Pentecost 16 Year C Proper 21 . Jeremiah 32: 1-3a, 6-                                       

A sermon from the Rev. Linda Mackie Griggs

On Rosh Hashanah 1944 a shofar was blown, as it always has been, and as it will be tonight, as part of the observance of the Jewish New Year. What made the cry of this particular ram’s horn so significant was that it took place at Auschwitz. The story goes that Chaskel Tydor, a prisoner in charge of assigning work details at the concentration camp, contrived to have a group of prisoners sent on an assignment far enough away that they could pray without being caught by the guards. And apparently, miraculously, someone had smuggled a shofar—a ram’s horn– into the camp and was able to take it with him and blow it for their clandestine High Holy Days celebration.

At Auschwitz. Amidst the terror, the death, the grief and the desolation—the utter insanity of those days in that place; the shofar was heard; the persistent cry of hope.

This is a story that resonates with anyone who has forgotten, or fears forgetting, what hope looks like. When the view of the future appears chaotic virtually into perpetuity, as it does lately, the knots in the stomach seem constant. We each have our own litany of monsters under the bed that keep us awake at night, or distracted during the day. Whether personal, political, ecological, or just generally existential, there doesn’t seem to be enough anesthetic to combat the overall anxiety that many people are confronting in these days. And when you go to the doctor for a physical, as I did last week, and are handed a depression-screening questionnaire as a matter of routine form-filling, you know, at the least (the very VERY least) that you’re not alone.

Someone said to me over coffee one day: “I don’t know if I have hope anymore.” A few days later, another person said, “Please, talk about hope!” Okay. So let’s talk about Jeremiah.

Biblical scholar John Collins writes that Jeremiah confounded everyone because when they were trying to be hopeful he was all doom and gloom, and when they were in despair he had words of hope. Sounds like a prophet to me.

He is one of the Major Prophets, along with Isaiah and Ezekiel, with 51 chapters of compiled sermons, signs and oracles, poems, essays, biographical narrative, condemnation, complaint, and, ultimately, eventually, words of comfort.

As I mentioned the other week, Jeremiah lived and prophesied at a pivotal time, as Judah was being besieged and ultimately destroyed by the Babylonians, with many of her people taken into exile for the next generation. Jeremiah warned, over and over again, that Judah’s worship of idols and disregard for the poor and marginalized would have serious consequences—which, by the way, is what our Gospel lesson emphasizes today. So as Babylon came knocking at the gates, Jeremiah said that God’s justice was being meted out to Jerusalem and Judah.

The thing is, he said this directly to King Zedekiah, and told him that under the circumstances the best thing to do was just surrender. Which would explain why, as our story opens, Jeremiah was euphemistically ‘under the care of the palace guard.’ Less euphemistically, he was in jail for treason.

Jeremiah’s entire prophetic vocation, begun reluctantly as a young man and pursued through years of hardship, ridicule, persecution and depression— had come to a head as Babylon tightened the noose around Judah and he himself was imprisoned.

It looked like a pretty hopeless situation, for both Judah and Jeremiah. But God would not be silent. God’s call is persistent.

God tells Jeremiah that his cousin Hanamel was on the way with a proposition. He would be asking Jeremiah to buy his land in the town of Anathoth. Jeremiah would have understood the nature of this deal because it involved his responsibility according to the right of redemption—when a relative was at risk of losing property the next of kin was obligated to buy it—redeem it—to keep the land in the family. But just because Jeremiah understood his obligation wouldn’t necessarily mean that he would be excited at the prospect.

This is because the saying that a prophet is not welcome in his hometown might actually have originated with Jeremiah. The last time he’d been in Anathoth the people there—these were his neighbors and the folks he had grown up with– had tried to kill him because of his prophecies.

So. He’s in jail. In a city about to be destroyed. Being asked to redeem a parcel of land in a town that despises him. Just another day in the life of a prophet.

“For thus says the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.”

Does Jeremiah blink? Does he flinch? Hardly. He buys the land, as he has been told to do. He does it publically, according to custom and proper procedure; documented (in duplicate), signed, witnessed, sealed, placed in the equivalent of a safe deposit box, money weighed and exchanged. Signed, sealed, and delivered. Words of hope in spite of all appearances. Punching despair in the nose.

