Once upon a time there was a beautiful mustard bush full of singing birds. On a certain day one of the birds began to sing a new song, about the great world outside the mustard bush, where there were gorgeous trees and an endless sky and sweet rain. And the other birds said: “Who do you think you are? We don’t want to hear that stuff. Now either shut up or go back to singing the songs your father taught you. Remember, we’ve known you since you were a scrawny chick!”
The little bird was hurt, and pretty surprised that the other birds didn’t want to hear such a beautiful song. There were just a few who listened, and started trying out a note or two. They were mostly the ugly birds nobody wanted to associate with. So the leadership of the flock said: “Listen, all of you pipe down, or we’re calling in the cats!” The cats, of course, were always lurking around outside the bush looking for stragglers—just keeping order in the world, you know.
But the little bird didn’t shut up, and his friends began getting better at singing, so, well, to keep order and get things back on track, the head birds waited till there was a cat nearby, and they shoved the singing bird off the branch, right into the cat’s mouth. And the cat ran away. End of story.
Except—well, those ragtag friends of that bird started singing even louder, and better. And they claimed their friend, who started it all, was not dead. Hah. The other birds had seen the pile of feathers. All the same, this new flock kept it up until they had to be shoved out, too. But in the meantime some of the dogs lying around in the shade of the bush had caught the melody, and they started imitating it. They weren’t very tuneful, of course, but with practice they got better. And although the cats got some of the birds that were shoved out, the dogs protected the rest, and the song of that one bird began to be heard far and wide—though more in the dog version and less and less in the bird version.
And pretty soon other animals started trying out the song, too: horses and cows and sheep, and some kinds of birds you wouldn’t expect to be good singers, like chickens and turkeys and geese. It was such a beautiful song, after all: about the sky and the sunshine and enjoying it forever.
But you know how things are. As time went on, the animals and birds got tired of singing the original song; they began to shorten it, and simplify it—so everybody could sing it, they claimed, but maybe they just weren’t up to the challenge of the whole melody. And maybe they were a little uncomfortable about some of the pictures it painted. They quarreled among themselves, too, about just how the song was supposed to go, and there came to be different packs and herds with different versions.
In the end, instead of the song catching on everywhere in its simplified version, what with all the quarreling and the different versions and the increased number of important things that dogs, for example, had to do to keep the world running right, like rolling in dead stuff and sniffing each other, well, the singing pretty much died down, and the vision of that bright world of trees and sunshine and rainbows faded, except in a few faithful hearts.
I don’t think I need to explain the story to you. You can pretty much guess who the “different” bird is, and who are the other birds, and the cats, and the dogs (that’s us Gentiles, if you need a hint). The song is Jesus’ message about the reign of God. He tells the crowds: of course you are rejoicing in the mustard bush God has provided for your shelter, because it’s what you have needed until now. But there’s so much more! God wants to give you the world with a ribbon around it! I’m here to tell you how much God loves you, how much God desires you, how God wants to be close to you! I’m here to say that God is kneading the Kingdom into your very lives, like yeast in bread dough! That it’s right here under your feet, a treasure hidden in the very soil; if you’ll just take the trouble to look for it, it’s yours!
And they say: “Who do you think you are? We’ve known you since you were a tyke, and you have nothing to tell us we don’t already know. Beat it.” And we say: “Listen, Jesus, that’s all very well, but we’ve got a world to run, and we understand reality. Let’s talk about the reign of God later, after we get through killing all the terrorists and trashing the planet. And besides: you’re saying we might have to give up something we already have in order to acquire that treasure, or that pearl, and frankly, we like what we’ve got (only we’d like more of it), and we’re not so sure about taking a flyer on your treasures and pearls.”
And so God says: “Okay, whatever you want. Come back when you’re ready. I’ll be waiting.” So on we go with our lives. And we could be living in the reign of God, but it seems like too much trouble to learn the song. Maybe later. It’ll keep. We’re so much happier where we are. After all, singing that song might attract attention from dangerous enemies—look what happened to Jesus. Are we really sure, after all, that we want to be associated with him and his riffraff friends?
Just be careful, though. One day you might encounter an animal, or a song, or a person you never noticed before, and you won’t know whether to be intrigued by it or to flee. It could be dangerous, or it could be healing. It could be a weed, or it could be the tree of life. It could even be Jesus. One of my students in Montreal this month, now a United Church of Canada minister, grew up unchurched. But one day in her young adulthood she was peeling onions, and suddenly she was done for. The poet Gregory Orr writes:
The beloved often
Arrives in disguise.
Not to avoid you,
Not to elude you
Who long so.
That would be cruel.

No. Only to surprise you.
To find you before
You find her.
To recognize you
Before you recognize him.

