By Faith

 Mark 8:31-38; Romans 4:13-25; Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

I hesitate to admit it, but in my heart I know that I would probably be Peter.  I know I’m the kind of person who wants to take the leader aside and say: “Um, that wasn’t the plan. Are you sure you want to go there? The plan we had before was better….”

And if we’re honest with ourselves, very few of us would be enthusiastic about Jesus’ plan if we didn’t know all the sequels.

Seriously, why would anyone want to take up a cross: a symbol of Roman supremacy, spelling failure for Israel’s oppressed?  Why would anyone want to embrace the possibility – the probability, according to Jesus, of painful death?  

This past week, on the recommendation of our God’s Diversity Committee and Racial Reconciliation leaders, I watched the PBS special on The Black Church.  And in the voices of the people interviewed I started to hear an answer to that question: faith.  

That’s one thing that can make us take up Jesus’ cross.
Not simple belief in the existence of God, but what Paul describes as the faith of Abraham, who “hoped against hope”, who put faith in the expectation of God’s promises when overwhelming evidence showed it to be impossible for God to fulfill those promises.

“We’ve come this far by faith,” said the Reverend Calvin Butts III of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York, quoting a hymn by Albert Goodson. “And God has not failed us yet. When we’ve been true to God we have always been successful.”  

He’s quoted in the context of how the Civil War freed slaves to become the targets of new oppressions and separations. Quoted as a bridge to stories of another century of evidence that God’s promises of liberation, dignity, respect, and abundance just aren’t being fulfilled.  And still the expectation of justice, healing, and freedom persists, an enduring faith.

As Henry Louis Gates Jr narrated the story of the Black Church through our nation’s history – through every failure of the promised land to manifest in the United States and every cross taken up for the sake of freedom and wholeness – I kept hearing a refrain of a faith in God that both accepts all that evidence that hope is unreasonable and still finds hope in God.

“Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, after all?” says that faith. 

He delivered Daniel from the lion's den

Jonah from the belly of the whale

And the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace

And why not every man?

That traditional spiritual [which we’ll hear the choir sing in a few minutes] is a prayer of confidence in God. If my Lord delivered Daniel from the king’s decree of certain death, then why not me? You? 

In the terrors and dangers of slavery, segregation, lynchings, and suppression, the singer is in the hand of God’s faithfulness to us. That faithfulness is what makes it possible to be faithful to God; to walk in faith bearing the cross that has been placed on the shoulders of the oppressed.

As the Black Church story turns toward the Civil Rights movement of the twentieth century, Gates comments that “a belief that the liberating God of their fathers and mothers was on their side” enabled a new generation to deploy the prophetic gospel in the battle for freedom. 

Many at Trinity were direct witnesses or participants in that generation as church leaders, civic leaders, and ordinary folks took up a cross – one shaped by the anger of white supremacy, by the high probability of beatings and unjust murder – empowered by their faith in God’s faithful commitment to liberation. Faith that God’s commitment to the liberation of Black people in the United States is as specific and powerful as to the liberation of ancient Israel or the redemption of all people.

This week a friend shared an image of Ruby Bridges entering the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. She’s holding her mother’s arm as they walk into the school against a background of shouting people and hateful signs. 

With that picture, Bridges is quoted as saying “I remember feeling fear once. I remember an angry white woman holding a little coffin with a Black doll and her screaming how she would hang me. I hesitated and my mother looked me in the eye and said, she won’t hurt you, I’ll see to that. I believed my mother and I kept walking.”

That’s the faith that Paul is praising Abraham for. The faith that sees the danger, sees the evidence that all is wrong, and keeps walking, fueled by trust. 

Trust that the one who has promised is faithful.  

It’s the faith of Lucille Bridges, who undoubtedly knew how real and serious the risks were, and kept walking, with her daughter, toward a promise that might often have seemed impossible. 

And if that seems out of reach for you or me, if that seems to be a faith unreasonable to ask of ourselves or others, it’s worth remembering that when Paul tells us that Abraham’s faith never weakened, Paul knew perfectly well that the line left out of the Abraham story we heard this morning is: “Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed” because the idea of him and Sarah having a child at 90 and 100 years old is ridiculous beyond belief.  

It’s not that Abraham believed without question or doubt all the time. It’s that Abraham stayed committed to God’s faithfulness, even renewed that commitment, when God’s promises were laughably extravagant, gloriously unreal.  (Abraham’s son Isaac is named for that disbelieving laughter.)

It’s not seamless for us, either. But that, Paul says, is the faith that will make our relationship with God whole. That is the faith that will unify us when we are tempted to separate ourselves. He’s talking to the Romans about Jews and Gentiles, but it’s just as true for our divisions (of race, politics, or anything else) today.
This commitment to realizing God’s impossible promises can unite God’s people with one another when the world tells us that some are better than others, that we are better off apart, that we need to hang on to our privilege, our advantages, our losses, our old identities. 

