In today's readings we have two stories about healing that are similar but hundreds of years apart: the story of Jesus healing the man with leprosy, and (years earlier) Elisha the prophet healing Namaan’s leprosy.  I love the healing stories from the Gospels, but they have nothing on those from the Old Testament when it comes to texture and detail.  And since it’s in that detail where much of the meaning of the story lies, I’m going to preach on our story of the healing of Namaan.

There are several people in this passage.  On the side of the Israelites, we have the king of Israel and the prophet Elisha.  On the side of the Arameans, we have the king of Aram and the commander of his army, Namaan, along with Namaan’s wife, some servants, and an Israelite servant girl who was captured in one of the Aramean’s conquests of Israel.

When the story begins, we learn that Namaan, the commander of the Aramean army, has leprosy (a generic term in the Bible for various skin conditions).  His servant girl, whom he had captured in Israel, suggests to Namaan’s wife that he go seek healing from the prophet in Israel.  A sub-theme in this story, as in much of the Bible, is that those (like this girl) with the least amount of power or worldly authority seem to talk the most sense.  They also often have moral authority over the rich and powerful, as this servant girl does here when she sends her captor and enemy to be healed.  Loving your friends and neighbors can be hard enough, but loving those who have done you wrong takes real moral courage.  It maybe reminds us of Jesus’ words, years later, to love not just our friends and neighbors, but our enemies, too.

For his part, though, Namaan doesn’t scoff at this suggestion to seek out help from the enemy - from his servant, no less - but follows her advice.  So he sets out to get permission from his king to go see the prophet of Israel, who happily grants it and sends him on his way with a note and cartload of gifts.  It’s interesting how the fact that Aram and Israel are enemies somehow gets lost here, reminding us how in times of need or vulnerability we’re much less likely to cling to our usual and petty divisions or wish others harm.

So Namaan sets off with a note from his king and a raft of gifts, and heads straight for the King of Israel, who greets him with understandable suspicion.  Upon which Elisha the prophet steps in to assure the king of Israel that he can heal Namaan’s leprosy.

That brings us to the healing itself, which, interestingly, doesn’t turn out like Namaan or much like anyone expects.   Elisha tells Namaan to go wash himself seven times in the Jordan River - that’s it.  Nothing difficult or magical: just go clean yourself off.   Upon which Namaan’s goodwill begins to wear thin and some of those old prejudices creep back in.  Why wash in the Jordan when he could have washed in the superior waters of Damascus in his home country?  Why come all this way only to be told to go wash himself rather than have the holy man perform some impressive gesture over him?  And how could something so simple heal him?   

His servants, again the ones talking sense, tell Namaan to stop with his objections and do what Elisha says.  And so he goes and washes seven times in the Jordan River, and his skin is made clean.

I think that, conventionally, this story is meant to show us that Israel’s God is superior to foreign gods, so much so that foreigners seek out Israel’s God for the kind of healing they can’t get from their own.  It was a story that would have assured its first hearers that, even though other countries may seem richer and more powerful than Israel, Israel’s God is still in charge where it matters.

But I see in this story other, maybe more interesting (if less conventional), lessons.  I think about Namaan being so outraged at the simple solution for his ailment, and it reminds me of how we can have a kind of narcissism about our problems.  This isn’t just any problem.  This is unique and really complicated, just like I’m unique and really complicated.  If the way out turns out to be simple, as it does with Namaan, we almost can’t hear or accept that.  So maybe this story reminds us to put our issues - and ourselves - in perspective.

I also see in this story a reminder that the answers to our well-being might be simpler than we think.  Namaan balked at the simplicity of the solution: basically, go take a bath.  His servants pointed out that he would gladly have done something more difficult; so why not do this?  But somehow simple answers aren’t as attractive, just like we’re less likely to look for our healing and happiness in the simple tasks and gifts before us every day: the mundane, everyday chores of life, a sunny day, food on our table, or the gift of rising out of bed each morning.   

A final lesson I see in this story is that the answer to our well-being might be closer to home than we think.  Namaan came all this way to a country that wasn’t his own, to a river maybe not even as good as his own river, to a holy man who basically tells him to go do the healing himself - probably anyone from home could have told him that.  In other words, he travels all that way to find out that he already had everything he needed, in his rivers, in his homeland, and with his holy people.