Whenever I read this passage I am both amused and bemused by the ability of a real estate deal to move and inspire. It’s just a land transaction, for goodness sake! But it’s a land transaction with resurrection implications. It is God’s promise to God’s people that life will emerge from the ashes of despair and destruction. Life will win, because God is faithful.That’s Hope.

What makes Jeremiah’s hope more sustaining than wishful thinking, which is what hope is sometimes confused with?

Hope is public. The community around Jeremiah witnessed his act of faith, with their eyes and their signatures. This was not a solitary act; it was communal. It involved accountability. An act of hope will not let you off the hook.

Hope is courageous. Jeremiah’s transaction was undertaken against the odds—a statement that, in spite of evidence to the contrary he was staking his claim on the future rather than conserving his resources for the short term. An act of hope calls you to dig deep and find inner resources you didn’t know you had.  But you do.

Hope is risky. God called Jeremiah to invest his faith in a place that had rejected him and betrayed a lifelong relationship. Not only that, it was effectively in a war zone. Who buys a house that’s on fire? Someone who has faith in rebuilding it from the ashes. An act of hope can look just a little bit crazy.

Hope is incarnational. God asked Jeremiah to do something and to ask others to join him. Writing, witnessing, signing, sealing, enclosing, weighing. Parchment, ink, wax, pottery, silver, land. Physical actions involving tangible things. An act of hope demands skin in the game.

And most importantly and foundationally, Hope is rooted in identity. Jeremiah acted as one who knew who and whose he was. He was the child of a God whose call into renewed relationship comes again and again in spite of humanity’s tendency for brokenness and infidelity. He was one of a people loved into being, liberated and called into covenant relationship with a God who had promised never to fail them. An act of hope is rooted in our identity as beloved of a God who never gives up on his Creation.

Hope challenges us to remember who we are!

It doesn’t have to be a land deal in a war zone. It doesn’t have to be the blowing of a shofar in a concentration camp.

It can be holding a cardboard sign that says, “There is no Plan(et) B” in New York, or Sidney, or Providence while marching with millions of young people worldwide. That’s public.

It can be in the passion and indignation of a sixteen-year-old with her cry of, “How dare you!” calling out the climate change complacency of the powerful in the halls of the powerful, in spite of efforts to sideline, demean and discredit her. That’s courageous.

It can be feeding the hungry homeless in the streets or giving sanctuary to migrants even as the authorities warn of legal consequences. That’s risky.

It is wherever music and art stir the soul, wherever the sound of laughter lifts the heart, wherever an act of kindness heals the broken-hearted. That’s incarnational.

It is whenever two or three are gathered together in God’s name to be fed by word and sacrament. That’s who we are. The Body of Christ; sent into the world to heal and to make whole.

Hope isn’t as easy or as platitudinous as wishing. It requires us to stake our claim against despair and sound the proverbial ram’s horn of renewal. Hope lays claim on our energy, our patience, and our faith.

But, as long as we remember who we are, we choose Hope. 

Luke 16 1-13

The parable of the dishonest manager is perhaps one of Jesus’ most confusing teachings.

A steward, the manager of an entire estate, becomes suspected by his employer of defrauding him. The steward, anticipating the likelihood of dismissal, prepares for the prospect of a grim future in which he will not only become unemployed but because of reputational damage, like as not be unemployable. So, he sets about renegotiating contracts with his employer’s debtors; reducing the amounts owed in one case by 30% and in another as much as 50%. What attracts our curiosity is that these are huge margins for debt relief; perhaps an indication of interest charges that would excite any modern payday lender.

The puzzling aspect of this parable is why his employer commends the steward for his foresighted shrewdness? Can it be that he’s so impressed by the steward’s entrepreneurial enterprise that he doesn’t notice or care that the steward’s actions have reduced his own profit margins?

Jesus then commends the steward’s actions, telling is disciples to do likewise. Further puzzlement. Can Jesus really be advocating sharp practice as acceptable behavior for discipleship?

Having appeared to commend sharp practice: make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth – Jesus then extols the virtues of faithfulness and trustworthiness – culminating in the famous statement: you cannot serve God and wealth –(at the same time).

