Homilies for Pentecost 4 - 6

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

16 June 2002

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa

Matthew 9.35-10.15

The Loving Father

“When he saw the crowd, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” Matthew 9.36

My father worked for many years as the research director of a chemical company. It was a small company and my father was involved in all the things going on there, not just in his labs but in the rail yard where the raw materials arrived, the factory where products were formulated and the loading docks where they were put on trucks for shipment. A chemical factory can be a dangerous place. There were, of course, the periodic explosions. More than once a train derailed and plowed through a building. Sometimes there were fatal accidents. A worker had his head blown off when he started welding in a holding tank from which he mistakenly thought the highly explosive monomer had been removed. Another time, when I was a junior in high school, a crane operator accidentally dropped a steel beam that landed on, and instantly killed, a young factory worker. My father was the first one to reach the victim and ascertain that he was dead. The plant closed early that sad day and my father came home late in the afternoon.

As it happened, I hadn’t gotten home from school yet. I had stayed late, involved in some extracurricular activity - maybe detention. There wasn’t anything unusual about this; I often got home that late. But when he arrived home and found out I hadn’t come home from school yet my father got back in his car and started to drive around, looking for me. He found me walking along the street on my way home, stopped and told me to get in the car and drove me home.

It was a strange feeling when I heard about the accident, and figured out what was going on, that my father’s response to the death he saw at the plant was to go looking for me to make sure I was safe. It wasn’t that I didn’t know until then that he cared, but my father—in sharp contrast to my mother—wasn’t prone to worries and anxieties, least of all irrational ones. He wasn’t much for overt expressions of love and concern, or of any emotions. All that was my mother’s specialty. I knew, in a taking it for granted way, that my father loved me, but to me he was always invulnerable, immutable, rational, in control. It was shocking to see his usually concealed care exposed, his strength made vulnerable. It was both comforting and disconcerting to see myself, through his eyes, a hostage to fortune, the risk of love.

In today’s Gospel, the people to whom Jesus brings the kingdom of God are harassed and helpless; they’re lost; they don’t know which end is up. They’re like sheep without a shepherd, like children without a father. They are the most unlikely citizens of God’s kingdom. Surely they have not kept the covenant; they have not been righteous and faithful. Yet the kingdom arrives: Jesus is not announcing some future event; in his words and actions he is making the kingdom’s presence a reality. The word he teaches in the synagogues, the good news he proclaims, is that God the seemingly absent Father has come looking for them. The tangible sign that it is so: he cures every disease and sickness, showing that the time when he will heal and make whole is truly at hand. It is in their very unworthiness and hopelessness that the people are ready for the coming of God. As St. Paul says in Romans “Christ died for the ungodly.” God comes to save us when he is least expected and when we least deserve it. The Father’s love does not weigh the worthiness; it only responds to the need.

Matthew tells us that when Jesus saw the sorry state the people were in, he had compassion for them; he was moved to pity; it hurt him, he suffered with them. It used to be that in Christian theology, only the incarnate Son is moved to feel compassion, only Jesus suffers. God the Father is immutable and impassible; “perfect being,” he is beyond being affected by human grief and sorrow; he is immovable and passionless. (The extreme version of this was 16th century extra Calvinisticum, the “Calvinist extra,” so called by the Lutherans who rejected it, the doctrine that while the second person of the Trinity was truly present in Jesus, he was never – whatever this means – fully contained in Jesus; after the incarnation the infinite Son of God continued to be God above and beyond the finite flesh of Jesus of Nazareth. So when Jesus enters into human life, suffers and dies, it wasn’t even the whole Second Person of the Godhead, but only the human part of him that suffers and dies.) Recently, these ideas have come on hard times and the ascendant view is that God through and through is moved to sorrow, grief and pain by the human condition. God the Father suffers with and for “harassed and helpless” humanity. It is the very being and nature of God, Father, Son and Spirit, to make the pain of his creatures his own and to take the burden of their sin into himself. As Henri Nouwen said “From the deep inner place where love embraces all human grief, the Father reaches out to his children” (The Return of the Prodigal Son, 95).

