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Sermon for All Saints’ Church, 

February 9 th 2025

How do we respond when God makes God’s presence known to us?

The theme of today’s readings is the sense of inadequacy. This is not an easy message to

share in a culture such as this one. The expected response when faced with a challenge is to

say “absolutely I can do that” “I’m up for that” or words to that effect. If you don’t feel confident, it

is all the more important to fake being confident. Fake it until you make it.

Yet in today’s three readings we encounter three very holy people – saints of God, in fact –

whose reaction to the call of God was exactly the opposite of what our culture dictates.

Isaiah has a vision of God in the Temple, surrounded by the seraphim, those angelic beings who

are traditionally understood to be highest and closest to God. And he is appalled. ‘Woe is me! I

am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes

have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’ The sight of God was regarded as too overpowering for

a mere mortal even to survive.

Peter reacts, or (more typically for Peter) over-reacts. This story occurs surprisingly well into

Luke’s narrative: Jesus has already met Peter (called only Simon in the early parts of the

Gospel): he had healed his mother-in-law and borrowed his boat as a teaching podium. It is only

when Simon Peter sees the huge catch that appears, utterly unexpected and impossibly, in his

net that he suddenly realizes that he has a divine being on his hands. The realization terrifies

him. ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’

Paul’s sense of insufficiency or inappropriateness is the most complicated and the most

rhetorical. He lists all those who had been favoured with an appearance of the risen Jesus.

Then, at the very end of the list, he places himself. The most unworthy of all to be called an

apostle, because he had been a persecutor who, we read, was converted by the direct

intervention of the risen Jesus. It is a story that Paul tells multiple times in Acts and in his letters.

“I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of

God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me has not been in vain.”

First, I want to contrast the modern self-assertive conviction of one’s own all-sufficiency and all-

competence with the humility of God’s holy ones. Why are they so convinced of their

unworthiness? Because they find themselves in the presence of the divine. They know who God

is, and they are well capable of knowing the difference between themselves and God. (Not all

people nowadays seem to recognize that difference.) Humility, in this case, is an act of worship:

it is an acknowledgement that there is something in the world that is far greater than my ego.

But of course, God does not leave any of these chosen instruments to wallow in their sense of

inadequacy. God sends an angel to purge the sins on Isaiah’s mouth, and makes him ready to

speak the words that God sends him to speak. Jesus appeared personally to Paul and gave him

the certainty and the courage that made him the Jewish apostle to the non-Jews. Jesus

reassures Peter that, sinful man or not, he is the fisherman chosen to gather in the harvest of

the kingdom. The huge catch of fish which Peter and his friends miraculously gather in, is

clearly a symbolic foreshadowing of the many thousands of people whom they would gather for

the movement that Jesus led, and his followers continued and expanded.

In other words, these saints were certain of their own insufficiency, but they were not paralyzed

by it, because they trusted God to give them the call and the strength that they needed.

Most of us, if we are honest, have probably not experienced the kind of dramatic, life-changing

call that makes one have to drop everything and suddenly go into a completely new kind of life.

But, on the other hand, because we are serious and compassionate people, I am quite sure that

we have all looked around us, looked at the chaos, injustice, and suffering in the world and in

this country, and asked ourselves “what can I do?”

It would be quite understandable if we felt oppressed by our own insignificance, and the

distressing sense that this is the hour of the overly confident people who lack any competence

at all. We are at the mercy, for the time being, of those who proclaim themselves able to solve

the world’s problems through crude, insensitive and often cruel actions; those who seek to

deprive the poorest of the poor of the proportionately small amounts that this country gives to

the least of these, the world’s most vulnerable.

What on earth can we do? Well, let us remember how the Roman Empire of Jesus’s day was

governed. It marshalled tens of thousands of troops from all regions within its sprawling borders.

It sent soldiers to suppress any sign of dissent, usually soldiers who did not come from the

region that they were policing. They behaved like invading armies, which is essentially what

they were.

