Where we really are

1 Samuel 3:1-10
Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17
1 Corinthians 6:12-20
John 1:43-51

There was a lot I didn’t know when I went to the Rector of my old church of St. Gregory’s in San Francisco and told him I thought, maybe, I was called to be a priest.  I didn’t know much about the Bible, or the history of the church, or how it was organized, and what the life of a minister was really like.  I certainly didn’t know anything about the ordination process, and if I had, I might never have had the courage to start.  Because the truth is I was afraid to tell my secret even to my friend the Rector—this secret I’d been keeping even from myself.  I was afraid of what he might say, and how I might feel.  I was afraid I was mistaken, and afraid that I was not.  Most of all I was afraid to be seen.

 

And the process of becoming a priest requires that you be willing to be seen.  You go through all these formal interviews with the parish Discernment Committee and the Diocesan Commission on Ministry, and the Standing Committee and the Bishop.  You get evaluated by a psychologist.  Each time you meet with these people you’re trying to articulate your vision of yourself as a priest, but it’s extremely awkward because all the while you’re wondering if it’s real, and you know that they are, too.  Because the way we understand the call to ordination in the Episcopal Church is that my own internal sense of being called is not enough.  Other people have to see it, too. 

I had a friend at St. Gregory’s who chaired the committee of lay people in the parish that met with me over a year or more to talk with me about that call, and hosted the meetings at her home.  And I’ll never forget the time, after I’d preached maybe my third or fourth Sunday sermon, when she came up to me and said, “This time I saw that you could be my priest.”  I could not have made it through in the ordination process or my subsequent years of life as a priest without moments like that one, when someone else could see what I had lost sight of, or doubted was anything more than a mirage.

You can see something like this in the story of the call of Samuel.   Samuel is serving as a kind of apprentice to a priest named Eli in the temple at Shiloh, and one night The Lord calls to Samuel as he is lying down to sleep, and the boy runs to Eli to see what he wants.  The priest tells him to go back to bed, because he had not called him.  And the call comes a second time, and again Samuel runs to Eli, and again Eli tells Samuel that he had not called.  But when it happens a third time, Eli has the wisdom to see what was going on, and he tells Samuel that it is the Lord who is calling.  Samuel was called to be a prophet, but to set out on his path he needed Eli to see him and recognize the calling for what it was.

I believe that all of us need to be seen in order to find our calling.  It is as true for teachers and scientists, nurses and bankers, artists and farmers, as it is for prophets and priests.  It’s true of professions, but it’s just as true of other, more personal callings, as parents and spouses and friends.  Because no matter who we are—what kind of family we have, or work we do, no matter what our talents, or disadvantages, or aspirations might be—we do not earn our lives by our efforts, or take them by cunning or by force.   We receive them as a gift.   

There is a voice calling out to each of us to accept the gift of our own true life.  There is a vision in the mind of God of who each one of us is, and of who we are becoming.  That is why it is such a blessing to meet someone who can speak to us with that voice, who is able to see that vision.  A person like that gives us faith in the gift of ourselves—the power to embrace it, and come fully alive.

The stories in the Gospels about Jesus’ calling his disciples only make sense when you understand that he was that kind of person.  It seems unbelievable that Nathaniel’s skepticism (“can anything good come out of Nazareth”) should change so dramatically to whole-hearted belief, unless you imagine this kind of experience of being seen.  When Jesus says to Nathanael “I saw you under the fig tree” I don’t think the point is that he is clairvoyant.   That wouldn’t be enough to make Nathaniel call him “Rabbi, Son of God, King of Israel.” To me, it’s the fig tree that’s the key.

 

Because under the fig tree is not just someplace Nathaniel happened to be hanging out before Philip came to tell him about Jesus.  This is a passage that is dense with references to the Hebrew scriptures, and in those scriptures “under the fig tree” is the place of freedom, fulfillment, and peace.  The classic text would be the book of Micah, Chapter 4:

they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
   and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
   neither shall they learn war any more;
but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
   and no one shall make them afraid.

And I think Nathanael’s fig tree takes us even deeper into the heart of the scriptures, all the way back to the Garden and the fruit of the forbidden tree, to a moment of seeing and being seen:

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

What blows Nathaniel’s mind is that Jesus reminds him of a moment under the fig tree, a moment of being seen naked, of knowing the presence of an other with whom there can be no pretense or deceit, one who knows him as he really is; one who, at the same time, frees him from fear, makes him self-sufficient and at peace.  When Nathanael meets Jesus, he remembers that moment, and his eyes are opened to recognize the one who saw him there.

