A Sermon Preached by John A.K. Boyd, MD
St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Durango, CO
Sixth Sunday After Pentecost
June 26, 2016

In today’s gospel 1 Jesus is traveling from his home region, Galilee, through Samaria to Jerusalem in Judea. Now, Samaria was an interesting place. It separated two Jewish populations, Galilean Jews and Judean Jews, from each other geographically. The residents of Samaria were related to the Jews; they shared a common ancestry and stories from the Hebrew Scriptures. But Jews and Samaritans were alienated from each other because of their religious and geopolitical past. Jews did not consider Samaritans true followers of Yahweh because their ancestors, though originally Israelites, hadn’t endured captivity and exile with the Judean elite who were taken to Babylon around 586 BCE 2. When the Judeans returned from exile around 540 BCE to rebuild Jerusalem and the temple, they refused to let the descendants of Israel who had remained in the area of Jerusalem participate in the project – and as a result those people and most other Yahweh worshipers moved the focus of their worship to Mount Gerizim in Samaria. Jews in Jesus’ time considered the Samaritans apostates and idolaters. Jews believed that Samaritans understood God incorrectly and that they worshipped him in the wrong way at the wrong place. And the Samaritans felt likewise.

It should not have been surprising, then, that Jesus was rejected when his advance delegation of disciples tried to set things up for his arrival in a Samaritan town. Those Samaritans probably believed that because Jesus’ “face was set toward Jerusalem” Jesus was not authentic prophet: he clearly didn’t understand God rightly and was going to worship him in the wrong way at the wrong place. But Jesus’ disciples, in Luke’s gospel, had just seen Jesus heal the sick, raise the dead, feed the thousands, calm storms, cast out demons, and be identified by God as God’s son during a mountain top transfiguration. By now, most of the disciples believed Jesus to be the Messiah – and probably a re-incarnation of Elijah (remember Elijah and Moses are the two guys who show up and stand with Jesus during the transfiguration), Elijah, perhaps ancient Israel’s most powerful prophet. Some of those disciples were undoubtedly familiar with a particular story about Elijah in the Hebrew Scriptures 3. In that story, Elijah was dealing with a king of Israel (Ahaziah, the wicked son of Ahab and Jezebel) who worshipped Baal-zebub instead of Yahweh and did so in the wrong way at the wrong places. When that King sent soldiers to fetch him, Elijah demonstrated his prophetic authenticity by calling down fire from heaven on two separate groups of them (one commander and fifty men each). And the fire “consumed” them. So, Jesus’ disciples probably figured why not ask the Messiah and new Elijah-like prophet of God whether or not he’d like to demonstrate his power by doing the same to those uppity Samaritans who didn’t understand God rightly and worshipped him in the wrong way at the wrong place.

But Jesus, here, refuses to follow Elijah’s example and use his methods. Jesus makes it clear to his disciples that following him does not entail calling forth violent retributive exhibitions of his power. Instead, he rebukes his disciples for their self-righteous suggestion (which they may well have derived from the Elijah story just mentioned) and simply moves on to the next town. But, as he continues traveling, Jesus begins to teach the disciples through a series of three hyperbolic proverbs what following him actually will entail. It will entail the possibility of discomfort and insecurity: Jesus, unlike foxes and birds, will have nowhere to lay his head – and so may his disciples. Following Jesus will also entail being fit for and proclaiming the Kingdom of God and, therefore, should not be delayed by excuses – even excuses that are ordinarily valid.

And why is Jesus so concerned that his disciples not engage in excuses and delays when being asked to follow him or while actually trying to do so? What’s the rush? Growing up, I was taught that deciding to follow Jesus was one of the essential steps in “getting saved.” Any delay, therefore, risked one’s eternal destiny. But I think there may be more to Jesus’ teaching about following him urgently than saving our own souls. I think that “following Jesus” means not just deciding to become his disciple; I think it also means urgently living into what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, into his vision of human and divine society, into human interactions wherein we consistently love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. Though God is sovereign, Jesus seems to be saying that delays and excuses on the part of those professing to follow him will have consequences; they may constrain the activity of God’s love expressed through us into the lives of others.