And yet, over time, the preaching of the Gospel would grow, would spread itself, and would

endure, while a seemingly all-powerful system, built on brute force, corruption, and the cult of

the leader figure, crumbled into dust and imploded in its own contradictions.

The Gospel is far more powerful than we know. As Bishop Mello said to us last week, the

Church was made for this troubled and challenging time. Our call is to speak, to share, and to

spread the message that every human being matters and every person is beloved, regardless of

race, sexuality, gender identity, or – perhaps especially – wealth. It is not just that the very

wealthy have no certain or privileged place in the kingdom of God: it is only by the grace and

forgiveness of God that they have even a hope of finding any place at all.

Go out and share that message. Trust in the God who calls you to do so.

‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ … ‘Here am I; send me!’ 

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From Water to Wine

Sermon at all Saints” Ivoryton. January 19, 2025

Presented by Sallie Boody

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be always acceptable

in thy sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer.

Today Rachel read the Gospel story of the wedding at Cana of Galilee, where

water was turned into wine. Before we talk about the story of that wedding at

Cana of Galilee which took place a long time ago, lets talk about weddings and

parties of today. How was your holiday? Did you have a party or go to a party?

Have you ever hosted a wedding? Did your guests come just for an evening

celebration or were they with you for a few days? Are there any other questions

on your mind that you might add? I am sure if we thought for a moment, we

would all have questions to add to my short list.

If you are like me, you might be very worried about the amount of food that you

were going to need, no matter the size of your party. I like to be prepared and

make sure I have enough of what we need. How many guests are invited, how

many days, where will they stay? As you can see the list of questions continues to

go on and on.

I like my peace and quiet, so entertaining a large, or small group for that matter,

is not so easy for me. I don’t like to buy a lot of groceries and then have them left

over. Robert and I had a graduation party for Marta, lots of food was left over. We

took it to the Middlesex Emergency Room in Westbrook for all the wonderful

workers to enjoy. Then for the reception after Ted’s funeral service, I really

misjudged and didn’t have enough food. I felt badly, but I did my best.

The guests have been invited and they will need to be fed. I don’t want to run out

of food. My friends know me well and they will help me, and bring a dish or two

to share, a bottle of wine or their favorite beer. There will be enough of

everything. Not to worry, there will be enough food and drink for all of us and

besides, the getting together for whatever the occasion is, is the most important

thing, besides none of us will starve. The getting together for any occasion is the

most important thing. For me, the food and drink are secondary.

Now let’s return to the reading of today’s gospel. The wedding in Cana of Galilee

was different than our weddings today. What kind of preparations were made

before out reading began today? People came for seven days, friends and

families would gather for feasting, dancing and celebration. Perhaps like the

destination weddings that some people have in the present times. But this was a

Jewish feast and quite different than what we have today. While we have many

of the same things that went on with the seven day celebration, today we seem

to pack it all into a few hours, not a week.

It is reported that on the third day of the festivities, Jesus and at least five of his

disciples and his Mother came to the wedding. A crisis pops up while they are

there. The wedding host has run out of wine. Oh my, as the host of that

celebration I would be so upset. In the ancient world this was a sign of

embarrassment to not provide hospitality for your guests. However, in today’s

world we are probably not far from the local liquor or grocery store and could

replenish the supply of what was needed. But in ancient times it was not so easy

to make right what had just happened. Jesus was informed by his Mother, being

referred to as Woman, that there was no wine. Jesus responded, “Woman, what

concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” While Jesus didn’t

recognize that he was about to perform his fist miracle, his Mother did. Then his

Mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Perhaps the words that

Jesus used towards his Mother seem harsh, rude or abrupt but what he is saying

is that what he does is not dictated by family, friends or the will of the people but

is based on his mission from the Father.

Pastor Steve posted this poem about the incident of the lack of wine. It is titled

Mom knows best

Leadership is nudging someone into their next step

the moment before they know they’re ready.

Even Jesus had to be prompted by someone

who knew his gifts, and who saw the moment.