That faith will allow us – even compel us – to take up the cross with Jesus.

Sometimes, we need to actively grasp the cross: choose sacrifice and self-denial, risk pain on purpose, in order to awaken that faith within us. That is often what people in positions of privilege –white people, straight people, economically privileged people – are called to do: to choose sacrifice in order to ignite and awaken that faith that makes us whole.

Sometimes, or for others, there is no choice. The faith God has planted in us compels us to keep moving toward God’s promises when the only thing visible on that path is the suffering of the cross. That’s what calls many of both the persecuted and the privileged into the streets to march, to speak out when we could lose jobs or respect or even our lives, to sacrifice ourselves for healing even if we’d rather avoid the pain it costs. 

Others have the cross placed on their shoulders, and “take it up”, or keep moving toward God, because that’s the one thing that can keep us moving at all.  

Because the cross of Jesus, the cross Jesus invites – commands – us to share, is a cross of resurrection. 

The cross that was meant as a symbol of Roman supremacy, defeat and death is also the shape of gloriously impossible hope: the defeat of death itself, the faithfulness of God that cannot be broken by empire or gerrymandering, redlines or judicial murder or anything else. 

The cross is the weight and the buoyant lift of the promised land where the full liberation of the oppressed, the full reconciliation of the divided, pours blessings on the whole world.

The cross Jesus tells you and me to take up is the faith that grasps life and wholeness from the thorns of sin and separation, that bears up powerful expectation when hope is ridiculous, that reconciles when it costs us everything.  

Take that up, Jesus says, and come with me in faith. 

God’s never failed us yet.

Wilderness Trust

 Mark 1:9-15

Blink and you’ll miss it.

Jesus’ month and a half in the Judean wilderness goes by in a single quick sentence in Mark’s story today.

I suspect Mark doesn’t give us much detail because he assumes that you and I already know what he knows about the wilderness:

It’s dangerous. 

It’s lonely. 

It’s far away from community. 

It’s empty of the resources we count on for day-to-day life.

The wilderness is a place of need, but it’s also a place of miracles, over and over in the history of God’s people.  Water from the rock, food raining from heaven like snow.  It’s a place of seeing and being seen by God. 

Many of us might long for a wilderness without Zoom and Webex and email, these days. 

But what we’ve been given – where we’ve found ourselves – instead, is a pandemic wilderness. 

Where danger lurks around us; we’re separated from our usual community; and many resources we’ve counted on are gone, or harder to get.  We may be lonely, may be struggling to survive.  It can be hard to see God, to expect to see God, in this wilderness.

But what if we knew we would? What if we actually believe that that is what we are here for – in this story, in this season, in the pandemic wilderness?  What happens when we enter the wilderness, as Jesus does, as beloved children of God? 

Mark tells us:

Jesus was tempted by Satan; he was with the wild beasts; and angels ministered to him.

Mark doesn’t need to spell out the details of temptation, of the encounter with Satan, because it’s a forgone conclusion. 

It simply doesn’t matter what Satan says or does or offers. 

Jesus, beloved child of God, can’t be teased or threatened into putting his personal needs first; can’t be made anxious or arrogant, can’t be tricked into denying God. 

Because he simply, completely relies on God. He expects and focuses on God’s presence, God’s care – and receives it, being with the wild beasts unharmed, and ministered to by angels.  

Jesus trusts God’s protection and provision as a beloved child, without reservation or hesitation. 

So Satan has nothing to grab on to; nothing to leverage.  Satan’s defeated before even trying.

Just because it’s inevitable doesn’t mean it was easy.

Our fundamental human tendency is to hold on to control, not to trust so completely in someone else’s control. Even God’s. And Jesus was fully human, as well as fully divine.

That absolute trust in God’s faithfulness isn’t automatic, even if it’s essential.

And that’s why we have Lent. A season every year to practice wilderness and trust. We learn by doing.

Many years, we choose some kind of wilderness for ourselves by fasting: giving up some comfort or resource or certainty. 

Other years, we just use the wilderness we are in.  Even when the world’s not in a pandemic, many of us find ourselves in a season of illness or loss or change that’s wilderness for us.

And in that season of wilderness, we deliberately practice trusting in God.

We practice accepting failure. Acknowledging that we are not enough, and that we need help.

That’s confession, and apology. It makes room for us to depend more on God, and on God’s mercy, than on ourselves and our own success.

It’s also honesty, which builds trust in any relationship. Trust we need between ourselves and God.

If you need help with that this Lent, read and pray the Litany of Penitence from the Ash Wednesday service. (BCP page 267, and a version with reflection questions on the Lent page of our website)

We practice letting God supply our needs by fasting - giving up chocolate or beer or TV or makeup or coffee or meat or something else we usually depend on for comfort or satisfaction or a shield from distress or emptiness.