One fall night in the late 1980s, I was on call at the hospital to admit patients who didn’t have their own physician. At about 2:00 a.m. I was contacted by the Emergency Department and asked to admit a young man with intractable vomiting and diarrhea – probably viral gastroenteritis. Though gastroenteritis can frequently be managed as an outpatient, such management was impossible in this case because this young man had no money, no home and was hitchhiking through the area. My response was somewhat less than enthusiastic, but I did come to the hospital, examine the patient, and admit him.  He was pleasant enough, but he was dirty, his clothes were worn and grimy, and he was very dehydrated. I ordered the appropriate treatments and went back home to bed. Within twenty-four hours he was much improved; his diarrhea had stopped, and he was tolerating oral liquids. On the morning of the second hospital day, the hospital case manager told me the young man should be discharged, and I agreed even though he still looked a bit miserable. I discharged him, made rounds on my other hospitalized patients, then got in my car and drove toward my office on the north end of town. But as I neared the office, I saw my discharged patient, sitting hunched against his worn back-pack, and shivering on the side of the road in his ragged clothes, trying thumb a ride with snowflakes swirling around his face and beard. I don’t often hear Jesus’ voice telling me specifically how to follow him – and to do so quickly, but that morning I’m pretty sure I did. And, as you might guess, I began mentally reciting excuses for not doing so. I didn’t need to bury a parent or say goodbye to my family, but there was no homeless shelter in Durango back then, and the soup kitchen wasn’t open. I had already given him several hundred dollars worth of free professional medical care at the hospital. Someone else might pick him up. Lots of patients were waiting for me at the office – and some of them might be sick. They needed me; I was their doctor.

Fortunately, for the young man, I finally followed Jesus (without much delay) – albeit imperfectly. I drove him to a local motel and paid for two nights lodging. I now wish I’d made more arrangements for food and possibly transportation. The point I want to make, however, was the importance in this instance of following Jesus urgently – not in terms of accepting a belief system so that I could be saved – but in terms of not missing an opportunity to act in love toward another human being and meeting his urgent physical need in real time. Following Jesus means that we do things as he would do them – and that means we do at least some of them now.  Without excuses. Without delay.

Currently, many of us are very concerned about the increasing violence in our country and the world. Since most of the justification on every side for such violence seems to be framed in terms of resisting evil and establishing justice, many Christians and other persons of good will are trying to develop effective ways of responding to evil and injustice that are nonviolent. André Trocmé, leader of a French village that nonviolently resisted the Nazi’s and sheltered Jews during the Second World War, insisted that nonviolent responses to injustice, to be effective, must be initiated “in time.” He told a story about being a twenty-year-old soldier in the French army in 1921 and being sent out with other French soldiers to map a dangerous area of Morocco. Because of the danger he was issued a gun and ammunition. But, during the mission, his lieutenant discovered that Trocmé was unarmed. When confronted, Trocmé explained that he was a Christian and could not kill; therefore, it made no sense for him to carry weapons. The lieutenant took Trocmé to his tent, offered him a cigar, and had a conversation with him about timing. He led Trocmé to understand that:

1. they were now only twenty-five isolated men in an area where attack by brigands and dissidents was very likely;
   
2. if other soldiers had done this, they might be massacred; and
3. Trocmé’s refusal to bear arms was too late – he should have made his choice and acted sooner.
   