A Sermon for Proper 8 (June 29, 2008)

Last Sunday, in the story of the banishing of Hagar and Ishmael, we heard one of the sad episodes in the story of Abraham’s dysfunctional family, which occupies pretty much the whole of the book of Genesis from the twelfth chapter onward. This Sunday we read the climactic chapter, the worst part of the whole: the story of the binding of Isaac, the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his own father. This is the kind of thing that gives biblical religion a bad name; the professional atheists love to point to this as proof that the God of Jews and Christians is an evil, vicious, vengeful tyrant.
Well, not so fast. Any way you slice it, it’s a disturbing story, but I don’t think God is the heavy. This is a story for all of us about how not to live.
The storyteller signals for the readers at the beginning not to expect the worst. She begins: “God tested Abraham.” So we can hope for the best. But why is God testing Abraham? Well, frankly, Abraham has brought it on himself. Through ten chapters, Abraham has sacrificed to his own interests everyone closest to him. In chapter 12, he abandoned Sarah in Egypt, letting her be taken into Pharaoh’s harem to save his own skin. He did it again in chapter 20, after God had promised that within a year she was going to bear him the son of the promise! And in chapter 16 he had handed Hagar over to Sarah to be shamed and humiliated until Hagar tried to run away; then in the story we read last week he threw Hagar and his son Ishmael out of the house to die in the wilderness. In every one of those episodes, God rescued the victim of Abraham’s cruelty; that is the best reason to expect that God isn’t going to abandon Isaac, either, even if Abraham does.
But Abraham isn’t likely to abandon Isaac, because Isaac is his only hope, the only means by which he will survive as the father of many generations. Abraham is too old to have other children, so all his hope for the future rests on Isaac. And God says to him: Abraham, you have sacrificed everyone around you so far. Will you now betray the last not-yet-abandoned person near you? For God to demand Abraham’s own life would be no test, because he would survive in Isaac. But if Isaac has to be lost, then Abraham is lost with him.
So Abraham takes Isaac to a faraway place, where he is going to sacrifice him. And as he is about to do the deed, as he is looking into the face of his beloved, ready to snuff out life and hope, he hears his name: “Abraham! Abraham!” In other words, he becomes, at last, fully present to himself, fully aware of who he is and what he has done. In that moment, Abraham is judged. And in that moment, recognizing who he is and what he has done, Abraham is saved—saved from himself, in order that he may fully come to himself and be at peace.
Now, some people have taken this story and made a crude comparison with our redemption, saying that God has sacrificed God’s only son for our sake. Well, not so fast. The earliest Christian writers who used the story as a paradigm of our redemption didn’t compare Jesus to Isaac; Jesus, rather, was the Lamb of God, the ram caught in the bushes, the substitute for Isaac, who represents us, the rescued, the redeemed.
But even that is not something we can very well stomach, for it still shows God as demanding some kind of death for our salvation. So I would challenge the story: why does there have to be a sacrifice, in the end? God has tested Abraham by challenging him to sacrifice Isaac, but when Abraham passes the test, God stops him. God doesn’t say: “Look, here’s a ram; kill that instead.” It is Abraham who “looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket . . . Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.” God didn’t demand a sacrifice; Abraham offered one anyway.
So I come to another way of looking at this story.
“I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Remember?
The trouble with Abraham—who stands in for all of us—is that he wants to be in control of his life. All those times when he abandoned and betrayed those around him—those were all attempts on his part to be in control. He tried to buy his way out of a jam, twice, by abandoning Sarah. When Sarah didn’t produce any children, even though God had promised that there would be a son to carry on the family, Abraham tried to make it happen by impregnating Hagar. Then, when God gave Isaac instead, Abraham tried to get rid of Ishmael for fear that Ishmael would be the stronger son and would seize the inheritance—the way Jacob did, later, from Esau. And finally, burdened with the guilt of it all, as his life is coming to a close, he decides to expiate his sins with a great, overwhelming act. He will redeem himself by sacrificing the one thing precious to him, the one means by which he has some control over the future. He thinks God is asking it of him. I think whatever god is asking that is not the God of Abraham; it’s Abraham’s guilty knowledge of all the ill he has done in his life.
Here we have, for the first time in our collective story, an example of what Walter Wink calls “the myth of redemptive violence.” It’s the idea that evil can be atoned for, banished, and peace achieved by the sacrifice of something or someone. It is an idea that has so captivated our minds that we take it for granted as the only way to behave, and we try to project it onto God by making Jesus a victim demanded by God’s justice. But that is not the message. It is not violence that redeems.
So when Abraham, at the last moment, comes to his senses, it is because he is brought face to face with the real truth: You. Are. Not. In. Control. Nobody else’s life is in your hands, to be disposed of, and your own life isn’t, either. You can’t redeem yourself. It is God who provides: God who gives life, and God who redeems life from all the trouble we cause when we try to be God in our own lives, when we try to redeem our lives by doing violence to others, in little ways and large.
In today’s Gospel reading we come to the end of Matthew’s “missionary discourse,” the chapter in which he collects a lot of Jesus’ sayings about discipleship and mission. They all boil down to this: You are not in control. If you want to be my disciple, you have to abandon all your self-ensured security and let me provide. Let me provide you with a family, with shelter, with clothing, with the bread of angels and the water of life. It will be no sacrifice, for that is not what God demands, not what God desires. God desires mercy, not sacrifice, a humble heart and not grandiose gestures. We say at the Offertory “all things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.” That is the real truth of our lives and the fulfillment of our days. Amen.