Sometimes we are ourselves are pure water,

unaware we are about to be turned to wine.

God, help me be open to the moment

And the nudging of Mother Spirit, who sees.

Then Jesus instructs the servants to gather six stone jars, each holding 20-30

gallons of water. The stone jars would equate to 120-180 gallons of wine. These

stone jars were used for purification rituals. If someone had sinned, then they

would wash and purify themselves with this water. The servants filled the jars

with water, right up to the top and took some of the liquid to the master of the

feast. The Master tasted the liquid and immediately recognized that it had been

turned into wine, better wine than the guests had initially been given.

Jesus creates an abundance of wine to show an overflowing amount of blessings

and grace. Usually as the wedding feast would go on a lesser quality of wine

would be served because they would probably not be able to tell the difference

but here at the end of the wedding, they were given the better wine. “Jesus did

this, the first of his signs, at the wedding in Cana of Galilee and revealed his glory

and his disciples believed in him. “

Why did Jesus give them more wine than they needed? Perhaps because God

doesn’t just give us enough, he is able to give us more than we ask for. He wants

us to know that he can give us life, a life that will continue after death. This first

miracle presents a challenge. Are we living as Christians or are we simply getting

by? Are we a friend of God, an honored guest at the feast celebrating the joy that

is rooted in God? Those are questions we will each need to answer.

I will close with this short story:

A small boy was asked by a visiting relative if he attended Sunday school. When

he said he did, he was asked, “what are you learning?”

Last week, came the reply, our lesson was about when Jesus went to a wedding

and made water into wine

And what did you learn from that story, the relative enquired.

After thinking for a moment the lad answered, “If you are having a wedding, make

sure Jesus is there.”

Make sure Jesus is there with you at all times, your life will be much better.

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Sermon for All Saints’ Church, December 8 th 2024

Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield begins with a memorable sentence: “Whether I shall turn

out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by any body else, these

pages must show.”

Are we the heroes of our own stories?

There is a tremendous temptation to think so, especially in a culture where the individual is as

highly valued as this one. Teachers, counsellors, therapists, and life coaches conspire to

present us as the leading figures in our own little dramas. The habit of keeping journals

(something I have never been able to maintain) or the writing of autobiographies can help to

reinforce that assumption.

Let me say that, for those who in traditional society were expected to efface themselves entirely

for the sake of someone else, especially wives and mothers, and carers generally, there is

something very healthy, something balancing, about saying “your life has a unique value in

itself.” Nothing that I say here is intended to take away from that, and indeed I believe that such

is the will of God.

And yet, in the last few years of my wife’s life, I came to terms with the fact that my most

important role was to be Ruth’s carer, the one who fed, cleaned, dressed, and generally kept

her safe, night and day, until I could do so no longer. I am entirely comfortable with the

possibility that those few years will have been the highest and most important calling of my life,

however inadequately I performed it.

I did not expect to begin this sermon like that. However, the thought came unbidden, as

thoughts sometimes do, when I looked at the passages from today’s scripture readings about –

John the Baptist. The second Sunday in Advent is often dedicated to thinking particularly about

John.

John the Baptist is well attested. All four Gospels tell his story, and all make very clear his

contribution to the climate of religious thought in which Jesus appeared. John is even described

in an undisputed passage of the Antiquities of Flavius Josephus, the cynically realistic historian

who took part in the Jewish revolt, and then became fully integrated into the Roman Empire.

If we piece together the accounts of the various Gospels, we can begin to see a possible

narrative of who John was, when he was still, so to speak, the hero of his own story.

John represented a late revival of the prophetic tradition. On one hand, he discovered a calling

to teach the people of Israel to repent of the behaviours that harmed their neighbours. What we

hear of his preaching suggests that his instructions were, in fact, quite modest: people should

live peacefully and responsibly in their allotted roles, and not oppress anyone over whom they

held authority. Even Roman soldiers received the same exhortations.

