered faithful have found signposts of wisdom that speak to the controversies and struggles of their time. The same is true for us.

Today we read in our gospel about Jesus and fame.

Celebrity is the currency of choice in our culture. Even money and power fade before the respect given to the famous.

There are a number of rungs on the celebrity ladder of status.

It starts with metrics as small and simple as Facebook likes or Instagram and Twitter followers.

Then it progresses to a ratio: how minute of a level of trivia about your life can you get multiple news outlets to cover?

Amateur celebrities can only get network news to cover them when they win Nobel prizes or maybe die.

Professional celebrities can get wall-to-wall 24-hour cable news and online coverage for which tie they wear or bag they carry to an event.

There is the special class of celebrity that has attained the right to go by only one name, like Beyonce, Madonna, Bono, or Pele.

And then you have the absolute monarchy of celebrity culture: people who have not actually done anything noteworthy, they are simply famous for being famous.

But what’s the real harm in celebrity culture? It’s just fun, right?

It gives us a break from our problems to leaf through a magazine or sit for an hour in front of the TV keeping up with the Kardashians.

Well, it turns out that our culture’s glorification of celebrity has a dark side. Continue reading

Cranmer: The Weedy Field with the Great Harvest

If you’re not aware of this already, let me give you some breaking news: Jesus is awesome.

I love this gospel text. It is a perfect illustration of his subversive wisdom, his undermining grace, his sneak attack on our complacencies and familiarities.

One of my favorite things about Jesus is that he refuses to allow us to believe we have all the answers.

We’ll arrive at a new spiritual understanding and relish and celebrate and benefit from it.

But the minute it starts to contribute to our ego satisfaction, Jesus will rip the rug out from underneath us.

Last week we talked about the fact that however great of a spiritual teacher Jesus may be, to be honest he would make an abysmal farmer.

Thank God the family business was carpentry instead.

But we continue this week with another edition of Poor Agricultural Advice by Jesus Christ, in the form of the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat.

First of all, who sows weeds? How does one even accomplish that?

Jesus attributes it to the Enemy or the Evil One, and I always have this image of the Devil standing in someone’s newly plowed field blowing the seeds off dandelions with unholy glee.

Then Jesus has the householder tell his servants not to weed the ground, because “in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.”

That’s, um, not how it works.

Every first-grader cultivating his first garden plot in the backyard knows that weeding is an unpleasant but entirely necessary part of the process.

And when you pull out weeds, generally the plants you are trying to grow are not uprooted if you pay attention at all.

So if we conclude once again that Jesus is not giving literal horticultural advice, what does he mean? If we are to take this spiritually, where do we land? Continue reading

The Gifts of Martha and Mary

Today we’re embarking on a unique phase of our worship life together. Today we begin our transition work in earnest.

I have four Sundays left in this pulpit, and my preaching task is as follows: to say goodbye, to tell you how much I love you and thank you for our time together, and to equip you for your transition time in any way I can.

We’re going to tackle those in reverse order over the next few weeks, using our lectionary scriptures to guide us in those tasks.

So let’s talk about Mary and Martha and what we can learn from them, not just for our everyday lives, but specifically for this unique season of transition St. Thomas and St. Luke’s are entering right now.

To do that, let’s start by talking about what clergy transition is like for a parish.

Transition is all kinds of things.

It’s exciting as the priest and parish look forward to the novelty of change.

It’s anxiety-producing as we face an unknown future and wonder how to tackle life without each other’s steady presence and familiar patterns.

It’s awkward as we try to decide what to say to each other—how much truth-telling is helpful and how much is just self-indulgent and divisive?

It’s full of grief as we say goodbye.

It’s simply full of emotion as we rehearse old grievances and old joys.

We give thanks for everything we’ve accomplished together and the ways in which we were so well-matched, and we mourn the goals we didn’t achieve and the ways we couldn’t fulfill each other.

It’s a holy mess, to my way of thinking, a sacred disaster, an exhausting miracle and a blessed train wreck.

It can bring out the worst in us if we’re not careful, but it will bring out the best in us if we allow it. Continue reading

What To Do When Atticus Dies

When we meet Jesus and the disciples in our gospel today, two things happen: “The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’”

But if we pick up the scripture right there, we miss a key ingredient of the story.

What just happened? What did we read about last week?

Mark doesn’t tell us what we know actually happened.

In the same conversation where the disciples tell Jesus all the good they have been able to do in his name, he has to break the terrible news to them: John the Baptist has been beheaded.

Can you imagine the grief and pain and fear that broke over them at hearing that Jesus has just lost his cousin and the world has just lost a great prophet?

So Jesus took them away to a deserted place to rest, not just from the clamor of the crowds and the tiring ministry work they’d been doing, but to give them some space to be alone as a small family to come to terms with the blow they’d been dealt.

It must have been a profoundly disillusioning moment for the disciples.

They’d just gone out and healed the sick and preached the good news to the poor.

They’d really seen people’s lives being changed by the message they had been sent out to deliver.

Then to come back and find that John the Baptist had been executed—it is one of those moments of wondering, “What is the point of all this? Where is God in the midst of this?”

We’ve all had moments like this lately as we’ve watched the news in our world around us, with one act of gun violence piling up on another.

And I have had one of those moments of combined disillusionment and grief in hearing the news about Atticus Finch. Continue reading

And I Did Not Know It: Jacob Goes To Mt. Rushmore

A rock, a ladder and a promise to a man who is running for his life.

That is what we get in our story from Genesis today.

Jacob is in a very bad situation.  He stole not only his brother Esau’s birthright, but also his blessing, and Esau has finally had enough.

Esau resolves in Genesis 27 to set aside a decent time of mourning for his father Isaac, but once it is over, he will kill Jacob.

Rebekah finds out and tells Jacob he needs to get out of town, fast.  So Jacob sets out.

There is very little that is admirable about Jacob.

Even his name means “cheater,” and he lives up to it every time.

We might even question why God keeps providing for him, why God continues to come through for him, why God chooses him to be the vessel through which the entire nation of Israel will be built.

We should actually take God’s choice of Jacob as great good news.

Why?  Because it takes away the burden and the illusion of personal worthiness being necessary for us to serve God. Continue reading