Trocmé said this taught him that the “commandment against killing had to be obeyed as early as possible if it was to be obeyed effectively. It taught him that nonviolence could, in fact, increase violence if it was not chosen in the right way at the right time.”4

Later, as the pastor of the small French Village, Le Chambon, Trocmé and other Christians, did follow Jesus “in time.” Along with other Chambonai, they began, after the German conquest of France, by continuing to run a local school teaching principles of international nonviolence and by refusing to stand around the school flagpole every morning as commanded by the French authorities to give fascist salutes to the new flag of Vichy France. Next, they refused to ring the church bells to celebrate the formation of a new French police unit modeled on the Gestapo. Then, they refused to identify the Jews in their community when French police sent busses into Le Chambon to round them up. Later, when Jews from all over Western and Eastern Europe began showing up in their town, the Chambonai sheltered these strangers in their homes, despite the risk to their own lives, the risk to their children’s lives and their meager winter food supply. By the time the war ended, Trocmé and the Chambonai had also learned how to forge false ID cards for Jews and help them escape to safe countries via underground railroads. When the war did end, the Chambonai sheltered and protected captured German soldiers, who elsewhere in France were often being rounded up and summarily executed. They followed Jesus consistently – and for the most part – without excuses and without delays.

And finally, all this leads me to ask the question: What might our community, and perhaps even our world, look like, if we as Christians helped one another follow Jesus by resisting evil and establishing justice and doing so nonviolently but urgently, without excuses and without delays  – “in time” as André Trocmé would say? May God grant us the opportunity to find out.

___________
​
1 Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version, Luke 9:51-62
2 Diarmaid MacCulloch; Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years, p. 62
3 Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version, 2 Kings 1
4 Philip P. Hallie; Lest Innocent Blood be Shed, p. 93

A Sermon Preached at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church
Twenty-Fifth Sunday After Pentecost
November 15, 2015
John A.K. Boyd, MD

This morning I’d like to preach on the reading from the New Testament epistle, Hebrews. In particular, I’d like to look at Hebrews, chapter 10, verses 23-28:

As a matter of full disclosure, I must admit at the outset that “holding fast” to Christian hope – and doing so “without wavering” – has often been difficult for me. Even now, though my life is very comfortable, when I listen to the evening news and consider the state of the world, our country, our government, our politics and the state of the Christian church, I find it very hard to be positively expectant with regard to my faith and the future – particularly the future of those I love, including my children and granddaughter, and my young friends struggling to reconcile their faith with their doubts and their personal integrity. 

And such feelings are not new for me. The first time I can remember having a crisis of hope was in the late fall of 1967, standing on the football field of Prescott High School with my gold-painted helmet under my left arm and my left knee heavily braced. The band was playing the national anthem (rather badly as I remember), I was singing along, my right hand was over my heart, and our national flag was rising at the north end of the stadium. While all this was happening, it suddenly occurred to me that I might be one of the last American teenagers ever to engage in such a ritual, because it was beginning to look as though American society (which I knew included football as a central feature) was unraveling. President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated four years earlier. Barry Goldwater had been crushed in the presidential election of 1964 by Lyndon B. Johnson (I really wanted Barry to win because my dad liked his ideas, his family owned a clothing store in Prescott, and he had kicked off his campaign from our county courthouse steps). The Watts race riots had occurred in 1965 near the Pepperdine College campus where my mother had happily gone to school in the 1940s. 

We were still fighting the Vietnam War, and six young men from my high school had already been killed. People my age and slightly older were beginning to protest in earnest, and I would be eligible for the draft next year. Things were clearly “going to Hell in a hand basket,” and except for having a somewhat dubious ticket to Heaven as an escape plan should the very worst come to pass, my religious faith seemed largely irrelevant to my immediate concerns. We were getting ready to play the Flagstaff Eagles (our arch-rivals), who two years ago, the night before our homecoming, had changed the whitewashed stone “P” on the mountainside near Prescott to an “F.” We had not beaten Flagstaff in football for many years – including last year because I fumbled an on-side kick during the final four minutes of the game when we were ahead by only three points.

So what might a text like Hebrews written to a Christian community over two thousand years ago have to say that would be helpful in response to the metaphysical angst of a teenager in 1967 and ennui of a sixty-five year old in 2015? Could this writing hold some insight that would help folks like me, my children and my young friends find some hope with regard to being Christians in the coming years? Let’s see.