Becoming a disciple of Jesus, this story seems to say, happens when we see him as the one who sees us, as we really are.  And, as I said, the person who can do that has given us the gift of our lives.  But in the story Jesus also promises Nathanael that he will see something even greater.  He makes one more reference to the Hebrew Bible, to the legend of Jacob’s who fell asleep on a journey and dreamed of a ladder on the earth reaching to heaven and angels coming and going on it.  And he woke up and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it.  How awesome is this place!  This is the gate of heaven.”  And he set up an altar there and called it Bethel, the house of God.        

The call to follow Jesus starts out innocuously enough—someone says “come and see.”  And if we go and see, we soon find out that we are being seen.  We see that we are naked, with nothing on but some fig leaves.  But we also start to see a vision of the person we are truly called to be, who we are when we are not afraid, when we want for nothing, but are at peace.  We begin to recognize the one who sees that person more clearly than we do ourselves, and to trust his vision more than our own.   

As that trust grows in us, a light of hope is kindled in our hearts, the hope of seeing something even greater.  We begin to sense that we are standing on holy ground.  We begin to glimpse a vision not only of ourselves but of the whole world as it is seen through the eyes of Jesus.  We begin to understand that this very place is the house of God, and gate of heaven.  And this vision, and this hope, gives us a new calling, one that unites all our individual vocations in the calling of the church.   It has two, interdependent parts. The first is worship.  And the second is to show the whole world where we really are.    

Changing expectations

Isaiah 65:17-25

Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

Acts 10:34-43

Luke 24:1-12

The first time I went to St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco it was Easter morning.  I’d just moved into an apartment a few blocks from there, and, walking around my new neighborhood a few days before I’d come upon the Anchor Brewery.   And, right across the street, there was this extraordinary building, looking like a cross between a log church from Siberia and the Shogun’s castle in a Samurai movie.  A sign out front claimed that it was an Episcopal Church.  Which was my brand, so to speak, at least it had been for about a year-and-a-half, so I took note of the service times.  And because it was right before Easter, I decided to come the next Sunday.

I showed up a little before 10 o’clock on Easter morning to find the place strangely quiet.  There were empty parking spaces along both sides of the street, and the sidewalk the entire length of the block was completely deserted.   The doors of the church were closed, and the windows were dark.  But there was a small white paper sign taped to the entrance, and so I went up and I read, “Our Easter service was last night.  You are invited to join us for an Easter picnic at the Southwest corner of Jackson Park at 11 a.m.  Sorry for the inconvenience, and please come back again soon.”  I was a little exasperated as I scrambled to come up with Plan B, and I remembered that the service at Holy Innocents, the Episcopal church near my old house, was at 10:30.  So I rode off on my bicycle across the Mission District thinking to myself, “What kind of church doesn’t have worship on Easter morning?”

When Mary Magdalene and Joanna and the other women from Galilee set out with their spices at early dawn on the first day of the week, they went with certain expectations.  And they were reasonable.  It is reasonable to expect that, when you go to a Christian church on Easter morning, there will be people there worshipping, and in the same way, when you see a man publicly executed, and you see his lifeless body taken down from the scaffold where he had been hanged, and placed in a tomb, it is reasonable to expect that when you go back to that tomb, his body will still be there. 

One can imagine that they set out for the tomb that morning with a sense of dread.  Perhaps they were anticipating the pain of saying good-bye.  Maybe they were already starting to imagine the sight of their spiritual master, who had been more alive than anyone they’d ever known, lying lifeless and cold.  Maybe they were already weeping at the thought of the marks of torture on his beloved body, as the raw memory of shock and horror came flooding back.  But they went, hoping to do the only thing they could do for him anymore— to finish the job of embalming his corpse.  Now that his enemies had finished using him for their public spectacle, the women went to have just a few quiet moments to grieve together with his body, so that their last memory of him would be one of reverence, and tenderness, and peace.

That was all they were hoping for, but what they found when they got there was something else entirely.   There are really only a couple of things I want to say about this.  The first thing is that the writers of the Gospels, in this case, Luke, want us to take these women seriously.  Luke acknowledges that there will be skeptics—there were skeptics right away, starting with the male disciples of Jesus.  They came around pretty quickly, when Jesus himself came and ate and drank with them.  But the women were the first, and their vision at the empty tomb was enough to convince them.  Perhaps when Luke wrote this he was thinking of the skeptics in his own day, who no doubt tended to be men.  Does that remind you of anyone?