Palm Sunday, March 16:

Three years ago on Palm Sunday, I told the story of Fadil Fejzic, as Chris Hedges relates it in his remarkable and disturbing book, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, I want to revisit it today. Some of you may remember it, but for those who do not, or who have not heard it, let me rehearse it again: Hedges tells of meeting Rosa and Drago Sorak outside the Muslim enclave of Gorazde in Bosnia, where they had lived for many years. At the time Hedges met them, they had left the town and taken over a house a few miles away. The Soraks were Serbs, and they expressed the usual scorn for Muslims—but, they said, not all Muslims were bad. It was their duty to admit that.
When the Serbian army began the siege of Gorazde in 1992, the Soraks lived in the city with their older son, Zoran, and his wife. The Soraks ignored the nationalist propaganda and went on living in Gorazde, even when shells began to fall on the town, when gas, electricity, and water were cut off. They were seen as traitors by the Bosnian Serbs, but to their Muslim neighbors they were Chetniks, just like the men who were lobbing shells into the city.
One night the Bosnian Muslim police took Zoran away for questioning. He never returned. Soon afterward, the Soraks’ second son, who was fighting with the Serb army, was struck by a car and killed. The Soraks were childless. A few months later, their daughter-in-law, Zoran’s widow, gave birth to a daughter. But the half-starved young mother had no milk. The family fed the baby girl tea for four days, but she was getting weak; she was dying.
On the fifth day, just before dawn, the Soraks heard footsteps on the stairs. They were terrified, because often groups of Muslims came to the apartment at night, looking for them. Still, they opened the door and peeked out. There stood a neighbor, an illiterate Muslim farmer named Fadil Fejzic. He kept a cow outside of town, and he used to milk the cow at night, when the snipers couldn’t see him. He stood there in his black rubber boots, holding a quart of milk. Silently, he handed it to Rosa Sorak, and silently he left.
The next morning, Fadil Fejzic was back, with another quart of milk. Every day he came, for 442 days, while his Muslim friends told him not to be foolish, not to feed the Chetnik baby, to let her die like the rest. Salt was selling for $40 a pound in Gorazde in those days; imagine what a quart of milk was worth! Yet Fadil Fejzic refused to take anything from the Soraks. For 442 days he brought milk to the baby, until the mother and child left Gorazde for Serbia.
After hearing the story, Chris Hedges went into Gorazde looking for Fadil Fejzic. He found him sharing the floor of an unheated basement with several other men. His apartment had been bombed out. His brown-and-white cow had been slaughtered for meat. He was keeping alive, just barely, by collecting worm-eaten apples from abandoned orchards and selling them. When Hedges told him he had seen the Soraks, Fadil Fejzic’s eyes brightened. “And the baby?” he asked. “How is she?”
The Soraks grieved daily for their sons; they missed their home; they could never forgive those who had robbed them of everything. But at the same time, they could not listen to other Serbs saying bad things about Muslims, or even tell the story of their own suffering, without telling of Fadil Fejzic and his cow. As Chris Hedges summarizes: “Here was the power of love.”
The power of love: that is what we celebrate, in all its magnificence and all its terror, in the Holy Week we are about to begin. A few years ago at this time people were going in droves to see the film of “The Passion of the Christ.” I said three years ago that I hadn’t seen the film, and I stil haven’t. It could be very good for some, but it wouldn’t be good for me. I don’t need, or want, to see someone else’s pictures of the graphic sufferings of Jesus, taking place on a particular day in the past. I don’t want some fixed set of images burned into my brain. When I think about the sufferings and the triumph of Jesus, the Christ, I want to hold the thought of him, in his historical time, together with stories like that of the Soraks and Fadil Fejzic, the stories of Jesus, the Christ, in his timeless presence in the world.
I also want to hold up the image of Jesus on the cross with the contemporary horror depicted in the Academy-Award-winning documentary, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” the true story of an innocent man named Dilawar who was crucified in our time and in our name—hung up by his arms and kicked in the legs until he could no longer support himself, and he suffocated, just as Jesus did. I want to hear Jesus’ words of compassion from the cross together with the story of the American officer who adopted an orphaned Iraqi boy afflicted with cerebral palsy out of pure compassion and love. Because the sufferings of the Soraks and of Dilawar and the love of Fadil Fejzic and the American officer are part of the story of God’s love affair with the world, in all its power and all its terror. Because Jesus is not dead and gone from our world, but is with us yet, in every moment of sorrow and compassion and loving service and tender joy.
The Soraks’ story breaks open the story of Jesus’ Passion into its two parts: the wrenching sorrow of the loss of the son, the strong young hero as we behold him entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the one who could have saved the whole family, the whole world, from suffering if he had been allowed to live, if Jesus had brought in the reign of God right then and there. That’s one part.
And the other part—the total surrender of God in Jesus, God in Fadil Fejzic, in utter and complete, self-giving love, so that we may indeed live, with a life whose triumph is forged in the crucible of love, the one thing asked of us all: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.”
The first part evokes anger for the pain, anger at those who caused the pain—and the film of the “Passion” and of the “Taxi” leave us there. But there is so much more to the story—the “nevertheless” of God’s love, suffering in and with Jesus, in and with us all, so that life may be ours in abundance, tempered by pain but never defeated.
Such a simple man, Dilawar, a total nobody from the back of beyond. Such a simple man, Fadil Fejzic, a total nobody from the back of beyond. Such a simple man, Jesus of Nazareth, a total nobody from the back of beyond. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth have touched and shaped the lives of countless human beings. The life and—who knows by now, possibly the death—of Fadil Fejzic touched and shaped perhaps four lives—but then, by being told in Hedges’ book, hundreds and thousands more as well. The power of love is incalculable. It can look so little, so futile, so insignificant when it is given, but the waves of it roll on like the eternal waves of the sea.
To enter into Holy Week with Jesus is to enter into his love, naked to the world. To truly pass through it with him is to be borne on that love, lifted on its waves and carried—where?—we can never know. When you are in love, do you want to know where it is going? Not really. It is enough that you love, that you are loved. Nothing else matters. So it is with the love of God, and our love that responds, responds with whatever we have, be it only a quart of milk, a moment of prayer, a smile at a stranger. Love comes calling at your heart’s door this week, in the dawn light, bearing its gift. Don’t be afraid to open the door.

