Welcome to St. Michael’s!

This is the second Sunday in a row that the Gospel lesson features a healing, and not just any healing, but a healing done by Jesus on—what else?—the Sabbath day.  Last Sunday we heard of the woman who had, Luke tells us, “a spirit of infirmity” for 18 years; she could not stand straight. Jesus healed her immediately. There were those who objected to this healing on the grounds that it was work, and work ought not to be done on the Sabbath. After all, the law says, “Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates.” Healing, they argued, is work; ergo, no healing on the Sabbath. Jesus did not challenge God’s law, but their interpretation of it. He asked them, on the Sabbath do you untie your beasts and lead them to water? Yes of course, and even your beasts of burden enjoy their Sabbath rest, as the law requires. Why then should not this daughter of Abraham be released from Satan’s yoke of affliction on this, the day on which God himself rested? In another place, Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27). In other words, God established the law of the Sabbath so that we human beings could set aside our toil one day out of seven, in order to enter the rest of the One in whose image we were created. I know it’s dangerous to “get political” in a sermon, but I do feel I have to say something about this. As our society has abandoned Holy Scripture and the Ten Commandments as a “norming norm,” the sabbath rest has become a luxury for the well-to-do. It’s Labor Day weekend, when government workers at least still get the day off to remember the humane victories of the labor movement, such as, for instance, the 40-hour week, the weekend (a secular Sabbath), and the family wage. Yet those hard-won protections have largely evaporated in today’s world of 24x7 work. Even now, on a Sunday morning, retail and restaurant workers have begun their shifts, and delivery vehicles ply our neighborhood streets. Wouldn’t it be better, more humane, to give them all the day off, or at very least, the morning? That Amazon package could wait a few hours—it really could! I’ve always been personally troubled by that venerable American tradition practiced even in the most religious parts of our nation, the tradition of going out to eat after church. It seems to me to be founded on the presumption that Sunday churchgoing is an activity of the leisured classes, while service workers are expected to be at their posts. Yet why shouldn’t we go out to eat on other days of the week and on Sundays entertain one another in our homes? Or perhaps, even more radically, on Sundays we could seek opportunities to minister to those who ordinarily wait on us. But more on hospitality anon. As the fine old lady said when the minister turned his attention to the sin of gossip, “He’s quit preaching, now he’s meddling!” I won’t apologize for my political opinions, but neither will I offer any excuse for my own hypocrisy in the many times I’ve shopped or dined out on a Sunday. I’m reaching for more of a cultural observation and a challenge, which I think is the real challenge of applying this commandment of Sabbath-keeping in an authentically Christian way: How ought we to use the freedom we have as Christians, not merely to enjoy ourselves, but to help others also enjoy the freedom and rest of Christ’s Kingdom? We often forget that the message Moses brought to Pharaoh was not simply a message of deliverance from slavery, “let my people go”; it was a message about God’s sabbath rest, a rest that is necessary for God’s people to realize their identity. “Let my people go, that they may serve me.” The sabbath is not simply a day for acts of individual piety (for those so inclined). It is, in Jesus’s teaching, a day for social justice, for liberation, for inviting our fellow man and all of creation to share the freedom and the rest promised to God’s people, and by extension, to all of creation. Now the hospital does not close on Sunday, nor do even our volunteer firefighters fail to answer calls on the Lord’s Day. This again is a right application of the principle. The Sabbath is not a day to shirk our obligations to others or to avoid helping those in need. Rather, because we are free in Christ, we may use our Christian freedom, especially on this day, to do good. With that somewhat lengthy preamble, we have the context necessary to understand what is happening in today’s Gospel lesson. Again, it takes place on the Sabbath. This time the location is a dinner to which Jesus and presumably many others, anybody who was anybody in this town or village, was invited. Here Jesus makes himself—how else can we put this?—the “skunk at the garden party,” the disruptive and ultimately unwelcome visitor, embarrassing the other guests and even his host. It reminds me of nothing so much as that tour-de-force essay of Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” (New York magazine, June 8, 1970) reflecting on the infamous occasion when Leonard Bernstein and his wife hosted Black Panther activists at a soiree: “Lenny is a short, trim man, and yet he always seems tall. It is his head. He has a noble head, with a face that is at once sensitive and rugged, and a full stand of iron-gray hair, with sideburns, all set off nicely by the Chinese yellow of the room. His success radiates from his eyes and his smile with a charm that illustrates Lord Jersey’s adage that ‘contrary to what the Methodists tell us, money and success are good for the soul.’ Lenny may be 51, but he is still the Wunderkind of American music. Everyone says so. . . . How natural that he should stand here in his own home radiating the charm and grace that make him an easy host for leaders of the oppressed. How ironic that the next hour should prove so shattering for this egregio maestro!” I wonder how the Pharisee who invited Jesus to dinner thought the evening would go. Surely he did not expect this frontal assault on his social position and generous hospitality. Like the Panthers, Jesus shamelessly and even tastelessly takes advantage, turning the entire occasion into a living parable, skewering the pretenses of the host and his guests and reducing them to dumbfounded foils and object lessons at their own expense—if, we may hope, also for their own good. The first set piece is of course this healing of the man with dropsy, which we usually today call “edema,” a chronic swelling caused by fluid retention, itself often a symptom of other serious health conditions. It’s a problem that even with modern medicine can be difficult to cure. (I’m not an expert, I just looked it up.) Now, how did this invalid get there? Did he just show up? Was he invited? Was the whole thing an attempt to set Jesus up, to see what he would do? Did the people doubt whether he could heal this man, or were they hoping Jesus would seem to violate the Sabbath by performing the miracle? Nobody says anything. But they’re watching. Before he ever says or does anything, Jesus is under suspicion, under surveillance. Jesus has to clear his throat and identify the elephant in the room himself. The host and others gathered are Pharisees, experts in the law. So Jesus invites them to offer a legal opinion. “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?” Nobody is willing to commit himself one way or another. No one will answer him yes or no, or even propose a distinction or clarification. Apparently the memo has gone out: do not engage with this man. So Jesus, when he sees that nobody will answer him, according to the scriptures, “he took [the man] and healed him and let him go.” The miracle of healing itself is so ordinary to Luke the Evangelist that it hardly rates a mention. But Jesus isn’t done. After the healed man has left, Jesus poses a second, rhetorical question to the cowardly legal experts, or perhaps to the assembly in general. “Which of you, having a son, or an ox, who has fallen into a well, will not immediately pull him out on the Sabbath day?” Again, no response. How could they respond, except to agree with Jesus that healing on the Sabbath does not necessarily violate the Law and that it is meet and right that God’s anointed, the Messiah, should do such things! The second episode follows immediately on the first. Jesus observes the behavior of the guests, jockeying for the best seats, the seats closest to the head table and thus reflective of status and proximity to wealth and power. He then offer some advice that sounds very much like what we heard in that very short reading in Proverbs. “It is better to be told ‘Come up here,’ than to be put lower in the presence of the prince.” Good standard advice for the ambitious but wise young person. Don’t put yourself forward, let others recognize you, etc. The kind of advice your mom would give you. Or is it? Remember that all of Jesus’s parables have to do with the kingdom of God. Notice the scenario Jesus offers: “a marriage feast.” For those who have ears to hear, he is not speaking of an earthly social occasion, but of the Supper of the Lamb at the end of days, the feast that has even now begun in the heavenly realm, the feast to which, in a few minutes, we will spiritually ascend and participate in as we celebrate of the Holy Eucharist. Well then, if this is a parable of the Kingdom, we should take the host to be Jesus himself, who said that in his kingdom “many who are first will be last, and the last first.” The social order and hierarchies and ranks of the kingdom of God are not like ours. It seems that money and success are not good for the soul after all. Those who are wealthy and powerful on earth had best in fact start practicing humility and self-abasement, because they’re going to need it if they hope to be happy in God’s kingdom. Finally, Jesus tells another parable that seems to be aimed at his host. “When you give a dinner or a banquet”—again, this sounds like it’s going to be more standard, proverbial type of advice. But Jesus quickly veers into the unexpected: “. . . do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid.” Oh no! Wouldn’t want to be repaid now, would we? Really, what is he talking about? Of course we want to be in good with our rich friends, of course we want to be repaid, isn’t that what building social capital is all about? But again, this is a parable