This, of course, is a continuation of a theme that you see throughout the gospels, but especially in Luke, about how the wisdom that Jesus teaches is hidden from the wise and understanding but revealed to babes—or women, or shepherds, or Samaritans, generally people whose opinions were discounted.  It is interesting that it is just at this point, at Jesus’ resurrection, that these women, who have been obscure, background figures up to now, suddenly emerge as main characters.  They even have names.  They were real people, Luke seems to be saying, and the story they told was true.

And I think this has implications for the way we think about Christ’s resurrection now.  It suggests that a lot of the arguments that have gone on over the past couple of centuries between male scholars and theologians about whether or not Jesus “really” rose from the dead have missed the essential point.  I think these arguments betray a lot of typically modern condescension toward the Gospel writers, and the characters they portray.  To hear some of them you would think that people in the 1^st century had never had a warm, fuzzy, feeling about a dead friend—“You know, it was like I could almost feel his presence, almost like Jesus was really here”—and couldn’t tell difference between that, and what they were experiencing now.   There’s also an anachronistic materialism that sometimes creeps into those arguments, as if the disciples were saying “Wow—God reversed the auto-metabolic processes of organic decomposition in implausible contravention of the laws of nature!  Far out!”  

No, the essential point about the resurrection is that the people who were there knew it happened.   And if I were to paraphrase their proclamation for today, it would go something like this--“ I just woke up from the worst nightmare.  Just when I thought all the worst things I’d ever thought and heard about human beings had been proven right, and just when I thought that God had justifiably abandoned us to a never-ending downward spiral of greed, hate, and ignorance; and just when it been occurring to me that the bad guys will always win, and we might as well just give up on ever having a world where justice is really done and peace actually prevails, because people never will learn to love each other, and for all our promise we’ll never have anything to show for it because our hearts our just too cold and our eyes are just too blind, and our tongues are just too forked for anything good to last—just then, at that moment, when I was ready to stick a fork in it and call it done, something happened.  

Something happened that turned that whole picture completely around.  It was like the world I thought I lived in had suddenly turned inside out, and where all I had been able to see was cruelty, suddenly I saw compassion.  And where before all I could see was misery, suddenly I saw resilience.  And where there was treachery I saw forgiveness, and where there was sorrow I saw joy, and where before there was only death, suddenly I could see only life.  And there was one little phrase that summed up the whole transformation.   It was the truest thing I ever said, and as soon as I said it I knew that people will never stop saying it as long as the sun shines and the sky is blue—Christ is risen!”

Getting married together

Isaiah 62:1-5
Psalm 36:5-10
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
John 2:1-11

At the reception when Meg and I got married, the beer gave out.  Actually, there was plenty of it—we ordered a quarter-keg of Liberty Ale and I had my best man pick it up that afternoon, after which my brothers took charge of it.  But somewhere along the line the tap got broken, and they spent the whole reception, and several hours back at their motel room after it was over, coaxing a slow dribble of beer from a tantalizingly full container.  The irony was that St. Gregory’s Church, where the wedding and reception took place, is directly across the street from the Anchor Brewery, where that keg had been filled.  So if Jesus had been there, he wouldn’t have needed to perform a miracle.  He could have just sent some volunteers across the street to commandeer a delivery truck, backed it up to the church and started rolling off more beer. 

Now, that would have been gratuitous—the beer wasn’t flowing, but we had wine, and it wasn’t a hard-drinking crowd, anyway.  The altar table at St. Gregory’s is in the middle of a large octagonal hardwood floor, which is sprung for dancing.  And the altar’s also portable, so when you move it to one side, you’re ready to go.  We had a good DJ, and our friends like to dance, so the party was on, no matter what.  But what Jesus did in Cana was gratuitous, too.  Maybe it was a little sad that they were out of wine, but surely they didn’t need one-hundred twenty to one-hundred eighty gallons of it.  And that stupendous quantity is the first clue we have that the point of this story goes beyond the mere fact that Jesus could change water into wine.

The Gospel of John says that this is the first of Jesus’ miraculous signs.  This wedding is where the public ministry of Jesus begins.  No one is sure exactly where Cana would be if it were still standing, but it seems to have been a village in Galilee, not far from Nazareth.  The three “synoptic” gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, also say that Jesus’ ministry began in Galilee.  But in those versions Jesus does a lot of his work there, in all kinds of settings, in the houses of the people, and by the road and beside the lake.  But this is the only place in John where we see Jesus in the company of the Galilean people, in the course of their ordinary lives.