I recently read something in a collection of religious thoughts by contemporary poets that made me think of this passage.  It’s a poet quoting another poet, Paul Eluard, who said “There is a better world, but it is in this world.”  There is a better world, but it’s not far off in some distant place to be chased after; it’s closer - and probably easier to find - than you think: in your own life, your own home, with the people and things you already have.  

When they asked him when the kingdom of God was coming, Jesus once told the Pharisees to stop looking around for it, because “in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.”   Had Jesus been there when Namaan was alive, he might have told Namaan the same thing.  We, these many years later, get to hear it - and hopefully, also, to live it.

Today is Candlemas, one of my favorite days in the church year. As the name suggests, it’s the day on which we bless all the church candles that will be used in the coming year - a tradition that goes back centuries, and sometimes took more elaborate forms, involving candlelit processions before the service, or people bringing their own candles from home to be blessed, and so on.  You can imagine that in darker, more northern regions, this was probably an important day in the church year, and, in fact, some of those more elaborate services come from churches in Ireland and Northern England.

Candlemas is also a day on which we celebrate several final events in the infancy of Christ, which is why some churches wait until Candlemas Day to put away all the church Christmas decorations like the creche and the mistletoe. The most famous event in Jesus’ infancy that we celebrate today is his Presentation in the Temple.  According to Luke’s Gospel, it was the custom of the day to present your first child to the priest in the Jerusalem Temple forty days after his or her birth, and you would bring with you a sacrifice - a lamb and a dove, or, if you couldn’t afford that, like Jesus’ family, just two pigeons.  

I read this week in my Jewish Commentary on the Christian Gospels that presenting your child after forty days like this was not actually a requirement of the Jewish Law in Jesus’ day.  But in the life of any new parent, bringing your new baby to church to show off to your priest and fellow parishioners might as well be a religious rite, it’s so exciting and momentous.  I kind of wonder if Mary, when she was recalling these infancy stories to the Gospel writer Luke (because remember that the tradition says that Luke’s infancy stories are Mary’s memoirs – the stories she told him in her old age that he then wrote down in his Gospel), I wonder if the event was just so inflated in Mary’s memory that she mistook her first trip out with her baby for an important religious ceremony.  Who knows?

Candlemas is also sometimes celebrated as the Feast of the Purification of Mary, emphasizing Mary’s ritual reentry into society after a forty-day period of seclusion following her baby’s birth.  That was Jewish law at the time, where women were presented in the Temple for a purification ceremony before going back out into the world.  In parts of the church where devotion to Mary was strong, this is the event people would have associated with Candlemas more than the Presentation of Christ.  It would also have brought to people’s minds a once familiar custom called the Churching of Women, where a woman is welcomed back into her congregation following the birth of her child.  In the Anglican or Episcopal tradition, we still have a prayer for the Churching of Women, rooted in this story and in those ancient laws.    

A final event in Jesus’ infancy that we mark on Candlemas is what is called The Meeting, or the encounter between the old man Simeon and the infant Jesus.  It’s a poignant scene: Mary brings her newborn to the Temple, and this old man, probably all but blind physically, somehow has the spiritual sight to see something - some scrap of hope for the future - in this forty-day-old child.  The song that he sings after that encounter is called the Song of Simeon or, in Latin, the Nunc Dimittis after the first few words: “Lord Now You Have Set [your servant free],” and it’s been sung for centuries the world over at evening prayer services.

So, those are the three Biblical events that inspire Candlemas: the Presentation, the Purification, and the Meeting.  If you’re wondering what links these events and the blessing of the candles, it’s Simeon’s reference to Jesus being the light of the Gentiles.  There is also a tradition that says that Mary carried a candle as she processed to the Temple – you see that in the painting on your bulletins and in a lot of the art of this scene.

The celebration of candles and light probably also comes from an event in the natural world on Candlemas Day: this is the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the point at which spring – just barely – begins to stir.  Which is appropriate, because it’s sort of what happens with the people in these stories.  Mary comes out of her postpartum seclusion.  Simeon awakens to new hope.  For both, life begins to stir and the end of a spiritual or emotional winter is in sight.

And that is God’s promise to us on Candlemas Day: that whatever we’re going through, light and hope will win out in the end. Winter isn’t over, and we still have the long season of Lent ahead before we reach the spring and then Easter, but for now we have this service and these candles to remind us of God’s promise to see us through the darkness and lead us into light.

It's hard to believe it's already the third Sunday of Advent, and it's only December 11.  That's because Advent this year started as early as it can possibly start, making this year’s season of Advent as long as it could possibly be.  (So if you’re not ready for Christmas, you have no excuse this year!)