That transformation of life – from a life lived in self-indulgence and whatever one could get away

with, to a life of real responsibility to and for others – was represented by the ceremony of water

baptism. One enters the water as the old person and emerges as something new, renewed for a

better way.

In another sense, John presented himself as a charismatic outsider. He dressed in rough and

simple clothing, ate coarse food, and drew people out into wild, uncultivated places to hear his

teaching. All of this was a way to say, “I am the very opposite of all your regular religious

teachers.” Those were people who dressed in long decorated robes, enjoyed sumptuous meals,

and taught in synagogues and in the Temple precincts. John presented himself as living a

unique life, set apart from all the things that gave ordinary people comfort, convenience, and

esteem.

Finally, John was political. Like the ancient prophets, he was willing to lock horns with political

leaders whose behaviour he regarded as scandalous. Elijah condemned Ahab for introducing

the worship of foreign gods at the behest of his Tyrian wife. John reproached Herod Antipas for

divorcing his first, Nabataean, wife, for the sake of someone closer to his own family.

Prophets were the conscience of their times. They multiplied over the period of the exile, when

the political rule over Judaea was a mess. They diminished in the years after the return from

exile, when the Hasmonaean priest-kings and later the Maccabees took up the standard of

national leadership. Now, the kingdom was once again in the hands of morally dubious

politicians, and John steps forward, ready to criticize them, at whatever cost to himself.

That is John’s story, as far as we can piece it together, before Jesus appears on the scene.

But then Jesus of Nazareth appears, and everything changes for John. Nearly all the accounts

that we have of his ministry and sayings come from the Gospel writers, and they all describe

John with reference to Jesus. John is the forerunner, the foreteller, the one who prepares the

way for the Lord.

Occasionally we have glimpses of what might have been John’s wistful reflection on this turn of

events. Near the end of the first chapter of John’s Gospel, John hails Jesus as the lamb of God:

immediately two of John’s disciples leave him and follow Jesus. In the third chapter, we read

that John was baptizing in one place, and Jesus’s disciples were baptizing in another. Some of

John’s followers appear to complain to him that Jesus is acquiring more followers than John is.

John replies that “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

When we look for statements about John in Jesus’s words as reported by the evangelists, the

separation between the two seems more notable than the interconnections:

Luke 7: 28 I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the

kingdom of God is greater than he.’  …

33 For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, “He has a

demon”;  34 the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, “Look, a glutton and a

drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” 

Then John is imprisoned because of his reproaches against Herod Antipas, and any rivalry

between them becomes irrelevant.

And so a new narrative arises, which we see especially in the first three Gospels. Right from the

start, the story of John forms an integral part of the story of Jesus. In Luke’s Gospel, John’s

mother Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary are related by kinship. Mary visits Elizabeth while they are

both pregnant, and their nativity stories are intertwined. If you remember Leonardo da Vinci’s

“Virgin of the Rocks” (which has always seemed to me a far finer pair of paintings than his other

surviving works) there we see two cherubic toddlers, one of whom is John and the other is

Jesus, in postures of blessing which make the flight into Egypt seem more like a play-date.

There is a lesson here. Somehow – and we may assume that, sooner or later, John reconciled

himself to the state of things – it became clear that the mission of Jesus would entail a much

greater transformation of the life of his followers than the mission of John.

John’s honour and glory was, not to be celebrated as a great prophet in his own right, but to

become the one who prepared the way for Jesus. We might say that to be the one who

announces the Messiah is perhaps enough of a distinction for anyone. However, for John, it

meant that he accepted that his call and his ministry were actually not about his own objectives,

but were really for the sake of someone else’s.

There is a particular saint-hood that consists in living, not for our own aggrandizement and

reputation, but for the love of the rest of humanity. We have, frankly, seen enough of those

people, usually men, whose entire life seems to be directed towards making their name and

their reputation to be seen everywhere. The way they cope with their own mortality is to plaster

their name over buildings wherever they can. Make yourself famous, they seem to think, before

the darkness closes in.