Maundy Thursday, March 20:

“As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”
Holy Week has come rushing at us this year—as early as it can possibly be or will ever again be in our lifetimes. Lent has gone by so fast—all the faster for being spent in the winter dark. Short days go faster. It all just reinforces the temptation to get past the dark and the winter and the sorrow and get on to the joy of Easter and the promise of resurrection, skipping over that nasty dying part. Many Christians do skip Holy Week altogether, hearing the Passion read on Palm Sunday (or maybe not even that), and using Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and Holy Saturday to buy their Easter clothes and candy and dye their Easter eggs. They’re not into proclaiming the death of the Lord, again and again, day by day, until he comes.
But we’ve had a lot of dying here lately. It may just put us where we need to be in this Holy Week: face to face with the Lord’s death—his letting go of everything, everything, just as we all must do. We hear how, at the supper, the farewell supper with his friends, he put aside his garments—his whole human dignity—and bent before them like a slave, to wash their dusty feet. Having put away all his dignity as God—as we heard in the letter to the Philippians on Sunday—he now lays aside all his dignity as a man, kneeling in humility before his rough followers, one of whom has already betrayed him, all of whom will soon flee from his fate.
Paul’s letter to the Corinthians describes—John’s gospel does not—how he then poured his whole life, all that was left of it, into the bread and wine he shared with his friends. By the time they went forth from the supper, we could say, he was only a husk, the outward appearance of a man, the man Jesus, for his whole self had already been poured out, handed over to them, to us. “When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.”
There were people very early in Christianity—and their descendants are with us still—called Docetists. Greek dokein means “to seem” or “to appear,” and the Docetists taught that Jesus did not really die on the cross; he only seemed to do so. It was too scandalous to them that God, in the person of Jesus, should be said to die. Not possible. So they made up stories about somebody else being crucified in Jesus’ place—Barabbas, for example—and Jesus laughing from heaven as he looks at the spectacle. Or they said that Jesus did miraculously come down from the cross, or was taken down by his disciples and found to be still alive, and taken away to be healed, so those supposed resurrection appearances were just Jesus in his hospital gown, so to speak.
We may find that amusing—or chilling—but the idea that Jesus could not really have died on the cross is still with us; witness the popularity of The Da Vinci Code and things like it. A colleague of mine told me a few years ago that one of her students, having read a gospel for the first time in her life, came to her in horror: She had never expected that Jesus would die! This young woman had grown up in a supposedly “Christian” nation, and the symbol of the Cross had certainly been all around her, but she had never comprehended that it actually meant what it means. Barbara told her to take courage and keep reading: it would turn out all right.
As with all evasions of the truth, there is a core, a scintiilla of something right in these notions of a deathless Jesus. Since he had already handed himself over to his disciples in the Upper Room, what was left of him to be “given into the hands of sinners, and mocked, and scourged, and spat upon,” and crucified? In one sense, only the outward appearance—because his Truth, his self, is given into our hands. Given into the hands of sinners, indeed—always, and again and again, whenever we come to the table of the Eucharist, and as long as we carry his dying with us in our bodies, from the table to the grave.
He died, indeed, on that spring day in the year 30 or so. That was bloody reality. But his dying, his surrender of himself to us in total, infinite love, goes on, and on, and on: “Whenever we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the death of the Lord, until he comes.”
“Do you know what I have done to you?” he asks us. That is the question. We can’t go on to the next part, the moment when he says: “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you,” until we have answered the question. “Do you know what I have done to you?”
One way to put the answer is to say that Jesus has exercised preemptive forgiveness toward us. Without being asked, he has handed himself over for us, to us. He has offered us forgiven lives, with all that implies.
In these three days, I invite you to ponder these things. Stay with that crucified man and let him ask you, with his dying breath: “Do you know what I have done to you?” Don’t be quick to answer.