Advent always focuses on the familiar themes of preparation, waiting, hoping, longing, and, in Advent, we meet the usual people of the Advent story: Isaiah, the Old Testament prophet whom Christians believe foresaw the Messiah; Elizabeth and Mary, cousins and mothers of John the Baptist and Jesus; and, as in today’s reading, John the Baptist.  Of those, this year, John the Baptist gets sort of pride of place in our cycle of Advent readings because we read this story about him baptizing in the Jordan River not once, but twice - last week, it was Mark’s Gospel’s version of this event, this week, it’s John.  John was the forerunner of Jesus.  According to Luke’s Gospel, he was Jesus’ cousin, and when the two men became adults, John sort of laid the path for Jesus' ministry.

All four Gospels give this account of John baptizing at the Jordan River just before Jesus approaches him, but the version that we read today is a little bit different from the other three, and also, my favorite.  In it, as we just read, some religious leaders send messengers to interview John the Baptist as he’s there by the Jordan River baptizing people and preaching repentance.  (It would seem that the religious leaders then, as now, don't like people to do anything without their approval and control!)  So, these messengers approach John and the first question they ask him is “Who are you?”  And his answer – his first recorded words in John’s Gospel – is “I am not the Messiah.”  Contrary to what everyone around him is saying at this point, he denies being the Messiah.

Then they ask him “Are you Elijah?”  Elijah was an Old Testament prophet whom many thought had never died and would reappear one day to announce the coming of the Jewish Messiah.  So, this was sort of the second most audacious person John could claim to be.  But to this, also, he says “No.”  Then they ask “Are you the prophet?” – being intentionally vague but probably possibly to another prophet of the Jewish tradition who was connected in people's minds to the coming of the Messiah, Isaiah.   But to this, too, he says “No.”

So finally they just ask outright: Then who are you?  And he quotes from the prophet Isaiah whom he has just denied being, basically leaving his identity as unknown to them as when they arrived.

As I said, all of the Gospels tell about how John baptized at the Jordan River – first others, and then Jesus – but this is the only Gospel with this peculiar dialogue between John and the religious leaders.  Some people – people who study this sort of thing – say that it’s here because John the Evangelist, who wrote this Gospel (a different John, by the way) wanted to discourage those early Christians who had come to favor John’s memory over Jesus’.  I guess in the early centuries there was a group of Christians who put as more of an emphasis on John than what became the mainstream Christian movement did.  So diminishing John in this way, by having him diminish himself, was a good way to shift the emphasis to Jesus.

I don’t know if that’s the case, but I just love this dialogue, and it seems to me there are at least two ways you could apply it to real life in this hectic season.  First – and especially in a season where so many demands and expectations are heaped on us, by others, by ourselves, and by our culture – we could all learn from John how to say “I am not.”

You don’t need to be completely ready when Christmas comes.  You don’t need to make your brother and mother get along at the Christmas dinner table.  You don’t need to get your kids everything they want – in fact probably shouldn’t.  You don’t need to make that extra pie or do brilliant things with the leftover ham.  You don’t need to guarantee everyone’s happiness – as if you could.  In other words, you don’t need to be the Messiah – or Elijah or Martha Stewart or whomever – this holiday season.  If that seems like too trite an application of John’s story, remember that it takes a lot of faith to be able to say that.  This third Sunday of Advent, let John be your example.  There already is a Messiah, and it’s not you.

In saying “I am not,” John doesn’t just give up control; he gives up a false sense of importance.  Which brings me to another lesson from John: seeing that we’re not the most important person in the room maybe helps us to see who is.  This season, when charity is so important, we think of all the people in whom Christ said we could find him: the poor, the heartbroken, the needy.  We might say, I am not Christ, but the mother who can’t afford even a simple Christmas dinner for her children, is.  I am not Christ, but the child whose parents are out of work and won’t be receiving Christmas gifts this year is.  Or, I am not Christ, but my friend who lost his father this year and is dreading the holidays is.  Once we allow ourselves and our own sense of importance to decrease, like John the Baptist, suddenly others increase and our priorities shift.  

So - we have one more Sunday of Advent and two whole weeks until Christmas to practice saying “I am not.”  And maybe a little more of that and our Advent will be not only more meaningful, but also a bit more manageable than it seemed before.