We can hardly think about the Father God who comes to us without invoking the story of the prodigal son: “While he was still a long way off the father saw him and was moved with pity. He ran to the boy, clasped him in his arms and kissed him” (Luke 15.20). Worn smooth with time and repetition, the sharp edges of this story need to be rediscovered. It’s a story about the love of God. How different it would have to be to be at all realistic about human behavior, about human love with its necessary terms and conditions: the son doesn’t really repent, at least not for long. He moves the pigs and his freeloading friends and a few harlots into the house, runs up huge charges on his enabling father’s MasterCard, wrecks his brother’s car while DUI, constantly gets bailed out by the mother with whom he is co-dependent and in whose eyes he can do no wrong, in family therapy announces that everything’s their fault because they always loved the older brother best…and generally makes everyone’s life miserable without end. God’s unconditional love for us, seen in human terms, is ill-considered, reckless, plain crazy, oblivious to the realities of the human condition. No wonder that the religious, including any number of Christians, are always ready to bury the appalling news that God’s love is poured out on the worthless, the unrighteous, on those who ignore, reject and despise him, without stint and without qualification. This prodigal God won’t keep his place. He won’t be the god of human expectations, but the true God of endless mercy, always at risk for love.

The simple truth is that God loves us as we are. He seeks us, helpless and lost, and gives us his life. He picks up broken humanity from the ground and makes it part of himself. Sometimes we might start to think we understand this, but we don’t; it’s a great mystery, the mystery of the Father’s love, of the gift of Christ, of the elusively present Spirit. Part of that mystery lies in the paradox of God’s power and God’s weakness. In the last analysis, only God can love this way without creating havoc. His mighty love is a power that transforms; it heals, makes whole and reshapes with gratitude those it saves.

There is also the power that God gives up in being the God who loves. Speaking at Henri Nouwen’s funeral, Jean Venier said “God is not a secure God up there telling everybody what to do, but a God in anguish, yearning for love; a God who is not understood, a God on whom people have put labels. Our God is a lover, a wounded lover. ” Too often, we let fatally sensible religion get in the way of the gospel, propagating a picture of God as remote, unmoved, powerful, and judging, a God who condemns and rejects. This is a picture that for many elicits disbelief and despair, for it portrays a God who does nothing to save, a God who in fact cannot save, a God who is merely God, not the Father. The writer Michael Thomas Ford, who grew up gay in a conservative religious community was, he says, “determined…to believe the whole God thing was a lot of nonsense;” he had known only “a lot of people who either feared God or used him as a weapon” (The Little Book of Neuroses, 55). Only the God who makes himself weak, who takes the risk of loving the likes of us, is strong enough to save us. Only that God is worth believing in.

A world of people hurt and needy, the same world Jesus walked, and talked and healed in so many centuries ago, has no use for, and no patience with, a God who is powerful and safe. Yet it hopes against the odds for the real God, the loving Father vulnerable in love who offers the sacrificial Son and sends the life sustaining Spirit. In her novel The Abyss one of Marguerite Yourencar’s characters asks “How many sufferers who are incensed when we speak of an almighty God would rush from the depths of their own distress to succor him in his frailty?”

The suffering God whose human face is Jesus is filled with compassion by the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but he does not see them from afar. He is with them, one of them: one of us, finally giving himself completely for all. May he give us the grace to join him in his works of love.

Amen.

Fourth Sunday After Pentecost

8 June 2008

Church of the Savior

Orange City, Iowa

Matthew 9.9-13, 18-26

Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” (Mt 9.12)

Go And Learn What This Means

The story is thin on detail: Jesus, walking through the streets of Capernaum, sees

Matthew sitting at the tax office. He calls him: “Follow me.” Matthew gets up and

follows him. We’re not told why Jesus calls Matthew. Nor do we hear what motivates

Matthew to follow him. We don’t know if there’s a back story, some previous history

between Mathew and Jesus. For all we know, Jesus calls him for no reason other than

his evil occupation. Matthew—in Mark and Luke he’s called Levi—is a middle

management cog in the cynically corrupt and oppressive machinery of Roman imperial

finance. Working with the gentiles, handling coinage that bears pagan inscriptions—a

scrupulous Jew would avoid even touching the Roman coins—Matthew is in a perpetual

state of religious impurity, cut off from the life of Israel, the life of God. Beyond that,

he’s a crook, mercilessly squeezing money out of the people of Israel, inflating the tax

bill and taking his cut. That makes him a despised outcast, a sinner in need of salvation,