The message of the Gospel, on the other hand, is that we may find ourselves called to live so as

to contribute to someone else’s story. And all of us, most importantly, are called to live for the

story of the kingdom of God, which is greater than any human institution.

Maybe that will mean that we are called to prophesy, in the name and on behalf of Jesus Christ,

about structural injustice in our society, about the abuse of other human beings by the powerful,

about the waste of the created order through environmental degradation, or the wrongs which

powerful people allow themselves to commit, because they believe that there is no God to

criticize or judge them.

However it turns out, we are surely called to live, first of all for each other, and secondly, for

something that is higher than any of us.

The beauty is that these two things do not conflict in any way. As we serve the needs and

support the well-being of each other and those in need beyond our circle, by that very fact we

are working towards the kingdom of God.

The glory of God and the love of God are made known in the way that people serve each other

and the greater community. As Jesus said repeatedly, the humble shall be exalted, and the last

shall be first. Do not envy – and certainly do not respect – those who glorify themselves for a

vanishing instant. Be grateful that we can work for an order of existence, God’s sovereignty,

God’s kingdom, that will endure forever.

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Sermon for All Saints’ Church, November 10th 2024

The story of the poor widow and her gift to the treasury is well known from the Gospels of Mark and Luke. The imagery would have been familiar to all the devout Jewish believers who frequented the Temple complex constructed by Herod the Great, shortly before Jesus’s lifetime.

In a space known as the Court of the Women, which was the most generally accessible part of the Temple itself, there were thirteen trumpet-like funnels which led into the Temple treasury, arranged along a colonnade. The intended effect of these funnels was that when large amounts of coins were poured into them, they would make a loud rattle and indicate to all around how generous a gift the worshipper was making to the treasury. Conversely, when someone made a very modest gift, like the widow described in the story, there would be a barely audible small tinkling sound.

Jesus, typically for a story-teller of the time, probably exaggerates for effect. The two “lepta” which the widow gave into the treasury are estimated at one-sixty-fourth part of a denarius. The denarius was the standard daily wage for a labourer, as we read elsewhere. These coins were a microscopic quantity of money, less than many of us have in penny jars in our homes, coins too small to be useful. Yet this, Jesus said, was all she had, “her whole life” as the Greek original puts it.

There was a strain in the thought of those days that regarded wealth as a blessing from God; and the richer that one was, the more blessed. Much of Jesus’s teaching about wealth seems to have meant to contradict that attitude, as the prophets had contradicted it in centuries past. 

This contradiction reminded me of a famous legend from 20th-century American life.

Ernest Hemingway wrote a rebuke to the idolizing of the rich in the August 1936 issue of Esquire:

“He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them [the rich] and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race….”

That article, transmitted through multiple critics and essayists, turned into a conversation, or confrontation, between the two authors that never actually took place. 

The point of the Gospel story – and the Hemingway story – is that it is not the quantity of money that is important. It is the attitude of entitlement which the possession of great wealth sometimes brings.

Jesus made his observation about the poor widow making her gift, in the context of a scathing critique of the religiously learned and privileged. Jesus – if he said the words attributed to him by Mark – accused those learned in the law of breaking the law by consuming the resources of widows, while benefiting from the social prestige of being religious leaders. It is this accusation of hypocrisy, of claiming to help ordinary people, while one is really only helping oneself, which Jesus makes many times in the Gospels.

A quite different attitude towards the poor widow is shown in the story of the prophet Elijah for our first reading. Here again, the prophet is in conflict, as Jesus was, with the rich, powerful, and entitled. King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, the princess of Tyre, together had introduced the worship of the Phoenician (and other) divinities Ba’al and Asherah. In revenge for this act of religious disloyalty, Elijah threatens Ahab with a long drought: “As the Lord the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.” The drought duly happens. 