[This sermon was preached at the 9 am service for the Feast Day of St. Nicholas at St. Nicholas-on-the-Hudson in New Hamburg, NY.  The 10 am service is the children and family service.] 

Today we’re celebrating the feast day of our beloved patron saint, St. Nicholas of Myra, and since it's one of those Sundays where I only preach at the 9 am service, I can do what I did when I talked here about Noah on Vacation Bible School Sunday: give you the uncensored, adult version of a couple of the stories we tell about St. Nicholas.

But first, a little biographical information for those who haven’t been here before on the Feast of St. Nick.  The St. Nicholas that most of us know is filtered down to us through the customs of our European ancestors, who adapted the story of St. Nicholas to their particular context (and called him “Santa Claus” or, in the Netherlands where many of our customs come from, “Sinter Klaas”).  The real St. Nicholas was born in modern-day Turkey in the 4th century.  He became a priest and then bishop and moved to Myra, where he served as bishop until he died, and where he was also buried.  Sometimes you’ll hear him referred to as “St. Nicholas of Bari” (Italy), and that’s because sometime around the 11th century the Muslims conquered Myra and his bones were smuggled by some Christians to Bari, Italy, where they remain today in a small chapel named after him.  And that’s how his story spread out into Europe and became part of our annual celebrations.

St. Nick was the patron saint of a lot of people – in fact, the list seems endless: sailors, pawnbrokers, barrel makers, murderers, students, perfumers, thieves.  You can be sure that, behind this list are lots of stories we would not want to tell our children.  But since he’s best known for being the patron saint of children, I’m going to tell you two “uncensored” stories about his work with kids.

The first is the best known and tamer of the two, the story of St. Nick and the three maidens.  The story goes that, as a young man, St. Nicholas went on a walk through town and heard a bishop preaching on the street about giving your money to the poor.  He was so moved by the sermon that he decided to do just that, but he wasn’t sure how to begin.  

A few days later, he overheard a man in the marketplace telling someone that he couldn’t afford dowries for his three daughters, and so, having nothing to offer any prospective husbands, he would have to sell them into prostitution.  So Nicholas followed the man home to find out where he lived, and that night, he snuck up to the man’s house and dropped a bag of gold coins in the window.  The bag fell into one of the daughters’ shoes, which was just beneath the window.  The next evening, he came back and did the same, dropping another bag of gold coins in the shoe of the second daughter.  And the next evening, he dropped a bag of coins off for the third daughter.  So all three daughters went on to attract husbands and were thus spared a life of prostitution.

There’s really no kid-friendly version of the next story.  According to this one, three boys were lured to the home of a butcher, who then chopped them up and put them in pickle barrels in his shop to sell to his customers.  But lo and behold, somehow St. Nicholas caught wind of what had happened, showed up at the butcher's home, pieced them back together, and sent them on their way.    

These stories are very Brothers-Grimm, aren’t they?  They probably were told to children at one point and, like those fairy tales, had some disciplinary purpose.  In fact I find it interesting that this second story has various versions of who gets put in that pickle barrel.  My favorite is the one where three seminaries studying to be priests are the butcher’s victims!

Anyway, what I like about these stories is not just that they’re fun, but that they remind us that St. Nick lived in the same messy, messed-up world that we live in, and that he wasn’t afraid to confront that world to make it better.  I don’t remember how I lost my faith in St. Nick as a kid, but I do remember sort of skeptically thinking of him as a perpetual child up there at his North Pole workshop  full of elves and toys - not someone I admired or felt a need to carry into my grown-up life.  But in fact, the real St. Nick didn’t just sit up in his snowy cabin inspecting toys by day and chewing candy canes in front of the fire with Mrs. Claus by night.  He was out in the world in places that few of us dare or bother to go - to the homes of the poor, to places where things take place that we’d just as soon not know about or see: like violence against children, the most vulnerable members of our society.

And I guess it’s because of these stories that my faith in St. Nick returned.  I believe in St. Nicholas just like I believe in all people who aren’t afraid to step out into the messy places of this world and offer a hand.  So today, on the feast day of our dear patron saint, may God grant us the courage to both see and help those in need, following in the footsteps of St. Nicholas of Myra.

Today we celebrate the feast day of St. Francis, the 13th century saint who did much more in his life than he’s usually remembered for.  He worked in a leper hospital.  He wrote hymns, including our hymn for today. He founded and administered what even in his lifetime became a large religious organization, the order of the Franciscans. He built and repaired small struggling churches. He even fought in the crusades before his conversion, an experience that inspired his message of peace and non-violence.