Hebrews is an unusual entry in the Christian canon. While I was growing up, most of us believed that it was one of St. Paul’s epistles. Virtually no modern Christian scholars now think that is the case because, stylistically, the Greek in Hebrews is much better than that of the confirmed Pauline writings, and the theological arguments in Hebrews seem to be more influenced by the Greek philosophy of the time than were the writings of St. Paul. Raymond Brown, the respected Catholic scholar, says, “We have to be satisfied that the most sophisticated rhetorician and elegant theologian in the NT is an unknown.”2 Current scholars guess that Hebrews was written around 70-80 C.E.  Based on its content and arguments, it seems to have been written to a Mediterranean Christian community that was culturally gentile and Greek (or Hellenistic) with extensive knowledge of and respect for Judaism. 

The recipients of this treatise seem to have been a discouraged community – Christians who had been significantly persecuted, were losing hope, were giving up on following Jesus, and were not showing up for their usual gatherings. They were probably threatened by the surrounding culture because Hebrews notes they had endured the “plundering” of their possessions. But it is likely they were feeling threatened by something else – by supernatural beings and forces. Like almost everyone in the First Century Mediterranean world, they believed in some type of god, gods or demons. And most of the old pagan gods out there were pretty scary. They were powerful, frequently fickle, and often malevolent. They were beings that needed to be appeased and placated. They might help your crops grow, but they might cause them to die. They might bless you with health, but they might curse you with disease or demon possession. They might help you defeat and punish your enemies, but they might also help your enemies to defeat and punish you. Even the god, Yahweh, worshipped by the Jews as the “one true God,” seemed, despite his law, to be fearful and unpredictable. The new gods that Greek philosophers like Plato had described sounded more rational, but they were characterized chiefly by perfection and detachment from the everyday sorrows and concerns of humans.

Because Christianity was, for the community that first read Hebrews, a new thing, and because things weren’t going very well for that community, it seems that some of its members were considering going back to a familiar and ostensibly more stable belief system.  But late First Century Judaism was in chaos; the temple in Jerusalem had just been or was just about to be destroyed. Hebrews’ audience was probably enamored with the “good ole days” of Judaism when Moses was in charge, God led Israel through the desert housed in a portable tent or “tabernacle” (interestingly, for all its references to Jewish religious practice, the Jerusalem temple is never mentioned in Hebrews), and God’s people were well managed. 

Hebrews’ message of hope to this culturally threatened, metaphysically troubled group of Christians, an extended and elaborate allegory comparing Jesus as Messiah with the priests of ancient Israel, centers, not on arguments for an afterlife, but on the uniqueness of Jesus. Hebrews asserts that, with respect to God, Jesus is the “real deal.” In the very beginning of the book the author writes, “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.” (Heb. 1:1-3a) According to Hebrews, if you want to see what God looks like, look at Jesus; if you want to hear God, listen to Jesus; if you want to see what God can do, see what Jesus does. Elton Trueblood, a Quaker scholar and Christian apologist in the 1960s, is reported to have said, “The historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.”3 This was an astonishing claim in the First Century – and it is an astonishing claim in the Twenty-First Century. If it is true, it is in my view perhaps the only reason for contemporary Christians to be hopeful, to wait in positive expectation of what’s to come. How so? 

First, if God came to us in Jesus, we can be love our neighbors (other imperfect humans). Because if Jesus was God, we can know that God loves imperfect humans and will empower us through the Spirit to love imperfect humans.

Second, if God came to us in Jesus, we can transcend suffering. Because if Jesus was God, we can know that God also suffers and will empower us through the Spirit to transcend suffering and become more like Jesus.