But the drought then catches Elijah himself out, because the wadi from which he was drinking dries up. So God tells him to go, of all places, into the Tyrian kingdom, home of Jezebel, to a widow and single mother. She is not a believer: she swears by “the Lord your God” that she has nothing to give him. But for her willingness to help Elijah, she is given a miraculous and inexhaustible supply of grain and oil until the drought comes to an end. 

But Elijah is still in a weak and perilous position. Ahab hunts for him and does not find him. Eventually Elijah appears before Ahab and challenges the pagan priests to a contest of prayer and sacrifice, to see which of them can call down fire from heaven over their offerings. Elijah’s victory over Jezebel’s priests only incenses her more against him, and he has to flee to the desert, where God appears to him in the sound of sheer silence. For the rest of his ministry Elijah is in a sort of stand-off with the kings of Israel in Samaria. He cannot resolve the conflict, even though he denounces what he sees as their religious crimes.

Two major lessons, I believe, may help us in today’s readings.

First, even when God is with us, not everything goes the way that we hope it will.

If you read the Psalms, you will see how often the godly experience affliction, insecurity, and even threat. We now believe that the Psalms were first collected as poetic prayers that could be offered by those who came to the Temple to pray to God for help in their difficulties. There was a Psalm for every kind of misfortune: illness, poverty, slander, the treachery of false friends.

The Psalm-writers affirm that God is with those who are afflicted; that God cares for the humble; that God casts down those who are arrogant, and confide in their own wealth and power. But God does not promise to wreak vengeance on the enemies of the humble and godly straight away. It is enough to know that long arc of God’s providence bends gently but surely in the direction of justice. 

Second, God’s love reaches out to the poor and unprivileged, even when in the eyes of the world they seem to suffer.

Jesus’s preaching often held up as an example those who were most insecure and powerless, especially the widow and orphan, who had lost their provider and were at risk of total destitution. He reaches out to people in that condition in love, reassurance, and support. So did the prophets before him. However, Jesus did not inaugurate some great social upheaval to transform the economic and political system in Judaea. That would be attempted after the end of Jesus’s life on earth in the political revolt of Judaea from 66 CE onwards. The result was a catastrophe for the Judaean people, leading ultimately to the destruction of their Temple and their scattering throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.

So, the message is that God is with those who are in affliction. That does not end the affliction, sadly. However, it does stress, beyond any contradiction, that the moral order in the universe does not favour the proud, the arrogant, the self-centred and entitled rich, who seek only to profit at the expense of everyone else. God is present with those who seek for a better order of things. As our Psalm for today said:

7 The Lord sets the prisoners free; the Lord opens the eyes of the blind; * the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;

8 The Lord loves the righteous; the Lord cares for the stranger; * he sustains the orphan and widow, but frustrates the way of the wicked.

Today, preachers across the country will be trying to respond to the events of the past week. And it is complicated. There will be some, I am afraid, who will regard the election result as an answer to prayer. Those who voted with the majority may have hopes for better times. Have compassion for them, since it seems almost certain that those hopes will be disappointed.

For those of us who hoped for a different result, it is even more complicated. We are the people of a God of love, and it is not our calling to detest or despise anyone, even those with whom we disagree deeply. There will almost certainly be a time of grieving, a processing of the loss of what might have been. That is a natural and inevitable feeling, but it belongs to the world of public affairs.

God’s kingdom is not in mourning, because it is not diminished by the outcome of a political process. The sovereignty of God is as mighty and eternal as it always was. However, as is most often the case in human history, the kingdom remains hidden under the shadow of worldly powers that resist it, defy it, or ignore it. That is the mystery of the Cross, and we are the people of a crucified and risen Lord. God vindicates those who love the afflicted through the power of the resurrection. But God’s kingdom is not of this world, and there will be many times when this world seems not to care.

There will be much in the next few years which will frustrate us, worry us, or alarm us. As a non-citizen and immigrant, I feel some of that anxiety. At the same time, I acknowledge, and lament the fact, that the privilege of language and skin colour will probably (though here I speculate) make my situation easier, than that of people who speak different languages or have darker skin. 