So there’s much more to St. Francis’ life than his love for animals, and yet these are the stories that move us the most - stories like how he once stopped along the road so he could teach a large flock of birds how to praise God.  How he called animals his brothers and sisters.  Perhaps the most famous one is the story of St. Francis and the wolf in which he persuaded a wolf living just outside the small town of Gubbio to stop harassing the townspeople, and, for their part, taught the people a few lessons about how to love animals.  He is also supposed to have staged the first live manger scene to help people better understand the Christmas story.  And finally, according to his earliest biographer, his donkey wept at his death.  

I’m not sure but what St. Francis himself might be a bit surprised that he’s remembered for these stories rather than for his other achievements.  But to me, that says as much about us as it does about him - us, and our need to hear someone telling us we’re not the center of things.  That there’s a whole world full of creatures that God delights in quite apart from us.  

Plenty of Christians over the years have talked as if we’re far more important to God than everything else that exists, and, even worse, that we can do what we want with God’s creation.  But, thankfully, every now and then saints like Francis come along and put us in our place - right alongside the birds, wolves, donkeys, dogs, cats, hamsters, squirrels, turtles, whatever other animals we might have here today - and all creatures great and small.  

So today we give thanks for them, and for the life of this gentle, humble soul, St. Francis.

Our Gospel reading for today continues what seems to be a series on some of Jesus’ more difficult parables.  This one is called the Parable of the Unjust Wages.  In it, a landowner hires some workers early in the morning and puts them to work.  A few hours later he hires more workers and puts them to work.  Then again, in the afternoon he hires still more, and they start working.  When it comes time to pay at the day’s end, he pays the late-comers first, giving them the same wages he gives to those who arrived early in the day.  So no matter how long you worked that day, your paycheck was the same.

The parable speaks for itself, but to get a better sense of how outrageous this is, I came up with some modern-day takes on it:  the colleague who comes onto a project late but gets the same amount of credit and bragging rights on his resume as those who worked on it from the start.  The co-worker who receives the same pay but doesn’t have the degree (or graduate school debt) that you have.  The woman who works twice as hard as her male colleague but whose paycheck is the same.  These are ways this parable might play out today, and when you think about it in contemporary terms like this, you see why it got his hearers so riled up.  In fact, in a lecture on this parable that I listened to this week, the lecturer guessed that this parable is what got Jesus killed.

I’ve heard several sermons over the years trying to mute the parable.  For instance, maybe Jesus was talking strictly about how things work in heaven, not on earth.   Or perhaps God, like the master in this parable, might favor generosity over justice, but that’s not how we’re supposed to structure our work places or societies.  I’m not sure those are distinctions Jesus would have drawn, but in any case, I’d like to put to one side the question of how we relate this parable to the real world (in that sense, at least) and focus instead on a couple other, simpler, lessons it has to teach us.

The first about coveting and contentment.  I’ve never read this in the context of a recession before, but doing so brought to mind some of the things people were saying when it all started in 2008.  Bear in mind, this was long before we knew how terrible this recession was going to be.  Long before we’d heard the word “double-dip” in connection with it.  Long before we or at least someone we knew lost a job.  Long before whole countries started going into default.  Long before all this, some of us more naive folks were sort of romantic about the recession because we thought of it as way to get away from the pressures of keeping up with our neighbors, or a chance to scale back and focus on what really matters.
In particular, I remember one friend of mine, a freelance writer who was forever complaining about her finances and how she couldn’t ever go out or do anything fun, saying how glad she was that everyone else would now have to live more like she’s always had to live.  

Comments like that really made me aware of how much our contentment and sense of what is enough is based on what others have, rather than on our actual needs.   We all know it’s a hard impulse to fight, the impulse to compare ourselves with others and to let their possessions dictate our needs.  And maybe something a little like that is going on in this parable.  Each person receives his wages at the day’s end, and nowhere does the parable say that the first worker to arrive received a meager or insufficient wage.  As far as we know, he wasn’t upset because he couldn’t go home and feed his family or pay his bills; he was upset because his neighbor who worked fewer hours got the same thing.  He began to compare and to covet, and that’s where his problems started, as they often do with us.  Again, this parable may be about much more than that, but that’s an aspect of it that I can understand and relate to.  