This is a parable of the dishonest steward is difficult for us to fathom partly because the elegance of the NRSV translation. For instance take: the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their generation than the children of light – elegantly distances us from its core meaning. Eugene Peterson in his translation in The Message gets more to the heart of the matter: Streetwise people are smarter in this regard than law-abiding citizens. They are on constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits.

Jesus is therefore telling his disciples: I want you to be smart in the same way – [but be] smart for what is right – using every adversity to stimulate you to creative survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so you’ll live, really live, and not complacently just get by on good behavior.

Peterson’s colloquial directness cuts through the elegance of the NRSV to disturb us even more. Where the NRSV’s elegant translates Jesus words as: you cannot serve God and wealth – in Peterson’s translation becomes: You can’t serve both God and the Bank.

Jesus’ address the complexities of conflicting loyalties. Yet for a community like St Martin’s, his identifying the conflict as between God and the Bank or wealth, is somewhat disturbing in more ways than one. Is Jesus really saying that you cannot be Christian and also have a very healthy bank balance at the same time? With an eye to an eventual capital campaign at St Martin’s, I’ve a very strong investment is hoping this is not what Jesus is saying!

The key to interpreting parables, I think, is to allow them to be as complex as they actually are, and then wait to see what they cause us to wonder about.  This one makes me wonder about how it is that we actually live together.

Richard Swanson

The parable of the dishonest steward reminds us that Jesus was not naïve in his understanding of how the world works. Using Swanson’s idea of parables making us wonder about how it is that we actually live together, we see emerging from this particular parable a realization that avoiding potential and managing real conflicts of interest are central to the way we actually live together. Navigation among conflicting interests is an essential life skill.

None of us lives in a world where we have only one loyalty. We are all torn between competing and conflicting loyalties. As a pastor, I have a loyalty to the members of my community. This loyalty frequently threatens to conflict with my loyalty to God. If I speak the truth – no matter how lovingly I do it, oftentimes someone is going to feel hurt, or judged, or rejected. Do I maintain someone within the community at the cost of turning a blind eye to inappropriate behavior?

Jesus is asking us to let one primary interest, one key relational loyalty, in our case our primary loyalty to God guide our navigation through the other conflicting sets of demands placed upon us.

We are all faced with similar conflicts of interest all the time. Jesus is asking us to let one primary interest, one key relational loyalty, in our case our primary loyalty to God guide our navigation through the other conflicting sets of demands placed upon us.

As a pastor and congregational leader, I strive to be tolerant, understanding, and non-judgmental. I accept a certain level of flack without retaliating. But I also know that sometimes the tensions just can’t be fudged, and I may have to speak my truth as I understand it emerging from within my primary relationship to God. By doing so someone may be lost, which is always a huge personal loss to me.

Being streetwise, on constant alert, looking for the angles that will stimulate us to seek creative solutions always in the interests of what is right – is preferable to being naïve and living life as an exercise of only painting by numbers – only coloring within the lines. Jesus recognized this as simply the reality that confronts us all as we negotiate our way together within complex social and economic systems over which none of us as much control.

In identifying a conflict of interest – am I loyal to God or to my bank balance, the question is not – can we serve God and also be wealthy at the same time? The better question is – how does this parable shine light on how it is we actually do live together in our present-day society?  

Sunday’s O.T. companion reading to Luke 16:1-13 is Amos 8:4-7. Jesus is in one sense the last of the Hebrew prophets. When taken together the gist of both Luke 16 and Amos 8 might be translated into contemporary terms as: the prime duty of a corporation is not to make a profit for its investors but to be an engine for social utility. By extension, investment in the market for financial return needs to be balanced with investment as a support for social good. Investment, you see, cuts both ways. When businesses are engines for the strengthening of social good, their investors benefit in more ways than simply a return on the bottom line. History is testament to the fact that mutual flourishing is a prerequisite for social stability. Unstable markets are an investor’s nightmare.

The young people this weekend rallying with raised voices in the Climate Strike events all over the world; the striking GM workers, objecting to the company’s two tier employment and benefits policies, both remind us that stability results when our flourishing is fundamentally dependent on our neighbor also flourishing.