of the upside-down Kingdom of God. What Jesus is showing us is that we have the opportunity even in this life to begin living as if we are already in his kingdom. The Kingdom of God is not some far-off place and time. The Kingdom is here, the kingdom is now! And what we do here and now does indeed have an impact upon our future standing in the world to come, as Jesus says: “You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” Here, I think we may return to the theme with which I began this sermon. Jesus says, “When you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you.” I spoke of how God’s sabbath rest cannot be kept to ourselves but must be shared with others. Jesus himself is the exemplar of this way of life. In his earthly ministry, he did not seek the attention of the rich and well-regarded, or the powerful and influential. He addressed himself to those who had none of these advantages, who brought him only their need. And he did for them more than they ever thought he could. This is how we too must approach our Savior. We do not come bearing gifts, hoping to be accepted for our good works, or our excellent character, or our standing in the world. We come to him simply because he offers in abundance all that we need and lack in ourselves: pardon for sinners, healing for the sick, strength for the faint of heart, peace for the dying. We acknowledge ourselves poor, maimed, lame, and blind, yet he is our life and our good portion, now and in the age to come.

If you look on the top row of the windows there in the back of the church (feel free to turn around) you will see a remarkable series of images. The repeated motif is volcanic mountains.  On the left the volcanoes evoke the earth in its infancy, still emerging as it were from the primordial chaos, as sea and sky bring forth life and dry land emerges from the waters at God’s command. The next image brings together two images of covenant and judgment. Noah is symbolized by the Ark, through which a righteous remnant of mankind was saved through the waters of the great Flood. Moses comes down from Sinai, the mountain of God, with the two tablets of stone containing the Law, in that awe-inspiring scene remembered by the Letter to the Hebrews: “So terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear.’” The final scenes envision the destructive power of nature, of mankind, and of final judgment. But the writer to the Hebrews tells us (you can turn back around now) that we have not arrived at any such fearsome place or destination. Not pictured in our windows, but very much in view, is another sort of mountain: “mount Zion,” “the city of the living God,” “the heavenly Jerusalem.” This mountain is our refuge from the eruptions and upheavals of the world, which Jesus said are the birth pangs of his Kingdom, and which, we may be sure, will continue until all things are made subject to his rule. Mount Zion is the place where heaven and earth meet in peace and joy, reconciled through him. See who is here: “innumerable angels in festal gathering . . . the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven . . . a Judge who is God over all . . . the spirits of just men made perfect” (the saints triumphant). And Jesus, the Mediator of the new covenant, offering his righteous blood not as an accusation, but a propitiation for sins. But who else is here? Why, we also are here, the preacher tells us. Can you believe it? You and me, entering the heavenly temple, washed in the Redeemer’s blood and clothed with his own merits, taking our places with the angels and saints! Heady stuff. This is not just what happens to us when we die—when we hope to join the throng of those “spirits of just men made perfect.” It’s talking about us now, here in this mortal life on earth. How is that possible? The Letter to the Hebrews was written to Jewish believers in Jesus who were going through a hard time. They had been rejected by their Jewish communities, put out of the synagogues, perhaps even shunned by their families, all because they believed in Jesus as the Son of God and the hope of Israel. It felt to them like they had lost their connection with their heritage, the religious and cultural life of their people. But the Letter to the Hebrews reminds them that they have something much better than the Temple and its sacrifices which are merely a dim reflection of heaven: they have in Jesus a connection to heaven itself. They are not missing out on God’s covenant promises; they are at the center of his plan for the salvation of the world. I want you to think for a moment about how important it is to belong. We are not made to be isolated individuals. We need to be connected, to have a home, a people, a family; not just the weak ties of voluntary associations but the strong ties of blood, of close friendship, of place, and of religion. Those who lose these connections are unmoored; they have lost a great deal of what it means to be human. On relocating to Albany I experienced a strong sense of loneliness. Once I realized this I was able to reflect on why I felt this way. I spent my formative years in remarkably strong communities; family, church, school, and