Another lesson the parable might have to teach is about how God values each one of us equally, at whatever stage we are on our Christian journey.  Which may be a good transition into the baptism of little Chloe Jean.  Like the workers who started out early in the morning, some among us have been following Christ for eighty or ninety years (Teresa and Jean); others fifty, others twenty; and others, like little Chloe, are just setting out.  But no matter how early or late, long ago or recently, we began to love him, the wages of God’s love in return are the same.   And those wages are surely enough - and more than enough - for us.  Amen.

I’m going to start today’s sermon by doing something I’ve been hesitant to do in previous commemorations of 9/11 that I’ve been a part of, and that is, share what I was doing that day.

The hesitancy comes from the fact that I wasn’t even in this area at the time, and that my story is probably the least interesting in the room.  In 2001, I had just graduated from Divinity School and was working my first job at a church out in Ohio to fulfill a 2-year commitment to my home diocese.  On the morning of 9/11, I showed up at work and found out what had happened from the church secretary.  Then, like much of the country, we spent the morning glued to the television watching events unfold.

In the early evening, we did a church service for the community, and then, after that, I drove home, picked up my college friend who lived nearby, and not knowing what else to do, we drove down to a place in Columbus where we had heard they were collecting donations for the victims’ families.  The “collection center” was a bunch of strangers with big industrial sized buckets taking money from people out their car windows – just the sort of thing that, any other day, you might be rightly suspicious of.  But I guess it was worth the risk to us just to feel like we weren’t completely helpless.

Finally, late that evening and after some more television, my friend Jessica and I took a walk around our neighborhood.  This next part is a memory I think I repressed until recently, not only because it’s a bit cheesy, but also because it’s illegal.  We came across a stretch of fairly newly poured wet sidewalk, and something in me just had to write in it.  So I knelt down and, with my finger, carved out the words “Sept. 11, 2001 – Never forget.”

It’s strange to think back to what that meant to me at that time.  Before long, it would become a sort of call to revenge - a reminder to keep the anger alive so we could get back at our enemies.  But on that first evening before our reactions were organized and interpreted and our various narratives to help us explain the event took shape,  Remember 9/11 meant something more like Remember the compassion and connectedness inspired by our feeling of vulnerability that day.

I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first let’s look at our Gospel reading.  Peter here asks Jesus how many times he has to forgive his brother.  He suggests seven times, probably having in mind an Old Testament command to forgive three times, and figuring he was being pretty generous.  But Jesus, not impressed with Peter’s generosity, says you have to forgive not seven but seventy seven OR, in many translations (because the original Greek isn’t clear) seventy times seven times – or, in other words, so many times it’s difficult to count them.  In his usual, provocative way when talking about things like love or humility or forgiveness, Jesus is being more demanding that seems humanly possible.

It’s a hard reading for a day like today.  And in fact the bishop of New York gave us the option of using different readings – these readings, if you can believe it, were set down in 1994, long before anyone knew they would fall on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.  I can maybe see where the OT text where all the Egyptians are wiped out is one we might just as well skip.  For that matter, I can see where this harsh text on forgiving is one we might happily skip on a day like today.  But then again, you don’t pick and choose the context in which you read passages on forgiveness, and something tells me that Jesus wouldn’t have softened his message even – and especially – today.  So I decided to let it stand.

Plus it got me thinking about this saying that you hear a lot: forgive and forget.  You know, of all Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness, both here and elsewhere, you never hear him say to forget after you’ve forgiven.  In fact, quite the contrary.  In the Bible, people are often called to remember times when they’ve been hurt and vulnerable.  Remember when you were slaves in Egypt.  Remember when you were lost in the wilderness. Remember when Jerusalem fell and you had no homeland. Remember, as we do each week when we celebrate Communion, when Christ was betrayed and crucified and sealed up in a tomb.

In both our readings and our rituals, we’re forever remembering terrible events.  But of course the purpose of all this remembering isn’t to stoke our anger or get revenge, but to make us better people – the kind of people we are after major tragedies, when we’re most fragile and also most generous.

I spent some time this week listening to radio interviews with New Yorkers looking back on that day, and I was struck by how many of them spoke about the overwhelming generosity of those days immediately following the attacks, and, at the same time, wondered where all that goodwill had gone in the decade since.  We’ve done a lot of remembering as a culture this past decade, but maybe not the kind that makes us more compassionate.  So, as we grapple with what it means to forgive on a day like today, let’s also remember what happened so that we might leave here better people – the people we were that day ten years ago.