Good Friday, March 21:

The mystic known as Julian of Norwich, in the year 1373, encountered the crucified Jesus in an intense set of visions known as her Showings. Here is some of what she saw and heard. After a long and detailed description of the dying body of Christ, which she sees “bleeding out” to the point of desiccation, she writes:
Then spoke our good Lord Jesus Christ, asking:
“Art thou well satisfied that I suffered for thee?”
I said: “Yea, good Lord, thanks be to Thee.
Yea, good Lord, blessed mayest Thou be!”
Then said Jesus, our kind Lord:
“If thou art satisfied, I am satisfied.
It is joy, a bliss, an endless delight to me that ever I suffered the
Passion for thee;
and if I could suffer more, I would suffer more.”
. . .
And in these words:
“if I could suffer more, I would suffer more,”
I saw truly that as often as He could die, so often He would,
and love would never let Him have rest until He had done it.

And I watched with great diligence in order to know how often He would die if He could,
and truly, the number passed my understanding and my wits so far
that my reason could not, nor knew how to, contain it or take it in.

And when He had thus often died (or was willing to),
still He would set it at naught for love;
for He considers everything but little in comparison to His love;
for though the sweet Manhood of Christ could suffer but once, the
goodness in Him can never cease from offering;
every day He is prepared for the same, if it could be; for if He said He would for my love make new heavens and new earth, that were but little in comparison, for this could be done every day if He wished, without any labor;
but to die for my love so often that the number passes created reason, that is the most exalted offer that our Lord God could make to the human soul, as I see it.

Then He means this:
“How could it then be that I would not do for thy love all that I could?
—this deed does not distress me since I would for thy love
die so often with no regard to my cruel pains.”

And here I saw with respect to the second vision in this blessed Passion
that the love that made Him suffer surpassed all His pains
as far as Heaven is above earth;
for the pain was a noble, honorable deed
done at one time
by the action of love;
but the love was without beginning,
is now,
and shall be without ending.

It was because of this love He said most sweetly these
words: “If I could suffer more, I would suffer more.”
He said not, “If it were necessary to suffer more . . .”for
even though it were not necessary, if He could suffer more,
He would.
. . .
In this He reminded me of the quality of a glad giver:
always a glad giver takes but little heed of the thing that he gives,
but all his desire and all his intention is to please him and solace him
to whom he gives it,
and if the receiver accepts the gift gladly and thankfully, then the
gracious giver sets at nought all his cost and all his labor for
the joy and delight that he has because he has pleased and
solaced him whom he loves.
. . .
Also for further understanding this blessed word was said:
“Lo, how I love thee.
Behold and see that I loved thee so much before I died for thee
that I was willing to die for thee;
and that now I have died for thee, and suffered willingly what I can.
And now is all my bitter pain and all my cruel labor changed to
endless joy and bliss for me and for thee.
How should it now be that thou wouldst pray for anything that pleases me,
and I would not most gladly grant it thee? For my pleasure is thy holiness and thine endless joy and bliss with Me.”

Julian sums up all her visions by saying: “Love was his meaning.” Amen.

Look at how childish you are acting! Jesus says. You’re miserable, living under the Roman yoke and paying taxes out the wazoo and with no control over your lives. And you have had a couple of good offers of ways to make your lives better—not materially, that’s not what counts, that’s not something to worry about—but by experiencing the true meaning of life.

First, along came John the Baptizer. He called for repentance and fasting and returning to the traditions of Israel, and getting ready for the day when Messiah will come. And you said: Phooey on that! Anybody who fasts all the time the way he does is probably possessed by the devil. (In the ancient world, excessive fasting was regarded as a sign of demon possession. It could well be that when Luke writes that Mary Magdalene had had seven demons driven out of her, it means she was severely anorexic! And we could have an interesting discussion about whether anorexia is, in fact, a sign of being possessed by a demon of our own time, one that preys on young women and whispers to them that they are ugly and unworthy.)