Amos is clear that greed is seductive, and we are all seduced at least some of the time by it. When we believe that our privilege or our wealth is the result of our own hard-won gains, rather than a combination of luck and hard work, we are being seduced by greed.

When we willfully ignore the way the arrangements in human societies reflect an unlevel playing field not accessible to all, we are guilty of self-serving greed. Because, some of us enjoy an unearned leg up from the start because of our race, our gender, or the fact that we are part of a family system in which wealth has been accumulated and passed on – so that elite education flows into good jobs and fine houses and the spare financial capacity to enhance wealth through prudent investments.  All of these factors help those beneficiaries move more successfully through the complexities of the world. From those to whom much is given, a special responsibility is also required.

In this last week’s E-News I laid out the case for Christian Capitalism, a capitalism guided by Biblical principles of social and economic justice. The conflict between God and the Bank as Peterson interprets Jesus’ words is the conflict the ensues when the forces of the free market are decoupled from the consistent Biblical voice on social and economic justice. From Moses, through prophets like Amos, to Jesus – we hear God’s requirement that we build fair societies. Courtesy of our Senior Warden I was furnished with a wonderful quote from Andrew Carnegie:

This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: To set an example of the modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and, after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community – the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.

The Gospel of Wealth 1889

Jesus is warning us that when greed – in all its subtleties makes us oblivious to the reality that what we enjoy is not solely the fruit of our own hard work but is entrusted to us in service of the greater good, we fall into the trap of truly conflicted loyalties.

The final collect at Compline reads:

O God, your unfailing providence sustains the world we live
in and the life we live: Watch over those, both night and day,
who work while others sleep, and grant that we may never
forget that our common life depends upon each other’s toil;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Luke 15:1-10

Are we among the lost or the found?  What do these terms even mean? Is finding ourselves the same as being found? Why don’t we notice that the experience of finding ourselves is so completely unsatisfying? The best solution to the experience of being lost is to be found. But waiting to be found is a bit too humiliating for most of us who prefer the illusion that we have already found ourselves.

Luke records two of Jesus parables in the first 10 verses of chapter 15. To anyone who has ever lost or misplaced a cherished object, or heaven forbid, lost a pet these two stories are immediately familiar. We can readily identify with the panic of the shepherd who is willing to leave the 99 in search of the missing one. We have all been the woman who ransacks her house in search of the lost coin; her mind completely fixated on finding the lost coin to the extent that nothing else matters – no food prep or cooking is done, no laundry is washed, the kids are not even picked up from school. We all know how great her relief is when she finds her lost coin. Yet, do we share her gratitude that finds expression in an exuberant celebration of generosity showered upon neighbor and stranger alike? Perhaps not.

It’s so like Luke to pair a story about a male shepherd with one about a female housewife. For Luke the kingdom of God is a place of complete gender equality.

The parable of the lost sheep is a story about the relationship between a shepherd and his sheep. In Luke’s telling it’s clearly an allegory about God’s relationship with us -a relationship that is informed by the intimate connection between the Middle Eastern shepherd and his sheep. B.W. Johnson in his 19^th-century commentary The People’s New Testament, 1891 reports and earlier experience:

As we ate and looked, almost spellbound, the silent hillsides around us were in a moment filled with sounds and life. The shepherds led their flocks forth from the gates of the city. They were in full view and we watched and listened to them with no little interest. Thousands of sheep and goats were there in dense, confused masses. The shepherds stood together until all came out. Then they separated, each shepherd taking a different path, and uttering, as he advanced, a shrill, peculiar call. The sheep heard them. At first the masses swayed and moved as if shaken with some internal convulsion; then points struck out in the direction taken by the shepherds; these became longer and longer, until the confused masses were resolved into long, living streams, flowing after their leaders. Such a sight was not new to me, still it had lost none of its interest. It was, perhaps, one of the most vivid illustrations which human eyes could witness of that beautiful discourse of our Savior recorded.

The parable is a form of ancient storytelling – its content instantly recognizable from the everyday lives of the story’s hearers. But while the storyline is familiar from experience, it’s the unexpected twist at the end of the story that leaves the hearers wondering what just hit them. Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep is like all of Jesus’ parable stories – a familiar story from pastoral life that unexpectedly confronts the hearer.