The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Some Sundays I preach on a particular reading because I like it.  Other Sundays, I preach on it because I don’t like it, and - I’m sorry to say - today’s Gospel reading falls in that last category.  

This passage, in which Jesus tells his disciples how to deal with problem people in the church, is the Biblical basis for the practice of excommunication.  In it, Jesus explains that if you have a grudge against a brother or sister in the church, you are to go directly to him or her and try to reconcile.  If that doesn’t work, you take your complaint to two or three other church members, and you all approach the offender.  If that doesn’t work, then you let the whole church in on it.  And finally, if that doesn’t work, then the person becomes “as a Gentile and sinner” - that is, he is cast outside the fold.

Before commenting further, I feel it’s worth mentioning that there’s some question whether Jesus even said these words - first, because it’s only in one of the four Gospels, Matthew, and whenever a saying of Jesus appears in only one Gospel, it’s fair to wonder whether this was something he said (or at least said often enough to be remembered).  Also, because Jesus himself hung out with tax collectors, prostitutes, Gentiles and sinners of all sorts, so it seems unlikely that he would say that those who are cast out of the church will be like Gentiles and sinners, whom he was eager to include.  And finally, because Jesus probably didn’t have in mind the creation of the Christian church in the way it’s described in this passage, and so neither would he have had in mind setting down rules for it to live by.  All that would come later, after his death, resurrection, and ascension.

So, it could be that the Gospel writer Matthew or someone else added these instructions.  Or it could be that Jesus said something like it, but in a slightly different way or a different context - we don’t really know.  In any case, as Episcopalians, we’re probably a bit too eager to just remove this passage from Jesus’ mouth.   Many of us, myself included, came to the Episcopal Church to escape more judgmental traditions, and we like the latitude of belief and the inclusiveness this church provides.  So I thought that, rather than dismiss it or list all the reasons I don’t like this passage, it might be more challenging - and productive - to consider what in it could be useful, even if we don’t make it a matter of church policy.  

The first thing I thought of was that it reminds us that conflict will happen in a community of people, even the church.  I can’t even count the conversations I’ve had with people who are incredulous that someone in their own church could do such-and-such.  It’s not that we don’t know better; it’s just that, without really thinking, we just set the church up to be that place without conflict that we long for.  And when it’s not that place, our disappointment and anger are that much greater.  If Jesus did say these words in connection with the emerging Christian community, it’s comforting that he knew it wasn’t going to be without its conflicts.  

Another good lesson in this passage is that it encourages direct communication with someone who has hurt you in some way.  One of the worst things in any community, and especially the church, is when we complain about someone to everyone but that person.  What I like about this procedure is that it assumes people have dignity, and that they shouldn’t be gossiped about as if they didn’t.  

Connected to that, the practice of directly approaching someone has the added advantage of forcing us to really think about whether the matter is all that serious in the first place.  If we’re too embarrassed to say to another what bothers us, maybe our taking offense is more about us than about that other person.  But we tend not to step back and really reflect on that possibility if we just spout our complaints to a third party.

On this subject of directly approaching someone, I also wanted to briefly mention an interesting version of this passage by the poet Willis Barnstone in his translation of the New Testament.  Instead of saying "If your neighbor sins against you go and tell him his sin (or fault)," Barnstone translates it: "If your neighbor hurts you, go and tell him of your hurt."   His project in his translation was to get closer to the Jewish context in which the events of the New Testament occurred, and I think for him the language of “sin” has taken on such freight in the Christian tradition that removing it from this passage brings it back to its real purpose: learning how not to hurt each other.  So, in his view, trying to remove sin from a community isn’t about condemning a fixed set of behaviors to make a community pure, but it’s about learning not to hurt each other.  I like that emphasis a lot more, and it makes me less apt to ignore this passage.

Which leads me to a final lesson that I like here: that our wrongdoing isn’t just between us and God; it’s between us and a community.  Next time we consider doing something hurtful, it’s important to really think about how it will affect those around us.  

So there is a lot of wisdom in this passage.   And ultimately I’d just like to say that I’m touched by Jesus’ emphasis on the community - as I often remark on here at St. Nick’s.  Again, we don’t know what kind of community he thought would be gathered in his name, but he knew it wouldn’t be perfect.  And as long as we strive to honor and love each other, his promise is that he will be with us.