At any rate, the people in first-century Palestine had another leader whom they could have followed. This guy Jesus, he wasn’t into fasting. Far from it! He went around eating with just anybody who asked him, and he liked a good glass of wine or beer as much as the next guy. So were they happy with that? Are you kidding me? “Just look at the way that guy eats! It’s disgusting! And did you see how much wine he brought to that wedding feast in Cana? And besides all that—look at the people he pals around with! Prostitutes, tax collectors, smelly fishermen, Zealot revolutionaries—there’s not a respectable person in his entourage, except that nice Judas fellow, who knows how to take care of his money and doesn’t throw it around.”

We are no different; we are so conditioned to suspicion, to a negative response to anyone and everyone who offers herself or himself as a leader—maybe it’s the constant political campaigns, or the miasma that has fallen over political life. But it seems that whoever runs for public office nowadays, or, for that matter, accepts leadership in the church, might as well just paint a target on her face and another one on her backside. We have been hoodwinked too many times, maybe. But how do you know when you’ve got the real thing—would you even recognize it, if your default response is always negative?

Jesus’ answer to that is: “wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” He reminds his hearers of what is written in the book of Wisdom (a fairly recent best-seller in his time). The bride and groom who were married here at St. Matthew’s yesterday chose a reading to remember Lady Wisdom. She is described as “a spotless mirror of the working of God” (7:26b) and “an initiate in the knowledge of God” (8:4). In the older book of Proverbs, Wisdom cries out to the people in the street: “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight” (Prov 9:5-6).

Luke hears the saying a little differently: instead of “Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds,” he writes “Wisdom is vindicated by all her children.” Putting the two together, we may say that Jesus claims our recognition, our trust, and our discipleship because he is Wisdom’s child, and we know he is Wisdom’s child because he does the deeds of Wisdom. He invites all who will come to him to rest in his presence, to be fed and calmed, to live in trust and in companionship with one another, not judging one another or feeling superior to one another. Such are Wisdom’s children.

And because we are called to be Wisdom’s children, to “walk in the way of insight,” we should not mistake what Jesus is saying when he thanks God “because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” This is not an anti-intellectual statement. At the other place in the gospel where Matthew refers to those who are “wise” or “sensible” he names them along with prophets as those God has sent to Israel (Matt 23:34). This is not Forrest Gump spirituality! Both the wise and the simple go astray when they assume they have knowledge, and then misapply it (for example, by taking a negative view of both Jesus and John the Baptizer because neither of them lives up to some image in their own heads of who the perfect savior or leader would be). “Infants” also appear once again in Matthew’s gospel, when they raise their voices in praise of Jesus as he heals the blind and the lame in the Temple (Matt 21:16). Children are pictured here as innocent, people who know what they hear and see and are not too “sophisticated” to give their hearts.

As we endure endless squabbles in the political world, and—alas—in the church as well, let’s keep this gospel in mind. Let us seek, and not be discouraged in seeking, for leaders and companions who are Wisdom’s children. We will be on our guard against false prophets and false messiahs, to be sure. But let us not succumb to cynicism. Let us pray, now more than ever, for our leaders in public life and for our bishops at Lambeth, that through their efforts and God’s grace we may indeed see Wisdom vindicated by her deeds manifest in the lives of all her children. Amen.

Just imagine this: Suppose that, when you have lived a very long time and been married for almost as long—like Michael and Ruth, or David and Virginia—someone in the family wants to write a book about you, for the family and anyone else who’s interested. And so you sit down with this young grandchild or cousin, and you describe what it’s like to live in intimate, loving communion with your best friend for many, many years, and all the joys it brings, and how that love has made it possible for you to share your lives with your children and grandchildren.
And then suppose the book arrives, and it’s a scientific study of how your diet and exercise patterns have helped you to live such a long life, and a psychological examination of what makes some people compatible, and a treatise on family systems and how they apply to your particular case! Would you be p.o.’d?
Well, I wonder how God feels on Trinity Sunday (and all the time, really), when we treat the so-called doctrine of the Holy Trinity that very same way! Because the story of the Trinity is the story of God’s life: what it’s like to be God, and how God shares—or tries to share—that very God-life with all of us!
You know how we say to the one we love: “I couldn’t live without you?” Well, for God that is literally true: The Father is the Father and the Son is the Son because they live in and with and for each other in love. They live together or not at all, and even that word together is not strong enough to describe their life; even saying “their” life gives the wrong idea, because with them there really is no “their” there, no “I” over against “you.” Their relationship is not “I and thou” but a mutual “I-for-you.” It is, as the English Benedictine Sebastian Moore says, “relationship at infinity.” We only call the Father “Father” and the Son “Son” because those words express a relationship, a relationship of equality and mutuality.
We ourselves cannot say truly “I couldn’t live without you” to another human being, because we know that we can, and we must. Probably the only thing that keeps a long, faithful, deeply committed marriage from being the kind of mutual relationship that images the Trinity is that we know that, in all likelihood, one partner will die before the other, and the other has to be able to go on navigating life afterward. That, and the fact that in our brokenness we are incapable of being completely and equally each-for-the-other; there’s always the danger that one will dominate, and the other will disappear as a person. That kind of relationship is deeply unhealthy, and knowing about such relationships is what makes us uneasy (makes me uneasy, anyway) about Buddhist-type notions of the annihilation of the self as an ideal to be sought after.
But this is what God is trying to show us, in revealing to us that God is Trinity: That “relationship at infinity” is not like that. It doesn’t suck one partner in; it instead expands outward, explosively so: For the love that unites Father and Son in infinite relationship is the same love that desired a universe into being, that broods over every rock and plant and insect in tender care. It is the same love that overwhelms and transforms our lives, if we will let it. We call it the Holy Spirit. It is so much a part of the relationship of Father and Son that it is another “thou” between them, and between them and us.
Sebastian Moore also writes:
we desire to be
desired by one we desire
love wants to happen