Third, if God came to us in Jesus, we can overcome death. Because if Jesus was God, we can know that God has died and overcome death, and will empower us to live again. The conquest of death has been a major source of Christian hope over the centuries, but both the Jewish and Christian scriptures describe hope in terms other than simply getting a ticket to Heaven. As the Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, has argued, the faith of both Jews and Christians involves “hope within history.”4

While these are all legitimate, historically grounded reasons for Christian hope, in today’s world I find a fourth reason to be perhaps even more compelling: if God came to us in Jesus, we are no longer trapped in the endless cycle of hating, torturing and killing our enemies while they hate, torture and kill us in return. Because if Jesus was God, we can know that God forgives his enemies (even while being tortured) – and that God will empower us through the Spirit to forgive our enemies.

One of the reasons I sometimes lose hope as a Christian today, one of the reasons I am tempted to become cynical about our future, is the difficulty I see all humans having with regard to forgiveness. As individuals, communities and nations, we seem to be constantly fueled and energized by getting even. We seem addicted to revenge (which we often label “doing justice”) – unable to be motivated to address any injustice without it. And when we act on revenge, the results are almost always destructive – and sometimes frankly demonic. Even though we say we believe in forgiveness, we seem, as a matter of will power, unable make it happen. The Twelve-step Spirituality scholar, Ernest Kurtz, notes that we do not forgive those who have hurt us by simply choosing to do so. When injured we cannot make ourselves forgive a perpetrator – we can only become willing to forgive him. And how to we become willing? Kurtz and Alcoholics Anonymous have one consistent recommendation: “Pray for the s.o.b.”5 What happens in the process of praying for our enemy (even if it’s only asking God to give him what he deserves), according to Kurtz (and my own experience), is that over time, two things happen almost simultaneously: 1) we remember that we have, ourselves, been forgiven by someone whom we have harmed; and 2) we realize that we have (often unconsciously) forgiven our perpetrator – and that both were the work of a “higher power.” 

So, when I hear stories of forgiveness, I become spiritually hopeful because I see the hands of God at work on the arms of Jesus and his followers, and I begin to imagine a future wherein my faith community and I might actually and effectually participate with God in the healing of the world. Listening to news clips from the court hearing for Dylan Roof, the young man who killed nine people at a Bible study in the Mother Emanuel Methodist Episcopal Church this summer, I heard the daughter of one of his victims say: ​

I’d like to read you a few verses from today’s gospel – but from the Authorized (King James) Version rather than the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).

In the fall of 1968, after graduating from High School, I drove one thousand miles from Prescott, Arizona to attend Abilene Christian College (ACC) in Abilene, Texas. The problem, of course, was that I left a pom-pom girl named Nellie Whittington back in Prescott. And ACC was a pretty weird college campus for the late 1960s. Female students were forbidden to wear shorts or pants on campus (with the exception for pants when going to or from a PE bowling class). Skirt lengths were measured. Freshman females had an 8 p.m. dorm curfew – unless they were attending a campus or church function. Male students were not allowed in female dorm rooms – and vice versa. Male students could not have long hair or facial hair beyond well-trimmed sideburns and a tasteful mustache. I couldn’t play tennis on campus courts without my shirt. The campus, town and county were “dry” with respect to ethyl alcohol – and none of us could drink any of that substance anywhere without risking expulsion from the college.

After my second year, for a number of reasons (mostly having to do with the pom-pom girl) I decided to transfer back to an Arizona school – the University of Arizona in Tucson. When I arrived on that campus, I discovered that it was very different from ACC. I kept falling off curbs and running into palm trees because women were wearing not only very short skirts and shorts – they were wearing tank tops (and only tank tops) on their upper torso. The hair and beards on many of the guys made them look like the characters on the inside of a Dutch Masters cigar box. Students drank beer in their dorm rooms and smoked reefers under the bushes on the grounds. My first few weeks were filled with sensory input overload – to include tear gas that wafted over to my dorm one evening from an anti-Vietnam War protest being dispersed by police near the campus entrance.