The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost

This week’s Old Testament reading brings us to the second book of the Bible, the book of Exodus.  The first book, Genesis, left off when Joseph died.  Joseph (you may recall) was the last of the patriarchs who was sold into slavery by his brothers but then went on to become the manager of Pharaoh’s household and eventually brought his whole family from Canaan to Egypt where they could live a better life.  And the book of Exodus follows that family as they grow into a whole nation (the nation of Israel), become slaves of Egypt, and are eventually liberated by Moses.

Our passage for today takes place probably about four centuries after Joseph and his brothers died, and it begins with this wonderful line that should only ever be said in the King James version: “And Pharoah knew not Joseph.”  Meaning that this new Pharaoh had no loyalties to the descendents of Joseph, whom he now used as slaves.

You know, you could wring several sermons from that line alone: “And Pharaoh knew not Joseph.”  It reminds us how quickly fortunes can change, or how large-scale political decisions are often influenced by ordinary human relationships, with their loyalties, vendettas, loves, and so on.  These many years later, there was no Joseph to drink a glass of wine of an evening with Pharaoh, so Pharaoh ceased to care about Joseph’s people and made them his slaves.

But back to our story.  We learn in it that the Israelites are reproducing prodigiously, and Pharaoh wants to put a stop to this so they don’t get so powerful they can revolt.  So first, he summons the Israelites’ midwives, and tells them to kill all the sons that they help deliver (to which I want to say, whatever political advisor came up with that idea should have been fired!).  Of course, the midwives don’t do what Pharaoh asks, because – as they claim – the Israelite women are so hearty they give birth before the midwives can reach them.  Even as a kid I remember thinking this Pharaoh was pretty dumb for buying that line.

So then he concocts another plan: if the midwives won’t kill the Israelites’ infant sons, then he’ll give that job to his own people – again, probably not the smartest plan.  But this doesn’t seem to go anywhere, either.

Meanwhile, an Israelite woman gives birth to a son whom she manages to hide for three months. (Now, this to me is proof that the Egyptians couldn’t be trying too hard to follow Pharaoh’s orders to kill the Israelites’ infant sons, because I can tell you first hand that you CAN’T hide a newborn very easily.)  But, after three months of hiding him, his mother puts the baby in the Nile in a basket, and prays for the best.  

Soon, none other than Pharaoh’s own daughter finds the baby.  So she draws him out of the water (the name “Moses” means to “draw out” as the story tells us), finds a Hebrew midwife to finish nursing him, and then raises him as an Egyptian prince.

It’s such a horrific and wonderful story - both at the same time. On one level, you have this terrible, bloodthirsty leader trying to exterminate a people in the worst possible way, by killing their infant sons.   On another level, though, you have ordinary people who seem to be paying barely any attention to him.  Some of them just ignore him. Others, like his very own daughter, go further, actually rescuing and rearing the Israelites’ sons.

To me, this is a story about the goodness of ordinary people, even when their leaders have turned corrupt.  Our political leaders aren’t exactly Pharaohs, but sometimes today my faith in humanity comes from the fact that most of us tune them out a lot of the time.

Taking a few more liberties with the story, it could also be about how ordinary, face-to-face interactions can transcend the differences that might otherwise come between us, like ethnic, religious, or political differences.

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to an interview on the program “Speaking of Faith,” which was part of this “Civil Conversations Project” they’re doing.  Krista Tippet was interviewing the Ghanian-British-American philosopher Anthony Appiah, and a point he kept returning to is that huge ethnic or religious differences that divide us and fuel so much evil in the world look a whole lot different when we actually get to know the people who hold them.  One thing he said struck me:

“Sometimes [he said] people think that the only way to deal with these big differences between religions around moral questions is to kind of face up to the difference directly, but I think often sidling up to it is better.  And sidling up can be done by not facing Islam, but facing Layla, and Achmed and Mohammed, with whom you don’t talk about religion most of the time; you talk about soccer.  You talk about rock music.”

As I imagine it, by the time Pharaoh came along with his terrible plan, most of those Israelites and Egyptians had too much in common – soccer, music, or, in the case of Pharaoh's daughter, the common experience of mothering a beautiful baby – to take his orders seriously. 

I guess, to close, I come back to that line I like so much: “And Pharaoh knew not Joseph,” and am reminded that it’s about putting a face on the enemy.  And once we do that, suddenly they’re no longer an enemy, but a friend.   May God give us the strength to understand our enemies, and make them our friends.