So far in the narrative of Jesus’ ministry, there has been no overt conflict between Jesus

and the Pharisees. His warnings against hypocrites and false prophets might have been

targeted at them, and he has taught the crowds that, unless their righteousness exceeds

that of the scribes and Pharisees, they will never enter the kingdom of heaven (5.20). On

the other hand he has declared that he has not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it;

indeed, that anyone who relaxes even the least of the commandments will be least in the

kingdom of heaven (5.17). It seems likely that up to this point, the Pharisees, even if

suspicious of Jesus, do not yet see him as a dangerous enemy. We have no reason to

think they would have disapproved of his calling the tax collector, on the assumption that

he was leading him to repent and turn back to Israel’s God and his law.

It’s what happens next that appalls them. Mathew throws a big party so his friends, other

tax collectors and “sinners,” can get together with Jesus and his disciples. There’s Jesus,

having a good time with the scum of the earth. (It’s not clear, but the term “sinners” here

might even refer to gentiles, not just to Jews careless about the law.) To them it must

look as though, rather than leading Matthew to the straight and narrow, Jesus has joined

up with him and his wicked buddies. Instead of showing the tax collector the way to

righteousness and purity, Jesus gets down and dirty with him.

Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ criticism does nothing to allay their suspicions. He

says, “Those who are well have no need for a physician, but those who are sick”—

something the Pharisees would agree with in the abstract, but surely they would have

seen Jesus as a would be healer who has been infected with the sickness he wants to heal.

Jesus goes on to tell them: “Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy and not

sacrifice.” It’s an insulting response. “I desire mercy and not sacrifice” is a well-known

line from Hosea, but Jesus adds the “Go and learn what this means,” plainly implying

that, while the Pharisees who object to his sharing table fellowship with tax collectors

and sinners know the prophet’s words, they don’t know what they mean. Further, with

the “Go and learn” Jesus employs a standard rabbinic formulation, one a rabbi uses to

instruct a callow, insincere student. The words “Go and learn” come from the great rabbi

Hillel, who died when Jesus was a child, but who would have been well-known and

revered in Jesus’ day. The Talmud records that a certain heathen approached a rabbi and

said, “Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand

on one foot.” That rabbi angrily drives him away, so he comes to Hillel with the same

outrageous request. Hillel tells him, “What is hateful to you, do not to your

neighbor: that is the whole Torah, while the rest is the commentary thereof; go and learn

it.” Thus Jesus, sitting there partying with lowlifes, insinuates that the Pharisees, who

regard themselves as the learned protectors of Torah, are the ones who are clueless when

it comes to what God wants. And, of course, he implies that they, the supposed defenders

of Israel against idolatry, are like the people of Israel in Hosea’s day, in God’s eyes

utterly unfaithful despite their religious observances.

Jesus says that God desires mercy and not sacrifice. He says it in a way that implies we

cannot understand what his words mean simply by hearing them. We have to go and

learn. We know what the words mean—we know what God desires—only when we go

and do something. I think this connects the two (disconnected) parts of today’s reading.

Our lectionary reading omits four verses. They recount that, just as Jesus is responding

to the Pharisees’ criticism of him eating with Matthew and his friends, the disciples of

John the Baptist turn up and start criticizing him too. “We fast, and the Pharisees fast, so

why don’t your disciples?” I imagine them looking over at Peter, Andrew, James and the

others, rowdily eating and drinking with the sinners, as they piously pose their question.

Jesus begins to answer them, but he is interrupted by the sudden arrival of a leader of the

synagogue, a man named Jairus. He falls at Jesus’ feet, tells him that his daughter has

just died, and implores him to come bring her back to life. Jesus and the disciples

immediately get up and follow him.

The Pharisees and the disciples of John want to pin Jesus down on matters of religious

observance and purity, on questions of who to eat with and when not to eat, but Jesus

walks away, responding to the distraught father, the dead child. He goes on his errand of

mercy. Before he can get to her, he is interrupted again, now by the woman who

suddenly reaches out of the crowd to touch Jesus, hoping to be cured of the hemorrhaging

she’s suffered with for a dozen years. Finally, Jesus arrives at Jairus’ house. Pushing

through the crowd of people telling him to go away, it’s too late, he at last gets to the

dead child. He takes her by the hand and gives her back her life.