Luke identifies two distinct groupings: Pharisees and scribes, and tax collectors and sinners. If this story is an allegory of our relationship with God, what is the takeaway? For me, the takeaway lies in discovering in which of the two groups I find myself reflected?

1900 years of Christian anti-semitic interpretation of this parable tricks us into too easy an answer which bears closer examination.

Pharisees, Scribes, tax collectors and sinners all are historical reference points in Luke’s world that enable him to sketch the picture of Jesus against a background of conflicting worldviews. I wonder between Luke’s time and ours, has anything really changed much? The names change, but the dynamic of conflicting worldviews stays the same – a conflict at its essence between those who have and those who have not. Yet the deeper question in much of Jesus teaching is – what constitutes having and not having? The answer is not always obvious.

The Pharisees are smug and self-satisfied. They thank God that they are not made as these contemptible others are. They feel confident in a system that makes them the authors of their own salvation. Here’s the rub. Like them, do we not feel we are the authors of our own salvation? We have the power and privilege of being in control of our lives. We are pretty satisfied that we are right with God, or more arcuately, isn’t it that God is right with us? Privilege blinds the complacent.

The Scribes are certainly censorious. Cocooned in a world of religious privilege that insulates them from the necessity of risk-taking. Their legalistic piety leads them into judgement of others. Aren’t we too pretty good at that. But wait a minute, on closer examination, if only we took our spiritual lives as seriously as the Scribes did theirs. Oh, that we cared as much as they did about being right with God and being faithful and regular in our daily and weekly religious observance. Unlike them, privilege breeds in us a worrisome lack or spiritual urgency.

The tax collectors are a wiley bunch. They benefit quite nicely from the fruits of economic and social injustice. They may earn the contempt of their fellow Jews, but sandwiched as the middlemen between their fellow countrymen and the Roman occupation they turn a nice profit. Are we not among the winners in our capitalist system, a system that is fundamentally exploitative? Perhaps its this lack of identification with the tax collectors that lies at the root of our reluctance to understand the need for root and branch change?

And then there are the sinners. Sinner is a technical term for Luke. Sinners does not mean bad people in the sense that we might use the term to describe the morally compromised. Sinners are those who live precarious and risk filled lives on the margins, shut out from both the religious and economic systems. It’s not likely that transported into Luke’s 1^st-century scene, we would identify ourselves with those whose poverty grinds them down and puts lives luxuriating in self-satisfaction and respectable guilt far beyond their reach.

We’re probably way too proud to think of ourselves as lost sheep. But the image seems to fit. For have certainly wandered off so that to be found requires God to go in search for us. The problem is that even when God finds us we don’t think we need to be found, because we can manage our own state of affairs, thank you God.

The comfortable have no need of God. Those humbled by worldly circumstances know only their need of God. Now we come to the heart of the difference between Pharisees and Scribes on the one side and tax collectors and sinners on the other. One group stands a little apart in a stance of the self-righteous; judging Jesus because he does not conform to their rules. The other group crowds in upon him — hungrily feeding on the image of a God willing to take considerable risks to go in search of his lost sheep. For those on the outside; those who are considered nothing because they have nothing, Jesus words have powerful effect and their longing is palpable. Longing to be found is also a metaphor for longing to be changed.

Where do we find ourselves reflected in Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep? To be honest with ourselves – it’s not necessarily a pleasant discovery. So how do we change this? Now that’s a question for us to consider.

On Homecoming Sunday, we gather to commence a new program year only to find God speaking to us through Jesus’ amazingly poignant and timely words recorded in Luke chapter 14, the gospel appointed for the the 12th Sunday after Pentecost.

For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish it, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying “this fellow began to build and was not able to finish”.

Luke 14

In late January, a significant rainstorm caused significant water damage in the tower, effectively rendering the chapel unusable for the last nine months. The storm highlighted the perilous state of the tower roof and cap stones, together with the deterioration of the leaded windows in the bell chamber, which allowed alarming amounts of water to flood in.

But it wasn’t only the tower. It became alarmingly clear to those of us in leadership that we could no longer ignore the ever-increasing number of leaks, damaging not only the chapel, but appearing throughout the church.