desire is not sin
but love trying to happen
we are wired for love

So when we baptize a Christian, we anoint her with the oil of chrism, the special sacramental oil that, with the water, signifies the powerful love that is the Holy Spirit, and we say: “You are sealed with the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” You have been brought into relationship with God, the same Father, Son, and Holy Spirit whose name was pronounced over you as the water was poured, and with all the people Christ has claimed for his own.
Here is our basic mistake as preachers, teachers, and evangelists: We address ourselves to individuals. We are, in these last days, so obsessed with individual rights and individual identity that we have apparently forgotten that we are called into life through relationship, and called into divine life through relationship—we are called as people who are to-others. To-others.
“No man is an island,” wrote John Donne. Of course not; but we have forgotten that. We have forgotten that a person is a relationship in the making. God is relationship made, relationship infinite, relationship not only within but outward. But it is only when the Holy Spirit, the power that draws us into relationship, succeeds in transforming our lives—it is only when we come up out of the font, shake the water out of our eyes and see—that we can begin to live fully as the persons we are called to become, always to become.
Love wants to happen. Desire is love trying to happen. Our lives in the church are a daily encounter with desire inviting us to love, to be loved, to become love. At the altar, whenever we come, we meet the one who says: I am for you. Take, eat, live.

Have you ever seen a valley of dry bones? I have! I have been in the most desolate valley of the world—the valley of the Dead Sea. This valley is not what we usually think of when we think about a desert: for we think of a desert as having cactus and sage brush, tumbleweed and prairie dogs, lizards and snakes and jackrabbits. Up to the time of Jeremiah, in fact, the Dead Sea valley wasn't even this kind of valley, not this kind of desert—but it was a lush land where the crocodile and the alligator, even the hippopotamus , all wallowed in warm water. They're all gone now, and their bones lie there. CAN THESE BONES LIVE? For nowadays this valley is dead. It is a noxious, vile-smelling place that assaults your senses with shimmering heat waves and sulphurous stinks. No wonder the ancient Biblical writers located Sodom and Gomorrah, and even Hell itself, down at the end of the Dead Sea.

The Dead Sea. Vultures circle the updrafts searching, searching for any living thing that stumbles into the area. They know they have but to wait a while and then they can glide down to peck out glazed eyes, and pick flesh from the bones that will soon bleach stark white in the searing sun.

CAN THESE BONES LIVE?

My brother worked for many years with Louis Paul Jonas, the great taxider¬mist. From this man's small workshop in the Bronx have come the habitat groups for most of the major museums of the world. How I used to delight in being allowed to go with my brother some Saturdays! I can close my eyes and smell the hide-curing room now. There were great piles of bones from Africa, Asia, with stacks of hides - zebra, wildebeest, lion, giraffe, dic dic.

What a marvelous process they had! Bone was fastened to bone to restore the basic skeleton; clay was modeled upon them; and this was all overlaid with plaster-of-Paris which formed a mold into which paper maché was pressed. The end result, when once the skins had been put on the paper maché model, would be complete to every fold and wrinkle, and would be so life-like that you could almost see the skin twitch to get rid of a fly.

If you are ever in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and can go to their Museums of Natural History - do so. In the Philadelphia museum you go to the second floor and turn right to the African Hall. There as you turn into the hall you will be face to face suddenly with a South African cape buffalo. His head is lowered, and his eyes have a red gleam of anger, and one foot is raised to paw the ground before he charges you. "Son of man, can these bones live?" Almost!

Is THIS what Ezekiel is talking about? No. Ezekiel is using picture language to describe to his people what our generation once called "the death of God." He was talking to a people who had given up hope, to a people in deep despair, to a people who FELT as if they lived in such a valley as I described. For Israel's hope had been centered in the Kingdom of Judah, in the City of Jerusalem. Their God had been actively present and they had known just where to find him: sitting in the ark of the covenant inside the Holy of Holies in the Temple. It must have been nice to always know where to find your God!