The other synoptic gospels relate the same story, but it is interesting that they don’t have

Jairus interrupting the discussion in Capernaum; they say he encounters Jesus later, back

across the Sea of Galilee. Mark and Luke also differ from Matthew’s gospel in that they

God ever really insisted that people make sacrifices to him. It’s very hard to believe

to the past, God did, after all, institute an elaborate system of sacrifice. That imposing

have Jairus say the child is dying, not dead. The version in Matthew’s gospel has a

heightened sense of the urgency of human need, to which the merciful Jesus responds.

Jesus shows what it is to know what it means to say that God desires mercy, not sacrifice.

In case we didn’t understand when we saw Jesus at table fellowship with the sinners and

tax collectors, he makes it clear: Want to know what it means, “I desire mercy and not

sacrifice?” Go to those who need help and healing. Follow me to those who need mercy.

Feasting with the tax collectors, being touched by the bleeding woman, touching the dead

child: all this renders Jesus ritually unclean. It doesn’t matter. Religious purity isn’t what

God desires. God cares about forgiving sinners, healing the sick, raising the dead.

Still, I wonder about the contrast between mercy and sacrifice. We know that it’s love

for lost and hurt humanity that God desires, not the forms of moral and religious

propriety. But how far can we go when it comes to sacrifice itself? Can we say that God,

finally, rejects it? This is problematic, both retrospectively and prospectively. Looking

temple in Jerusalem, in which animals were constantly sacrificed, was God's idea, wasn’t

it? Do Hosea, and the other prophets who said the same sort of thing, say that God never

really meant it, or that he changed his mind? On the other hand, it’s not so great to think

the God we know in Jesus was ever really like the pagan gods, demanding to be paid off

gracious giver and forgiver, but as a deity they can placate, and ultimately manage,

propitiated—by people: “Give me a nice goat and I’ll forgive your sins this year!”

The ancient Hebrew sacrificial scheme is notoriously complex, but there’s a way of

understanding part of it—the sin offering— that I find helpful here. Although the other

peoples of the ancient Near East made offerings to their gods as sacrifices as we, today,

understand the term, that is, as giving away something we value in order to get something

of greater value, Israel’s God introduced something that on its surface looked like the

same sort of thing, but which was in essence radically different. When a Jew grievously

sinned, in so doing he cut himself off from his people and ultimately God, the source of

all life. He fell into a kind of death. When the “sacrificial” animal was killed, God took

the animal’s life and gave it to the sinner, restoring him to life, to full communion with

God and God's people. God calls him back to his place at Israel’s table. So what was for

others people giving something to God, for the people of Israel it was God giving

something to his people, not people propitiating an angry deity, but the gracious God

giving life to the dead. We might think of this as God “deconstructing” human religious

impulses; hijacking them for his purposes. If something like this is right—I don’t know

that it is but I think it ought to be—then it’s plausible that when Hosea and the other

prophets denounce Israel’s confidence in its system of ritual sacrifice what’s going on is

that the people have not gotten it. Like their pagan neighbors, they see God not as the

by means of their religious technology, a God they can control while going about their

business, which involves all kinds of injustice. This impulse to replace God’s mercy with

human religion was, it appears, alive and well among the Pharisees who were scandalized

by Jesus.

The idea that God disowns sacrifice can seem even more problematic when we look

ahead, and consider the meaning of Jesus’ death. It brings us up against a deep

incongruity in certain kinds of Christian faith—the kind I grew up in, for instance—for

they contend that this God who desires mercy, not sacrifice, also demands that human sin

be paid for by the sacrifice of Jesus. Only the self-sacrifice of an innocent human being

can propitiate divine justice and save us from the wrath of God. It is, I believe, a very

strange kind of Christian faith that, at the end of the day, portrays Jesus as saving us from

God. There are things we very desperately need saving from, but God is not one of them.

God is the savior, not he from whom we need saving.