So you could say that this scene at the wedding in Cana stands for a whole phase of Jesus’ ministry, as he carried it out in the everyday social milieu of the people he knew best.  And it suggests that what he gave them was an extravagant experience of celebration, of participation in an overflowing spirit of gladness and community.  And we can see this by entering into the imaginative world of this story and playing there for a minute.  We just have to ask, “What happens to all that good wine?”

Well the wedding party has already drunk a lot of the cheap stuff, so I suppose the next in line would be the lower-ranking among the invited guests, and then I guess it would be the turn of the servants, who’d be ready to unwind after filling all those water jars.  The news would travel fast, and pretty soon the wedding crashers would arrive, and the servants’ friends would be coming by, and by the next day or the next, folks would be wandering the streets of Cana, giving the stuff away.  That wedding would be remembered as the biggest party in the history of the town, when everyone got to join in a celebration that went on for days.

Now Jesus’ disciples were at the wedding—John mentions that at the beginning of the story and again at the end—and the result of what happened was that they believed in him.  But here again, I think it’s not just the fact that he turned water into wine that made the impression.  It was the way hr transformed an ordinary village wedding into a celebration that overflowed to embrace everyone in the community, where everyone got to share in the joy of the bride and groom.  In this miracle Jesus gave his disciples a vision of a greater and even more inclusive wedding feast, of which his whole ministry was the sign. and at which he is the host.  And if the host, then also the bridegroom.  

The ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, the things that he said and did in the towns and villages of ancient Palestine, was a public demonstration that God really does love us.  Jesus spoke and acted for the God of scriptures like the 62^nd chapter of Isaiah, a God who desires his people, who finds them beautiful and chooses them for his very own and pledges faithfulness to them that will last forever.   And in the company of Jesus, those people saw a vision of what a faithful response to the love of God looks like as they united with one another in an inclusive community of abundance and celebration and love.   

Meg and I didn’t worry too much when the beer ran out at our wedding, because it wasn’t really our party, at least not entirely.  It was a church wedding, and I don’t mean merely that it took place in a church.  We threw in a few wrinkles, like a neo-pagan invocation of the ancestors and the four directions, but basically the ceremony was a celebration of the Holy Eucharist like it happens every Sunday at St. Gregory’s.  We invited our friends and family, but also the whole church congregation, and we trusted that the people of Saint Gregory’s would know how to embrace a company of strangers and help them become a worshipping community. 

The husband of the parish administrator turned out to be a pastry chef and gave us an incredible three-tiered cake.  While Meg’s mom and stepdad went to Costco for the food and drinks, some folks from the congregation went to San Francisco’s wholesale flower market, and brought back materials from which they made arrangements and a bridal bouquet.  We recruited volunteers to set up the tables after the ceremony and to bring out the food and to serve the champagne. Various people were photographs, and somebody even brought a video camera.  The church choir sang an anthem.  One of our priests gave the sermon, another performed the wedding, and the third did a beautiful job chanting the neo-pagan invocation to an improvised tone.

In this way we got to have a bigger and more beautiful wedding than a psychotherapist intern and a seminarian could ever have afforded otherwise.  Not that it was perfect.  The tap on the beer keg broke.  Our wedding album, such as it is, is full of blurry underexposed snapshots of people having a wonderful time.  The best portrait of the two of us was taken from behind us as we greeted a line of people after the ceremony.  Meg and I are looking at each other, smiling radiantly, and right between us, looking directly at the camera, is a mentally ill woman from the neighborhood named Audrey who ate practically a whole platter of Costco sushi and drank too much champagne.  A minute after that picture was taken, she was hanging onto us and gushing about how she loved us and this was the best party she could ever remember.

It was a celebration of love, and it was a profound experience for Meg and me to be at the heart of it.  But it was also about a kind of love that modern individualistic ideas about romance don’t do justice to.  It was an occasion for an outpouring of the gifts of a whole community, a community that expanded to embrace a whole company of strangers, where we all danced together around Jesus’ table to a single song of joy.  And in that sense it was the continuation of a wedding feast that started a long time ago.  It was about Meg and me, but it also shone with a glory that was manifested in a place called Cana, the glory of the love that God bears toward everyone, and what it will look like when we’re all married together.