The Vineyard had purchased the building of a defunct Greek Orthodox Church. The pews, altar and icons had all been removed. The floor was covered with donated carpet scraps. The walls on the sides were covered with stained, rough-sawn boards, and a painting depicting an apocalyptic scene from the biblical book of Revelation covered the wall behind the stage in front where an altar had once stood. When I first walked in, I envisioned myself as young prophet who had spent two years at a Christian college and was fully equipped to lead these Christian beginners from their spiritual naiveté to real Christianity. But I found out that they were also giving “street people” a place to sleep, and they were finding jobs for drug addicts. And the folk group which lead the singing were really good musicians – especially a couple of the guitar players. We sang contemporary Christian folk music and a few praise choruses. A speaker, who sounded like he was a counseling student, led a Bible study – and his message made a lot of sense. By the end of the meeting, there were tears running down my cheeks, and I knew I should be listening to “Jesus People” – not trying to fix them. And of course, they were talking about having been “born again” – and they were asking me whether or not I had been so born.

Sadly, since the late 1960’s, Jesus’ language (especially the King James version thereof) has been popularized, politicized, hackneyed, clichéd and misused. It has been used as a Christian code for someone who is a “true” Christian – not just a nominal Christian; for someone who has a certain interpretive view (usually literalist) of the Bible; for someone whose life has been dramatically changed for the better by religion; for someone who has received the “gift of the spirit” (usually speaking in tongues); for someone who has had a dramatic conversion experience; for someone who has been baptized by immersion; for someone who has said the sinner’s prayer; for someone who is saved from Hell and locked-in on a trajectory for Heaven when he dies; for someone who agrees with me about what constitutes “real” Christianity; or for someone who incorporates any combination of the characteristics above.

The final message of this morning’s gospel is that God, the Creator, actually loves the world – and demonstrated that love in Jesus: “for God so loved the world . . . .” In a beautiful line from a short story about his parents, Don Snyder writes, “Let us hope that we are all preceded in this world by a love story.” If Jesus is actually God’s revelation to the world, such a hope is fulfilled for each of us, and there is every possibility – even for us skeptics – that our lives could be reinvented by that love story, could be “born from above.” What could be better news than that?

During the early centuries of the Common Era, the Church struggled over its identity: was it a Jewish sect or was it something else? It became the official religion of the Roman Empire and got involved in war and politics. It split into camps that fought about the nature of Christ: was he God and man existing separately in the same container or was he God and man mixed together inseparably in the same container? During the Middle Ages, the Church started burning witches and heretics and launched the Crusades to take the Holy Land by force from the non-Christians who lived there. During the Renaissance, it split over many things and fought major internecine wars. During the Enlightenment, it resisted science, fought more wars and continued burning witches and heretics.

Church struggles and failures not only affected western society socially and politically; they affected individuals at a very personal level. In Scotland 1696, Thomas Aikenhead, a 19-year-old theology student at the College of Edinburg, passed the Tron Church in that city along with 3 friends. Despite it being the month of August, it was cold and blustery, and it had been raining and freezing all summer. As they walked past the church, Thomas remarked, “I wish right now I were in the place Ezra called hell, to warm myself there.” Someone, however, overheard this remark and informed the kirk (church) authorities. When those authorities investigated the accusation, they learned from other students that Thomas Aikenhead had been systematically ridiculing the Christian faith and making claims including the following:

• the Bible was not the literal Word of God, but the invention of the prophet, Ezra;
  
• Jesus performed no actual miracles;
  
• the story of Jesus’ resurrection was a myth;
  
• if Moses actually existed at all, he was a better politician and magician than Jesus and that Mohammed had been better than either;
  
• Jesus was an imposter;
  
• God, nature and the world were one, and had existed since eternity.

Aikenhead’s remarks constituted blasphemy as defined by an act of Parliament in 1695, which decreed that a person “not distracted in his wits” who railed or cursed against God or the persons of the Trinity was to be punished with death. He was, therefore, put on trial by civil authorities per the recommendation of church leaders. Despite repenting and recanting all his heretical statements, following a lengthy trial during which he received support from the philosopher John Locke and other Anglican “latitudinarians,” Aikenhead was finally found guilty and hanged on January 8, 1697. With his last words he forgave all concerned in his trial – including Mungo Craig, the other student who was the chief witness against him. Aikenhead also noted that his fall had been initiated solely by his pure love of the truth. Thomas Aikenhead was tragically and cruelly executed due to the failure of his own church.

