​27 June 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
V Pentecost: Songs of Sorrow, Songs of Trust
 
“If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” (Mark 5)
 
            We commemorate today the toll that sixteen months of pandemic has taken upon us.
            Some of us have suffered the loss of a loved one.
            Some of us have lost jobs.
            Some of us have had to reinvent our jobs.
            Some of us have had to teach and care for children at home.
            Some of us have taught students remotely online.
            Some of us have been shut in at home, anxious and lonely.
            Some of us have had to work on the front lines of caring for the community, even at great risk to our own health and safety.
            Some of us have had to cope with other illness while medical care was hard to access.
            We have all had to be separated and isolated from one another.
            And we have all internalized at some level a deep sense of trauma that we are still trying to process—perhaps a greater trauma than even we realize.
 
            In today’s gospel, we encounter a similarly traumatized person: a woman who had suffered from a debilitating hemorrhage for twelve years. As a result, she had been shut-in at home because she was made ritually unclean, a pariah in the community. And not only she was made untouchable, but anything or anyone she touched would have become unclean as well.
            Everything she had tried had failed. No physician could help. And so by now she was desperate: alone, isolated, and afraid.
            But somehow—and this is the real miracle in the story—somehow, even in the midst of her own trauma, she was able to reach down deep inside of herself and to find there a kernel of hope. There was still one more thing to try: to find Jesus, even just to touch the hem of his garment. As she says to herself, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.”
            Now, her statement is more powerful than comes across in the English translation. The word that lies behind “be made well” is, in the Greek, derived from the same word that means “savior,” or to be “saved,” or to be “made whole.” What she is really saying is, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made whole again, a complete human being.” Not just healed of a disease, but made whole, her dignity restored. And we should not underestimate her courage in choosing this course: it deliberately violated many social norms of the day, and so took an incredible amount of determination and even chutzpah on her part.
            And isn’t that what we most long for today, also to have the courage and determination to be made whole again, to move past our fears and losses, and to claim a world being made new after so many of its previous fault lines have been revealed?
            But before we can do that, there is the trauma of these past sixteen months to be dealt with. And it’s not just the pandemic that has traumatized us, but also all that happened in and around it that has shaken us to the core. The anger of last summer’s street demonstrations. The violence of the assault on the Congress. The loneliness experienced at the deaths of loved ones who could not be properly memorialized. The acrid smell of hot smoky skies. The songs that could not be sung, the plays not performed.
 
            But as the woman with the hemorrhage discovered, it is out of the most difficult of situations, that our greatest healing can occur—the same inextinguishable determination of which James Baldwin speaks when he wrote, “my God, in that darkness, which was the lot of my ancestors and my own state, what a mighty fire burned!” Like his forebears, and like the woman of today’s gospel, our own healing will take reaching deep within ourselves to find that seed of beauty and dignity that has not and cannot be crushed, which can germinate into something new and sound, where we thought there was only decay and brokenness. That is what our songs of sorrow and songs of trust are meant to help us to do today: to name our sharpest pain, yes, but also to find our deepest hope by trusting in the mercy and compassion of Jesus. “If I but touch the hem of his garment …”
            A parishioner sent me a quotation from the Roshi Joan Halifax this week, which sums up what I’ve been saying, using the image of a lotus flower. So let me close with her words:
 
It is said that the lotus flower will not grow in pure water and can only bloom fed by the mud of decay. So too our collective trauma, brokenness, delusions, moral suffering, and pain can, ironically, be the very means for our awakening. [And so,] each day, let us awaken to transform ourselves, our communities, our nation, and our world with wisdom and compassion.
 
            Let it be so. Amen.
           