But as the Church, our mission is clear, and it is the same as it was weeks, months, or years ago. We are called to be God’s people, to hear God’s Word and live it. We are called to share the Sacrament of the Eucharist with each other, not just for ourselves but for the sake of the whole world. We are called to speak words and perform acts of compassion and love for those who are in need, for those afflicted or in trouble, and yes, even for those who are deeply misguided. 

We do all this, knowing that the one who was incarnate in Jesus Christ, and brought a message of love to the world is, by the power of the Cross, ultimately stronger than arrogance, prejudice, bigotry, or hatred. These things shall pass away. The Word of God will not pass away.

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Sermon for All Saints’, October 20th 2024

As time goes by, I appreciate more and more the way that our readings for this season, in the track that we use, shed light on each other. It is a traditional principle that the way to read Scripture is to relate it to other scripture. That needs to be done carefully: it is too easy to begin by assuming that one knows what scripture is “really” about, and then find echoes of one’s own preoccupations wherever one reads.

I mean something more thoughtful and humbler. First, remember that Jesus, the apostles, and above all Paul were saturated in the language and images of Hebrew Scripture, our Old Testament. They naturally found there the language to express what they believed was happening, refracted and transformed through the stories in the Gospels.

The “servant songs” in Isaiah chapter 53 present us with both the benefits and the risks of reading the New Testament in the light of the old. The liturgy of the stations of the Cross for Good Friday quotes this poetry to express the desolation of Jesus at his Passion. Down the centuries Christian interpreters have insisted categorically that Isaiah was foretelling the suffering of the Messiah. It is regrettable when Christians one-sidedly appropriate the Scriptures for their own purposes in this way. It led to claims that Jewish readers did not understand their own sacred texts, and has done much harm.

Scholars today insist that the servant songs are poetry. They are not a coded metaphor, to be read in one way only. Through poetry, the prophet who took the mantle and the name of Isaiah (maybe some centuries after the first Isaiah) explored how the personification of the people of God entailed suffering; that God was with the servant who suffered; and that beyond suffering there was hope, redemption, restoration. Some scholars nowadays argue that the “servant” represents the people of Israel as a whole. For the sake of the world, God called his beloved people to suffer. Through their sufferings they became an example and a source of hope to the world.

I confess that it is hard not to hear echoes of the story of Jesus in this ancient poetry. Maybe those who wrote the stories of the Passion had the servant songs echoing in their minds. Jesus may have remembered Isaiah’s prophecies as he faced his destiny. One can draw spiritual messages from these poems without colonizing them, without claiming them as the exclusive property of the Christian message.

Service, suffering, sacrifice for the sake of the people: we certainly see that in today’s reading from the Letter to the Hebrews. “He learned obedience through what he suffered; and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” The echoes of Isaiah are clear.

Just before today’s Gospel from Mark, Jesus had foretold his Passion, in more detail than before. Mark, with his usual brutal frankness, showed the disciples completely missing the point – again. They hear Jesus foretell his terrible sufferings and his rising again – and all they think of is who will be closest to Jesus, when he is raised in glory. They skip over the sufferings and ask for the sweet treat at the end. Jesus reminds them that there is suffering first, which they must take on. He then says that “all right, you will have the suffering, but you have to wait and see who gets the treats.” In a way, it serves them right.

The rest of the disciples join in the debate, and prove to be just as status-obsessed as their colleagues. Jesus, yet again, has to explain what leadership in the kingdom of God means. He draws a distinction between the world outside and the kingdom that is coming into being. In the world of Imperial Rome and the puppet kingdom of the Herodians in Judaea and Galilee, power was expressed through grandeur, intimidation, and fear. “Those seeming to rule among the nations make a big thing of their lordship, and their great ones impose their authority over them.” Mark uses some rather unusual compound words, based on the roots of “lord” and “authority”, to describe imposing power and control over the people. There is probably some satire here, which is difficult to recover.