Flashings are the copper interfaces that connect the roof to the stone gables, of which we have three. In addition to the tower roof, it was clear that we had multiple flashing failure points at the west and east ends and the raised stone gable bisecting the church and chancel roofs.

As we began to address this escalating crisis, of course we then discovered other problems – particularly the crumbling state of the Great East Window mullions and other stonework problems. I encourage you all to stop by and view the excellent electronic bulletin board presentation of the issues located in the atrium or visit the website for a fuller PowerPoint presentation of the issues and the scope of the work.

For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish it, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying “this fellow began to build and was not able to finish”.

Although Jesus’ words indicate the prudent approach to undertaking building work, sometimes life doesn’t fit into the logical and sequential planning process Jesus seems to advocate here. As the full implications of the scope and costs involved began to dawn on us, thank goodness we didn’t read Luke 14 at the time or we might easily have felt indicted as fools. For it was imperative that we acted urgently to begin the work before it was clear how we would pay for it; not the normally prudent way of going about such things.

We began this 1.2-million-dollar restoration project in late spring, and we are on course to complete the work by Autumn’s end. The quality and scope of the work done will secure the Church from water ingress for at least another 100 years.

Over the summer the Church Wardens, John Bracken and David Brookhart, together with Peter Lofgren – who thanks be to God – quickly became our resident architectural supervisor of works, have worked tirelessly to oversee this building restoration project. Without these three crucial leaders, I do not know how we would have been able to respond to the urgency and scale of this project, which also involved exploring a viable way in the short term to fund the work.

As the scale and cost of the project dawned on me, I felt like Prissy, the black maid in Gone with the Wind who protests to her mistress: I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies, Miss Scarlet. I protested to God that surely God didn’t imagine that church roofs and raising money were in my wheelhouse of skills?

So, God did what he normally does when I complain. He ignored me. Or so it seemed at the time.

Soooo, what does all this now mean for us? I want to share some reflections with you as we come home to begin a new program year.

Jesus’ words in Luke 14 occur within a larger passage which is really about the challenges and costs of discipleship. Throughout the restoration of the building project those of us in leadership positions have learned many things. However, it’s about discipleship that we have learned most.  

We found ourselves becoming transformed from a fearful and anxious state of mind to hold an attitude of courageous and energized confidence.

As rector, wardens, and vestry gradually came to terms with the challenge facing us, something quite extraordinary happened to us. We found ourselves becoming transformed from a fearful and anxious state of mind to hold an attitude of courageous and energized confidence.

At one level the challenge can be reduced to being about stone and copper. Yet, at another level the challenge reignites our affection for buildings as the spaces within which our community flourishes. St Martin’s buildings communicate the warm experience of fellowship and shared endeavor. They also invite and communicate an experience of numinous space that stimulates a sense of being present with God.

After the crucial Vestry meeting in May, the Senior Warden reported to me that when he’d gone home, his wife had asked how the meeting had gone? He was about to say his usual understated way “it went well” when he paused and marvelled that the Vestry had just approved the signing off on the construction contract and one million dollar three-year revolving line of credit from Bank RI – in a spirit of unanimous and confident excitement.

We were indeed surprised to have no doubt that we were responding to God’s paradoxical invitation. By this I mean we understood that this restoration project is not primarily about raising 1.2 million dollars to pay for the physical restoration of the church. It’s about an invitation to move into a new and energizing phase of spiritual engagement with spiritual selves.

At first this invitation was an unwanted one, but it quickly transformed into something we actually welcomed and embraced with enthusiasm; an opportunity to think a-fresh the kind of vision for our community we want going forward.

Sometimes in life we don’t have the option of careful and controlled planning before we have to act. What we discover instead is the source of courage that allows us to confidently set out on a challenging path – not simply do what has to be done, but to become changed in the process by discovering spiritual benefits we could not have imagined.

I find Jesus’ words in Luke 14 more than a little puzzling. Careful planning and controlled anticipation are not the characteristics of either Jesus’ own approach to life or the life of discipleship he called his followers to. Faith, courage, and the quiet hope that propels and nurtures both are the marks of discipleship, not confidence in our own power and strength to be in control of everything. Faith, courage and hope, these have been the discovery among our parish leadership team these past months. Like the crowds who went on their way after listening to Jesus, we are all amazed by this experience.