This does not mean we should not understand Jesus as sacrificing himself for us. Surely

he does, but not in the way the Pharisees, or those Hosea prophesized against,

understood. He does not die to placate affronted divine justice. God’s justice, God’s

righteousness, is precisely God's faithfulness to people, his commitment to saving us no

matter what, saving us even despite ourselves. To say God is just just is to say that God

is merciful, that God saves. Jesus dies, and there we see what the ancient rites of Hebrew

sacrifice symbolized: God gives us his life. When sacrifice is seen rightly, there is no

space between mercy and sacrifice. What we are given in Jesus crucified is exactly

God’s relentless mercy. God gives his life for us and shows us his mercy, calling us to

share in it, both by receiving it and by being merciful to one another. Go and learn what

it means.

Amen.

Sixth Sunday in Pentecost

26 June 2005

St. George’s Episcopal Church

Le Mars, Iowa Matthew 10.34-42

Matthew 10.34-42

The Sword of the Lord

Henry David Thoreau famously said, “If I knew for certain that someone was coming to my house to do me good, I would run for my life.” Everyone appreciates the sentiment. No one welcomes self-appointed do-gooders who take it upon themselves to straiten us out. Still, if someone was really coming to do you good, you’d welcome him with open arms, right? But Jesus does not seem to think so.

Today’s lesson comes from the chapter of Matthew’s gospel that begins with Jesus sending his twelve disciples out to the “lost sheep” of Israel. He instructs them: “As you go, proclaim the good news, “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” The good news Jesus commissions them to proclaim is not mere talk; he empowers them to enact the coming kingdom, not just—like all those prophets from the past—to promise long-delayed help from God, but to bring it: Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. And they are to do these wonderful things for free: You received without payment; give without payment. Hope and healing, no strings attached. You might expect this to be pretty well received. This is what, in Matthew’s narrative, Jesus has been doing up to now, and it has gone well. He has become famous and he’s pursued by excited crowds, eager to hear his words and receive his healing.

Yet Jesus is not optimistic about what awaits those who take up his work. He prepares them for arrest, interrogation, the cross, and death as their reward for bearing the good news. He warns them: I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves… They will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues… You will be dragged before governors and kings… He says they will be maligned, persecuted, have to flee from one town to the next. Acting in Jesus’ name will make them lethally unpopular. Note, crucially, that this can’t be contained as the reaction of the religiously or politically powerful. If you speak for Jesus you can expect those you love to hate you: Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name.

What’s so bad about the good news?

No doubt, there’s an endless supply of people who regard themselves as loyally proclaiming the gospel of Jesus but offer a message of condemnation, control, and exclusion, delivered in a tone of smug self-righteousness. You see it in an uninhibited, unrefined form on those tee-shirts popular on some campuses:

You don’t have to be smart to go to heaven but you have to be stupid to go to hell.

In the event of Rapture you can have this shirt.

For your place in eternity, do you prefer smoking, or non-smoking?

or

A large S. O. B. with the acronym explicated below in small print: Sure Of Beliefs. (That’s one of my favorites since it might fit better than its wearer supposes…)

It’s what Homer Simpson, in a moment of lucidity, rejects when he complains to Ned Flanders, his exquisitely annoying Christian neighbor, “I'm not a bad guy! I work hard, and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I'm going to Hell?

And of course there’s an indisputable record of centuries of Christian support and encouragement—implicit or explicit—for all kinds of injustice and oppression. When it’s not the Church complacently serving the powerful as moral guardian of the status quo, it’s Christianity as vehicle for resentment toward cultural elites who denigrate popular opinion and threaten traditional ways. One way or another, the face Christianity so often presents to the world is not the face of the crucified savior but instead one that incites legitimate disdain. Something more like the faces of the executioners. But these perversions of the Christian faith can’t be what Jesus has in view here in Matthew. There must be something inherent in the authentic good news of Jesus that produces such fierce opposition. It has to be something about Jesus himself—not some bogus religion that trades on his name—that incites the murderous anger he warns the disciples about, and which soon enough leads to his own murder. A few chapters back, giving what has come to be known as the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God (Matthew 5.9). Now he says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword?” (Matthew 10.34). What is it about Jesus that can make of his coming not the advent of love and peace, but a maddening attack?