The Jesus community must be the very opposite of these despotisms. The leader must be the servant of all, the one who washed the disciples’ feet at the Last Supper.

The kingdom of God is counter-cultural. I have said this before. Bear with me: there is a twist in the story coming up. Just recently I received a publicity email from an organization called The Living Church, which advertised a particular take on scripture. It promoted a collection of texts entitled “the New International Version Upside-Down Kingdom Bible.” The publicity text claimed that “God calls believers to live faithfully in a way that flips the wisdom of worldly kingdoms on its head.” The edition then presented extracts from Scripture organized around themes of how to read the world’s values differently.

If we over-stress the counter-cultural nature of the Gospel, we risk assuming that the message of Jesus is for “religious” people only. That was how those who founded monasteries in the Middle Ages thought. Inside the monastery there was humility, service, work for the good of all, and shared prayer. Outside there was class distinction, glorifying of the leader, competitiveness and institutionalized violence. Two worlds were opposed to one another. We risk sending a message that a community of faith has nothing useful to say to the community of the world. (Believe me, the world is already only too ready to assume that we do indeed have nothing useful to say.)

Here comes the twist. Bishop Mary Glaspool of New York, in her weekly email a few days ago, wrote about servant leadership. Bishop Mary traced the modern use of this phrase to a book published by Paulist Press (a publisher of spiritual literature) in 1977 by Robert Greenleaf entitled Servant Leadership. This work applied the ideals of “servant leadership” to managing any kind of organization or community in the entire world. It has spawned quite a literature, which proposed that good “servant leaders” practice ideals such as “prioritizing others, empowering others, sharing power, focusing on personal growth, and honoring diversity.”

The leadership that Jesus taught and lived as an example is needed, not just for communities of faith, but for all societies made up of human beings.

“Imperial” leadership (let’s call it that) the leadership associated with grandeur and authority, exalts the value and the dignity of one individual, or one ruling elite, at the expense of all others. It surrounds the leader-figure with sycophants and enablers, who constantly reassure the leader that all is well, and that the leader is admired and feared. We see that in despotic regimes around the world. We even see it in a candidate for high office in this country.

“Imperial” leadership is not just wicked and demeaning to the vast mass of a people who are talked, cajoled or bullied into abject adoration of one inherently unworthy object. It is also fundamentally ineffective. It does not enhance the flourishing of human life in its fullness. It does not enable the diversity and variety of human culture to make our lives richer, more beautiful, or more life-affirming. On the contrary, it sucks the energy and the resources out of a people. In the Eastern European tyrannies – and in the so-called absolute monarchies centuries earlier – much of the energy of the regime was devoted simply to keeping itself in being, by identifying and suppressing challenges and threats. Such regimes tried either to coopt the life of the churches into their own machine, or to suppress them brutally because they represented an alternate focus of authority.

The contrast to “imperial” leadership is the leadership that was personified by Jesus, and that should be – though that is not always the case – practiced in the Christian churches, and those bodies influenced by them. Such God-given leadership will not seek to oppress the weak or glorify the strong. It will not seek to impoverish the poor to benefit the rich. It will raise up the faint-hearted and care for the sick, the needy, the outsider, and the vulnerable. You only have to read the Psalms and the prophets to see how ancient that idea of good leadership really is.

The world needs not just the leadership of Christ, but Christ-like leadership, in every aspect of its life. That means, in turn, that the world needs the Gospel to be preached, and Jesus’ mission and message to be made known. The Gospel is not just for a future realm, a hereafter prayed for and believed. The Gospel is vitally needed for today’s world, here and now. We teach and share the message that the God made flesh, the divine principle lived among us in humble service. There can be no higher or better example of how to lead and care for people.

What James and John missed, of course, was that there was no advantage or priority to be claimed in the glory of God. The joy and love of being in the presence of God has no “more” or “less.” To live in the community of the saints of God is absolute and utter fulfillment. Let us do all we can to show that glory in the lives that we lead and the examples we offer here and now.

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