work all significantly overlapping to form a close web of relationships and meaning which was very important for my sense of identity and significance; in short, belonging. I could say that I miss my home. But it’s less about the places themselves. I miss the human communities that fostered me. One of my big goals in life is to find that sense of belonging again. But many of you can relate, I’m sure. I experienced this on moving across the country, but you can lose that connection even while staying in the same place. As life goes on, time takes much that was once familiar and dear to us, especially those people who are such an important part of out sense of belonging, our living connection to this world. I often meet people who remember the St. Michael’s of their youth vividly and fondly. I think it was a community, perhaps for some the only one, where they felt that they truly belonged. For many it seems to have left a void that has never been filled by anything. I wonder if for some that sense of belonging was so strong, and the loss of it so keenly felt that it has prevented them from ever feeling “at home” since. Anyway, I think the scripture gives all of us in whatever circumstances a direction for hope. There is a place and a people with whom we truly belong. It’s not my family, it’s not my hometown, it’s not even my local church, though all of these earthly experiences point us there. The Letter to the Hebrews encourages its original recipients that they have a share of belonging in “a kingdom that cannot be shaken.” This kingdom, as I have said, is not just the matter of future hope. The preacher speaks in the present tense as of something they already possess and participate. So we understand that “our citizenship is in heaven,” as Paul wrote to the Philippians. But how is that manifested right now? It is primarily in the church’s worship that we find our real and tangible connection with God’s Kingdom. It is said that we live in a consumeristic age. Churches feel the need to compete for people’s attention, not just with other churches but with all the other alternatives the world offers for things that create a sense of meaning and belonging. And so we often frame the question of worship like, what can we do or “offer” to “bring in” more people to our worship services. This word “worship” can be misunderstood. In many churches today, the worship service is produced and finely tuned to create a highly charged and compelling sense of energy, emotion, and catharsis. This is accomplished by technological means, with loud music, dramatic lighting and projections, not to mention fog machines and other special effects. It was very common for people in this milieu to use the word “worship” to refer to the subjective experience engendered by these techniques. The Temple worship experience of ancient Israel 2,000 years ago was just as immersive and overwhelming, perhaps even more so. Noisy, smoky, visceral (in the literal sense of people were dealing with the entrails of sacrificed animals). Lots of blood. Lots of noise too—you could probably hear the sounds of choirs chanting, animals, crowds of people. The smell also must have been overwhelming with smoke of burning fat and roasting meat, like a massive BBQ, not to mention the incense. This kind of spectacle is what “worship” meant to most people, whether Jews or pagans, in the ancient world, which, after all, was also a society driven by consumer choice. Some things don’t change too much, after all. But when the preacher to the Hebrews speaks of “acceptable worship” he means quite a different thing, something that has little to do with the outward trappings of what is commonly regarded as worship either in his own day or ours. His hearers have been called out of that, because the one thing needful is not there. The Temple continued to put on an impressive religious show for a time, but God had left the building. Jesus, he says elsewhere in the letter, “suffered outside the camp,” and so even as these believers in Jesus find themselves excluded from the life and worship practices of their community, they may offer worship that is acceptable to God like nothing else, because it is centered on their crucified and risen Lord. It is in seeking this path and offering “acceptable worship” through him that true belonging is found. This is what we do in the Eucharist. “Lift up your hearts”—what does this mean? It does not simply mean, be happy, with a smile on your face and a song in your heart. The “uplift” is more literal; in that moment the church is raised up to heaven, the place where we truly belong. Sometimes in the sacrament we think of Jesus “coming down” upon our altars, and this is not wrong, but it is just as true and perhaps even better to say that in these rites we are “lifted up” to the heavenly places where he offers the one, true, pure, immortal sacrifice on our behalf. We receive the Body and Blood of Christ because we are spiritually present in that place where he lives and reigns eternally with the Father. Heed, then, the preacher’s warning: “Let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire.”