​13 June 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
3 Pentecost
 
“With many such parables Jesus spoke the word to them,
as they were able to hear it.” (Mark 4)
 
            On these summer Sundays, we are in the middle of reading week by week from a long string of parables that Jesus used to try to explain the kingdom of God. He compares it to all sorts of things: to a pearl of great price, to a lost coin for which one goes looking, to a treasure buried in a field, or as we heard today, to the scattering of seed on the ground, and to a mustard seed that grows into the greatest of all scrubs. On and on he goes.
            What I’ve always wondered about these parables, is whether Jesus used so many of them out of exasperation, or by intention. Did he say, for instance, “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed,” only to decide that such a metaphor it is not at all right (“No, no, no, it’s not like a mustard seed … rather, it’s like this other thing”)? Or, did he say it more like, “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed … but it is also like a pearl of great price … and yet, it is also like (dot, dot, dot)”?
            In using parables, in other words, was Jesus stumbling around for what to say, or was he waxing eloquent?
            I like to think that the multiple metaphors of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom were deliberate, because above all things he didn’t want his hearers to get locked into any fixed understanding of it. The kingdom of God is not any one thing, and so trying to describe it cannot be done by any one analogy. The kingdom is about many things—mercy, and compassion, and judgment, and creativity, and solitude, and community, and … the list goes on. And so do the parables. The kingdom of God is not simple, but complex, and if you’re going to try to understand it, you’re going to have to wrestle with that complexity. In short, the kingdom isn’t reducible to a single slogan or simple formula—however we might wish that it could be.
            And I think that Jesus’ point about the density of meaning in the kingdom stretches to other things as well. Wouldn’t it be nice, for instance, if our spouses or partners or children were uncomplicated enough that one day we could just say, “OK. Now I’ve got it. I know fully who he or she is, so now we can just get on with living our lives together.” But it’s not like that, is it?
            Those whom we love most intimately are a constant source of amazement to us, because we never really get to the bottom of who they are. Even the human beings we know best, turn out at some level to be enigmas to us—so “getting to know you” (as that old Rodgers and Hammerstein song puts it) turns out to be a lifelong and ultimately inconclusive project.
            So too with our histories, both personal and national. Once again, we wish there could be a relatively clear and definable story of who we are, yet if the truth be told, we as individuals and as a nation are a complex amalgam of events and forces. So why is it, do you suppose, that as a nation we are so wedded to the idea that there is a single thread of historical truth that weaves its way along an inexorable path of freedom toward the present day?
            The African American poet and social critic James Baldwin, in his 1964 essay “Nothing Personal,” wrote about the American myth that “To be locked in the past means, in effect, that one has no past, since one can never assess it, or use it: and if one cannot use the past, one cannot function in the present, and so one can never be free. I take this to be … the American situation in relief, the root of our unadmitted sorrow, and the very key to our crisis.”
            Baldwin would have us to recognize that the past is not an unqualified good, but a complex admixture of heroism, aspiration, violence, and subjugation that leaves us all diminished. Only reckoning with that complexity can free us from its hold. No one myth (or parable, as it were), can fully express what America is, for it is simultaneously many things, both good and bad. Our national life is no different than our personal life, in that regard.
            So to circle back to Jesus’ teaching in parables—we might take from their multiplicity a broader insight than just that they were his somewhat quaint and rather charming way of speaking (as we tend to do). The variety of parables points to a larger truth that whatever is of significance in life, is also going to be complicated. We can try to reduce things down to a simple idea (like “love is the way”), but such reductionism ultimately isn’t very effective at making us better persons—after all, I’ve never known any loving relationship that isn’t also complicated. That’s life.
            But at the same time, isn’t it wonderful that life is so complicated as to be interesting, and so beyond our grasp as to be full of amazement? Would we really want to live in a world where everything could be understood, where nothing was mysterious, where there was no place for the indefinable and the ineffable? Without complexity, there would be no poetry, no music, no art—and dare I say it, no love?
            So I would rather have a hundred parables of the kingdom, than just one. I would rather be aware that there is more to be known, than I know. I would rather take a lifetime to find God, than to experience a solitary conversion. I would rather dwell in uncertainty, than to inhabit a sphere of fixed opinions.
For as Albert Einstein said, who ironically devoted much of his life to searching for a single unified field theory, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true science, true art, [and true faith].” Amen.
           