But what had happened to this people? The Babylonians had swooped into the Near East and conquered them; had driven them into exile; and had sacked and demolished the Holy City and the Temple. The present city of Jerusalem is built upon piles and piles of potsherds - bits and pieces of the Jerusalem that once was, with no two pieces big enough to cover the palm of my hand. Talk about hopes being shattered! That's what happened to Israel's God. For when the Temple was smashed to bits and put to the torch, what happened to God who sat in the Ark? He was smashed and went up in smoke along with the Temple. Is it any wonder that the Psalmist wrote:

"By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For they that carried us away captive required of us a song: and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" (Psalm 137)
No wonder Ezekiel spoke of "dry bones". No wonder they sighed deeply and said: "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost: we are clean cut off."

So a people in a distant land long ago sat by a river and wept over their exile; a people long gone once felt utterly cut off, once felt they lived among dry bones - what is that to us? We don't live in a valley of dry bones - we live among the Green Mountains of Vermont! Green. Lush. The dairy center of the land that overflows with abundance and loveliness, as do our lives. Our God isn't dead - is He? We aren't in exile - are we?

Maybe Ezekiel wasn't talking about LITERALLY having dry bones shuffle about and join together to come alive. Maybe he was talking with the sort of imagery we use when we talk about a story "coming alive." A few years ago David and I went to New York City, to Lincoln Center, to see the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Boris Goudenov. Before we went we played the records and we read the score, but they were very dry bones. Then, at Lincoln Center, those marvelous star-burst chandeliers began to lift to the ceiling as they dimmed, the oboe began a haunting melody, and there before us was Moscow's Red Square with snow falling onto the Kremlin walls and the cobblestones. (And I heard a rattling and some bones began to shuffle together!). Then onto the square strode Boris Kristoff - six foot eight, all clad in shimmering, jewel-bespangled gold robes - and THERE HE WAS! BORIS!

Is THIS what Ezekiel was telling the people of Israel in their Exile? Is he telling them that God is going to take them to Lincoln Center - to their Jerusalem - and breathe life into them? If God, through the prophesizing of Ezekiel, can bring these dry bones to life, maybe hope stirs - maybe they had only THOUGHT their God was dead. If these bones can live, if their exile can end, if this God-forsaken people can come alive - then hope is re-born and God is not dead after all.

But you, and me, living in the midst of Vermont's Green Mountains, are not in exile! We haven't been living in a valley of dry bones, and our God isn't dead. Or is this not quite true? WHAT ARE YOUR DRY BONES? WHAT ARE YOUR DRY BONES?

The New Testament lesson for today also speaks of the death of hope - Mary and Martha's brother Lazarus was DEAD. He was BURIED. With him was buried a loving relationship. Lazarus was DEAD and he'd been BURIED. When Jesus finally arrived and asked to have the tomb opened, Martha demurred and bluntly said "Lord by this time he stinketh; for he hath been dead four days." You can't get any deader than that. Yet, even as the word of God, spoken by Ezekiel, breathed new life into the dry bones of Israel's hope - so the word of God called: "Come forth!" and new life was given to what had been dead.

WHAT ARE YOUR DRY BONES? WHAT ARE YOUR DRY BONES? A hope that dies? A marriage that dried up? A son or daughter or friend who left for a far country and never returned? Have you perhaps lost hope that YOU are of any worth, that you can be loved or accepted by anyone, including God? Have you given up hope that some relationship you once valued can ever have life again?

Israel, cut off, lamenting its exile and sure that their God was dead, was assured that they would be brought back to their land, that their God lived and would keep His promise and would end their alienation, their cut-off-ness, their exile.

And we? Do we have any of these promises or are we and our God dead? Do we continue to live in countless valleys of dry bones, cut off and alienated from those we love?

For our God, like the one of the Israelites, DIED. Their God went up in smoke with the Temple. Our God went up on a cross and the Temple veil was rent asunder. He was lifted up and he died. Our creed MAKES NO BONES ABOUT IT; it says the stark words: "He was crucified, dead, buried. You can't get and deader than that.

Let's nail this down hard. See him? There on a cross. Crucified. Dead. Utterly forsaken. Remember? "They all forsook him and fled." Talk about hope LOST. That's a valley of dry bones for you! "Son of man, can these bones live?"

YES. For God raised up the one who was dead, called him from his grave, breathed his spirit into those bones - so that we might know that THERE ARE NO BONES SO DRY THAT GOD CANNOT GIVE LIFE.

Not just the sort of life that is some hide stretched upon some bones. Not just some jeweled robes put upon a singer. Not just the restoration of physical life. But the kind of life that shouts: "I am accepted! I am loved!" : that kind of life calls us out of all our valleys that are filled with the dry bones of dead relationships, out of our tombs of dry hopes. New life—given by the one who died that we might have life and have it more abundantly