Brits, Aussies and Kiwis have a rather down to earth expression. We often speak of a situation or person being arse about face, (US English translation ass about face) to mean that things seem to be evolving or they are going about things in a back to front kind of way. Here at St Martin’s we are having an arse about face experience which actually alerts us to the nature of authentic discipleship. In fact, maybe the path of discipleship is always to live in an arse about face kind of way.

In fact, maybe the path of discipleship is always to live in an arse about face kind of way.

That being so, we cannot completely escape our conditioning and so we are about to begin a process of discernment for the feasibility of launching a capital campaign in 2020. We last had a capital campaign in 1996. The result was the building of the atrium and the massive enrichment the atrium has brought to our community life. Getting our face back in front of our arse means inviting you to now share your hopes and vision for St Martin’s with us.

We’ve appointed a consultant from the Episcopal Church Foundation to guide us through the discernment and feasibility study phases that precede any possible launching of a capital campaign. In a matter of weeks, we will produce a discernment brochure outlining discussion points designed to excite a parish wide conversation. There will be a number of cottage meetings – small group get-togethers – that will allow all of us who want to participate to have a voice in sharing what St. Martin’s means to us and what we would like to see as the fruit of a possible capital campaign.

As the parish leadership have already discovered, the real challenge is not to raise 1.2 million dollars. The real challenge is to allow ourselves to become transformed into disciples; an experience the leadership has already discovered is actually amazing, and which we now recognize as being beyond price.

Benedictine wisdom on the nature of community observes a common pattern: young monks are fervent but not holy, old monks are holy but not fervent, and middle-aged monks are neither holy nor fervent. In as much as this might be a good description of our community, let’s rise to the challenge for all us monks to be both fervent and holy.

                                                                              

A sermon from the Rev Linda Mackie Griggs

Jeremiah 2:4-13  Luke 14: 1, 7-14

“But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, `Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

My most vivid memory of my fourth grade Virginia history book was the chapter entitled, “A Red Letter Day.” Of course the first thing we had to learn was what a red letter day was. Mrs. Hosner said that it was a day that was special—pleasantly noteworthy or memorable. The day in question was in late August 1619, when three things arrived in the little English colony at Jamestown: indentured servants, women, and slaves. A red letter day. America’s original sin of chattel slavery was portrayed to us as pleasantly noteworthy.

Thus began my education, or rather, indoctrination. What I didn’t know until much later (last week) was that the book that I was reading from, studying, and dutifully parroting back on tests, was part of a set of three textbooks for elementary, junior high and high school, created in the 1950s (and used until the late 1970s) under the heavy influence of the segregationist political machine of Sen. Harry Byrd Sr., who wanted to make sure that Virginia children learned proper history, not tainted by any of that Communist or Civil Rights malarkey. And so we learned of red letter days, of how slaves (please call them servants,) were well-treated and content, of the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War (please call it the War Between the States,) and how handsome and gallant Robert E. Lee was as he rode his proud steed, Traveller, and how the reason for the War Between the States was certainly not slavery, but states rights.

As Rogers and Hammerstein noted in the musical, South Pacific, “You’ve got to be carefully taught.”

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear

You’ve got to be taught from year to year

It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear;

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

And we were.

Those books—that propaganda—affected multiple generations of children, because many of the ones who originally learned it taught it to their children. Look at the faces of the young people who rebelled against the removal of the Lee statue in Richmond two years ago. Hear the people who defend flying the Confederate flag. Heritage, not hate, they say. It’s about tradition and history, they say. Not about slavery.

They have been carefully taught.

When history is written, or rewritten, by those in power, the narrative is theirs to dictate.  Fortunately that is changing, and we have the opportunity to hear the voices of the oppressed more broadly and deeply than before; to hear the stories

of slavery and its repercussions from the perspectives of the enslaved, the sharecroppers; the victims of the Black Codes, the lynchings, Jim Crow and Mass Incarceration. We have the opportunity to ponder the true legacy of that August day in 1619 and to begin to understand that the white European-descended power structure that we have today was built on a foundation of the labor and suffering of fellow children of God who were bought and sold as property.  We are beginning to understand the idea of white privilege; the idea that the benefits in education, healthcare, home ownership, employment, voting and legal rights that the white community takes for granted are generally not benefits accruing to our black sisters and brothers. And the reason for that dates back to August 1619. We have been carefully taught that our rightful place is at the head of the table, and the fact that others are seated lower is their responsibility, not ours.