Historically, the answer is clear: Jesus ate and drank with sinners. That’s what made people want to kill him. Modern scholarship has recovered the significance of this in the Gospels. It is not simply that Jesus made himself unclean by table fellowship with renegades and outcasts, Gentiles and lawless Jews, having dinner with Romans, lepers, tax collectors, and prostitutes. Jesus made the occasions on which he shared food, drink, and fellowship present enactments of the future messianic banquet in which God celebrates with a redeemed and restored Israel. Twice in Matthew he eats with the great unwashed multitudes, the “uneducated rabble ignorant of the Law” in their thousands, taking steps to ensure that these great outdoor meals portray God’s feeding of his people in the wilderness, his abundant provision in the promised land, and exemplify Jesus’ role as the Messiah who cares for God’s flock, the sheep without a shepherd (Mt. 9.36). Worse, it is likely that many of those with whom he shared these meals were Gentiles, since at least the second appears to have taken place in Gentile territory, not in Israel proper. (I can’t resist noting that the second mass meal, the feeding of the four thousand in chapter 15, comes on the heels of Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman who, imploring a reluctant Jesus to heal her daughter, said, “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table” (15.27). Did she convince Jesus to enact the great symbolic feast a second time, demonstrating that God invites everyone, even Gentiles, into his kingdom and gives them, not crumbs, but more than they can eat?)

In all this indiscriminate sharing of meals Jesus was deliberately and explicitly profaning Israel, brazenly undermining its identity as God’s people. Norman Perrin wrote that in doing this Jesus “shattered the closed ranks of the community against their enemy” and that “it is hard to imagine anything more offensive to Jewish sensibilities” (Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus, 103). Dinner with Jesus was what one New Testament scholar calls “a provocative theater” that exhibits God’s embrace of all peoples (Donald Senior & Carroll Stuhlmueller, The Biblical Foundations for Missions, 264). Those whose personal, national, ethnic, and religious identity was integrally bound up in secure divisions between Jew and Gentile, clean and unclean, keeper of the law and breaker of the law, confront this dangerous Galilean who seems intent on breaking down all the carefully maintained walls. How could they not feel he must be destroyed, and that in getting rid of him they were doing God’s work? Can we think of anything even remotely equivalent in modern terms? It is hard for us, living in an individualistic culture where identity is not constructed out of universally acknowledged and assiduously patrolled boundaries, to grasp the magnitude of Jesus’ offense. The closest I can think of is that heroic incident in the civil rights movement: when, on a February day in 1960, four black college freshman entered the Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, bought some school supplies, and then went to the lunch counter, sat down, and asked to be served. That simple act, so innocent from the outside, was of course an overt attack on a way of life, an identity, indeed a religion, and predictably created deep divisions and engendered violent responses.

Jesus said, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword…I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother…” But much irony lies behind his talk of bringing divisions, for Jesus brings the good news of the kingdom into which God is determined to draw everyone to a people whose sense of wholeness, cleanliness, holiness…salvation is cast in terms of who they are not. And they define God in terms of whose God he is not. In this regard they are, when all is said and done, like us; they were simply more upfront about it. Like us, they lived by a self-affirming, consoling, but ultimately deadly illusion of being on the right side of the line that divides the qualified from the unqualified. But it’s a line Jesus refuses to respect and promises to erase in the name of the God who insists on giving himself for everyone. The conflict Jesus creates flows from his attack on the divisions that separate person from person, and persons from God. Jesus bears a sword, but the sword he wields cuts down the barrier between Israel and the world, between saint and sinner, between God and us.

Our task is not to imagine that we are at bottom different than the horrified Jews who thought they were doing God’s work when they plotted to kill Jesus. The good news of God’s unconstrained love for all is ultimately as alien, and as unsettling, to us as it was to them. Jesus brings the sword the cuts away the protective layers of imagined merit that we think make us worthy in God’s eyes but serve only to shut us up in ourselves, isolated from God and one another. Nonetheless we are called to put ourselves in the multitude of all those unready, unwashed, untaught, unprepared, unqualified, unreformed sinners who despite everything find they are welcomed to Jesus’ table. This morning, we partake of a meal with Jesus, one at which, as Richard Fabian, priest at St. Gregory’s in San Francisco, puts it, all diners are officially declared unworthy to eat, every time they eat it (“First the Table, Then the Font”). As the wonderful old “Prayer of Humble Access” confesses:

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful

Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold

and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather

up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord

whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore,

gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ,

and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him,

and he in us. (BCP, 337)

Amen.