So, if history and our own lives are rife with examples of church failures, problems and pain, why do we need this community we call “church”?  Why can’t following Jesus just be about Jesus and me? Why does Matthew’s gospel quote Jesus saying that he will establish his “church” and that the very gates of Hell will not prevail against it? Why did the early Christians continue meeting in churches – those communities reminiscent of Jewish synagogues – even when many of their members were gentiles? Why did St. Paul seem to care so deeply about churches, calling them “the body of Christ”? Why does John in today’s gospel describe our relationship with Jesus using a metaphor that includes not just Jesus as the “vine” but “branches” – other Christians – connected to us in a community that often gets messy – a community that finds itself involved in conflicts of leadership, kinship, membership, economics, and aesthetics. Why did Jesus and his apostles seem to recommend participation in the Christian community over a simple individual “personal relationship” with Jesus and heroic, uncomplicated “Lone Ranger” spirituality? In short, what could God have been thinking?

In this way, we are no different that Jesus and his disciples. They had expectations of each other, and they failed to live up to them. Jesus’ disciples frequently failed to understand his teaching, they fell asleep during his emotional turmoil, they deserted him during his trials and execution, one of them denied him, and one of them finally betrayed him. And Jesus didn’t always live up to their expectations: he wasn’t the triumphant militant Messiah they wanted, he did not restore the Davidic kingdom, and he died like a common criminal on the garbage dump outside the city. 

The imperfect community of Jesus’ followers, what we now call the Church, is ironically the perfect environment in which to practice and experience forgiveness leading to love. Forgiveness can certainly be tough – but not as tough as we often think. In my own case, I did forgive my church of origin and have continued to love and respect my friends and family who are still participating in that Christian tradition. Doing so, however, was not the result of heroic spiritual effort on my part. Forgiving my church happened slowly, almost mystically, over several years as I continued to muddle along my own spiritual path in other Christian communities. Of course, part of that forgiveness was coming to understand that I had misjudged my church – coming to understand that some of those folks were not just interested in being doctrinally correct. Some of them sat with my mother, prayed with her and read her the Psalms as she lay dying. Some of them prayed for my nephew while he served a 20-year prison sentence for the murder of a homeless man, gave him a good job when he got out of prison, and helped him rebuild a life from ashes. My church helped me understand the fallibility of my moral assessments of other people. It taught me to be less righteous about my resentments and grudges –especially those that were fueled by my perception of motives I had imputed to others. Forgiving my church was, I think, the work of the Holy Spirit mediated through the lives of other Christians who forgave, loved and mentored me along the way. 

And what about here and now? In case you hadn’t noticed, St. Mark’s is an imperfect Christian community. It is also a place where we have legitimate expectations of our sisters and brothers – expectations that we do not and will not consistently meet. But it is a place where many of us have continued to experience forgiveness and genuine love – in spite of our warts. In this season of transition, I hope we can realize that what we need to do is probably not rocket science. The grace to continue forgiving and loving one another comes from being connected to (or as John says “abiding in”) the Jesus Vine – and thus connected to the other branches. The pruning described in today’s gospel is not about us cutting the bad people out of the church – it is about our choices to remain connected and about God removing the sickly, dying pieces of detritus from each of us so that we all can flourish communally in God’s vineyard. But we must stay connected to each other through Jesus. To do so, we will probably, as Stanley Hauerwas has written, “have to break our habit of having church in such a way that people are deceived into thinking that they can be Christians and remain strangers.” The practices that keep us from remaining strangers, practices that help us remain connected to each other as branches on the Vine are, fortunately few and relatively simple: worshiping together, praying together, eating together, studying together, playing together – and perhaps even putting a few more shekels in the collection plate. Mostly, I think we just need to show up.