Jesus told his parables of the wedding banquet to an audience who was aware of the proper etiquette of table seating at dinner parties; that the people with greater power and influence would be granted the privilege of reclining closest to the host, in the places of honor. In offering up the rather ridiculous image, of guests racing and climbing over one another to be the first to the bottom of the table so that they may be asked to move higher, Jesus is encouraging his hearers to think more deeply about entitlement; about the economy of standards that they use to measure themselves against one another. Why does somebody deserve a place of honor? Wealth? Education? Gender? Hometown? Looks? Jesus prompts us to ponder; are these the standards that apply in the Dream of God? He prompts his audience to consider that they might be confusing privilege—the special rights or advantages available to a certain group—with blessing—the favor, protection and care of God. Jesus calls God’s people not to rush to claim the fruits of privilege, but rather to hold their privilege lightly—so lightly that that they can share it with others, thus embodying God’s blessing as members of a beloved community.

Today, 400 years after that dubiously named August day in 1619, might it be that Jesus is asking those who have heretofore controlled the narrative of racial history in this country to take the challenging and humbling step of questioning our place at the table?

The message hasn’t always been so gentle as Jesus framed it in Luke’s Gospel. Abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass didn’t go to the Gospels as the Biblical source for his writings and speeches. He made a beeline for the prophets, particularly Isaiah and Jeremiah. Jeremiah wrote about thirty years before the fall of Jerusalem in 597 B.C.E. and he could see the signs of the looming consequences of Judah’s worship of idols and refusal to turn back to the God who created and delivered them. “I brought you into a plentiful land to eat its fruits and its good things. But when you entered you defiled my land, and made my heritage an abomination.” Jeremiah’s accusations against the powerful and the privileged—the rulers, the priests and the prophets—were the heart of Douglass’s passionate tirades—his biographer calls them jeremiads—his tirades against the slave owners, the church, and the politicians who ignored his cries for justice for his people. The abuse that he suffered, the scars on his back and the discrimination that dogged him even as a freedman—this was his first-hand knowledge of how the white power structure exploited black human beings—sacrificing them to the idols of cotton and tobacco, financial gain and political power. Douglass, like Jeremiah, wrote on the eve of disaster for the country—a civil war/War Between the States that would bring emancipation of our enslaved brothers and sisters, but at the cost of 620,000 lives.

And the costs have continued to mount over the past 150 years as the wounds of racism have festered. Because the power structure that has written the narrative of race until recently would like us all to forget what the marginalized and powerless can’t help but remember. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In a New York Times Magazine piece a couple of weeks ago journalist Bryan Stevenson summed up where we are now: “…[W]e are at one of those critical moments in American history when we will either double down on romanticizing our past or accept that there is something better waiting for us.” He continued, “I realized how important it is to stay hopeful: Hopelessness is the enemy of justice.”

And justice is all of our business. We can’t opt out because we aren’t Virginians. Rhode Islanders—including Episcopal Rhode Islanders, played a leading role in the transatlantic slave trade whose consequences continue to transcend generations. Justice, and hope, are the business of all of us.

Last Sunday afternoon churches in Virginia and Rhode Island, at the encouragement of the Presiding Bishop and in cooperation with the Center for Reconciliation, rang their bells, to remember. To remember 20 African men who were brought to Virginia in a Portuguese ship named for John the Baptist. To remember them and the millions more who were brought later and those who died on the Middle Passage. The bells rang as a wake-up call and a prayer of hope, that we can hear our story anew; listening with open and humble hearts, ready to offer our places at God’s Banquet table to all, so that we may share God’s blessings of healing, forgiveness and reconciliation.

You’ve got to be taught

to be afraid

of people whose eyes are oddly made

and people whose skin is a different shade.

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught

before it’s too late

to hate all the people your relatives hate.

You’ve got to be carefully taught.