           

​6 June 2021
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
2 Pentecost
 
“Where are you?” (Gen. 3)
 
            It has been said that the shortest questions are the best ones. If that’s true, then God’s question to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden must surely rank among the greatest questions of all time.
            Three simple words: “Where are you?” They make such a great question because they can be read in so many different ways. At face value, of course, they simply mean that God is looking for Adam and Eve, and can’t find them.
            But of course, we as readers know that the situation is much more complicated than that. We’ve already seen Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden fruit, and so they are now ashamed of themselves, and are in fact hiding from God—hiding from the One with whom they so recently had such easy and uninhibited converse.
            And so, on another level, God’s question can also be read as an expression of fear—perhaps God suspects that Adam and Eve have eaten the fruit, so in a moment of panic, fearing the worst, he calls out, “Where are you?” God frightened for his own creation.
            Or, perhaps God in fact already knows what has happened, and so the question is not a genuine effort to find Adam and Eve at all, but rather a way of confronting them with their misdoing. In that case, “Where are you?” becomes more of a judgment than a question.
            Yet within the judgment, the question also implies an invitation for Adam and Eve to acknowledge what has happened—to come clean, as it were, and thereby open the possibility of restoration.
            Adam, however, will have none of that. Instead, he rather brazenly evades responsibility, first by dodging it (“I was naked and ashamed, so I hid myself”), and then by wading in deeper by blaming the whole thing on Eve.
            So now, with the place of humankind in the garden spoiled, God’s question takes on yet another meaning: Adam, what has become of you? What has happened to your spiritual life as a human being, that you hide from and even lie to God? Where are you?
            And when all those layers of meaning have been pealed back in God’s question, what we are left with are what I find to be some of the most sorrowful, desolate words in all of scripture, full of pathos and disappointment. God had created Adam and Eve to be partners in creation, to mirror back to God the love and trust that God had in them.
            But now, that plan is defunct. Adam and Eve have betrayed God, and they have betrayed one another. “Adam, Eve … where are you?” I hear in God’s voice such sadness, such a sense of letdown.
            In Hebrew, the question is made all the more poignant by the fact that it is conveyed with a single word, ayeka. So in this moment of such deep pathos, God really speaks only a single word to Adam and Eve, but within that one word is the whole drama of the human condition. Where are you? How far have you gone away? How distant are you from the holiness and beatitude for which you were created?
            Martin Buber told the story of Rabbi Shnuer Zalman, the Hasidic Rav of Northern White Russia, who was put in jail by the Tsarist police. The great rabbi was asked by an inquisitive jailer, “How are we to understand that God, the all-knowing, said to Adam, ‘Where are you?’” The rabbi answered the jailer, “Do you believe that the Scriptures are eternal and that every era, every generation, and every person is included in them?” “I believe this,” answered the jailer. “Well then,” said Rabbi Zalman, “in every era, God asks every person, ‘Where are you in your world? How far have you gotten in achieving wholeness?” When the jailer heard this, he stood up shaken, and placed his hand on the Rav’s shoulder, and cried bitterly, for he realized he had progressed very little.
            So here is the point for us: God’s question, “Where are you?”, is not addressed just to Adam and Eve. It is a question addressed to each of us right now, as part of God’s search not just for our wayward mythic progenitors, but also God’s search for each of us. And when hear the question put to us, it suggests that the real challenge of religious life is not to figure out a way to find God (as we usually suppose), but rather to open ourselves to let God find us. It turns our picture of the religious quest on its head: it is God who is looking for us, and not the other way around.
            In fact, the question suggests that it’s maybe even a bit cheeky on our part, to think that it’s up to God to await our taking the first step toward the holy One, when it is God who has already taken the first step toward us. God did not say to Adam and Eve, ayeka?, because God did not know where they were. God asked them that question because through their self-absorption they no longer knew where they were, and so God had came looking for them. It was Adam and Eve who were hiding, after all, and God who was seeking.
God’s question becomes especially important in the present moment, because coming out of Covid, many of us don’t know for sure where we are. So perhaps now more than ever, we can hear God’s question to us as coming more out of compassion and concern, than anything else. Where are you? becomes in effect, How are you?
            And because God does not ask that question casually, as in daily conversation, but from our of the depths of the divine being, it is a question that is at the same time both challenging and reassuring. For God asks the question with a genuine interest in helping us to answer it, and then of responding to what we say. Where are you? is not merely a question, but an invitation to allow God to be with us in this moment, with today’s uncertainties and hopes, in our present griefs and losses. And most importantly, ayeka? is asked of us with all the same longing and desire for deep and life-giving relationship with which God first asked it of Adam and Eve in the garden. Where are you?