Letting someone else fill a need – even when we think we can do it ourselves – helps us trust more confidently and deeply.

There are several suggestions for things to do without in the Lenten Micropractices book we mailed to your home recently (also on our Facebook page and website).

We practice acts of kindness, of giving and service. When we act as God would act – to feed the hungry, clothe the shivering, shelter the neighbor or stranger, tend the sick – we build our trust that God would never forget or fail to nourish and shelter and tend us, in our own need.

  

We build intimacy and trust by spending time with God. Scripture reading and prayer can be like sitting with God on the couch, or working through a problem together.
There are suggestions for several ways of doing that in the Lenten booklet.  Or you might read the psalms, which tell the story of trust in God fulfilled in every possible human need.

And there’s one more thing I think we want to do this particular year, in this wilderness we share.

We need to practice receiving care. Being ministered to by angels.

We need to look for the ways that God is actively, right now, caring for you and me, in the daily wilderness.

Set a time – or a dozen times – each day to just notice one thing God provides that you need. 

We do this every time we say grace at meals and pay careful attention to the words. 

Or you can notice your breathing, the beating of your heart, the life-giving things your body does that you don’t usually think about and can’t entirely control. 

Notice, this Lent, what you already depend on God to provide; notice the needs you can’t fill for yourself that are already met, with God’s help. 

Practice thanksgiving, because that, too, builds up trust.

Which might mean, this year, that you have to eat more chocolate, instead of giving it up, if that is how you taste the goodness of God in this wilderness.

Let’s practice that trust – however you need to, however we can – here and now, this Lent. 

Practice that belovedness, until we rely on God without hesitation or reservation, so that Mark can say of you and me what we heard him say of Jesus:
These are God’s beloved children. Here they are in the wilderness, victorious over Satan, at peace with the wild, and angels are ministering to them.

Exhausted, Renewed

1 Corinthians 9:16-23; Mark 1:29-39; Isaiah 40:21-31

I’m exhausted. Are you?

It happens every time I read this part of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians: “I became all things to all people”, he says. I do everything, anything, for everyone, anyone, “so that I might by all means save some.”

I can’t do that. Can you?

None of us really can be all things to all people, and many of us have been feeling the strain of trying during this pandemic.  If not quite being all things to all people, many of us are trying to do too many jobs and tasks we’re not trained for, balancing too many people’s needs. Others of us have had to be all things to ourselves, thanks to lockdowns and changes that separate us from the services and the people we usually rely on.

A friend shared an article this week suggesting that a lot of people are hitting walls of exhaustion these days. (I’ve seen similar articles about every two months since last March, and they seem just as true every time.) 

[When the choir recorded our introit this morning, Vernon mentioned that he thought some of us might be feeling “heavy laden” at this point.]

Then on Friday, the Harvard Business Review emailed me an article about managing burnout. 

They’re all right. It’s a basic truth: extraordinary effort isn’t sustainable for human beings.

Except, apparently, for Paul.

And for Jesus, of course.

As Mark tells the story today, Jesus’ healing and teaching rush forward at an urgent pace.  In the four sentences that describe the arrival at Simon’s house and the healing of his mother-in-law, Mark uses the word “immediately” three times.  And when Jesus has cured a whole village worth of sick in one evening, he’s ready early the next morning to move on, and do it all over again in the next village, and the next, and the next.

It’s exciting that God can do all that healing and teaching. 

But Simon – Peter – can’t keep up. I can’t keep up. We can’t keep up.

We’re invited to join in God’s work, offered a share in Jesus’ power. It’s exciting. It’s wonderful what God can do, it’s flattering we’re invited to join in.

But, oh, sometimes it just looks way too hard.  

I can’t keep up with Jesus. Or Paul. Or even Peter.

And that makes it hard to want to try even a little.  

The problem is that if we step back; if we wave Paul and Jesus on ahead without us, waiting until we have energy to spare, we’ll miss most of the miracles. The ones that would heal us, as well as the miracles that help others.

Sometimes those are one and the same, after all.

A conversation with my friend Amber this week reminded me that when Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law, and she gets right up from her sickbed to “serve them,” that’s not a sign of subordination. It’s a sign of restored community. She takes up the things that connect her to her family, takes up her part in the divine work of this extraordinary teacher who’s staying in her house. And that heals the whole community, the community that’s been out of balance, broken, without her.

I don’t want to miss that. I need my community restored. 

I need the miracles more when I’m tired, when I can’t keep up. Maybe you do, too. And not just miracles at a distance, to watch. I need that healing and renewal and energy and wonder and hope in my own heart and legs and hands and soul.

And that’s part of the answer, right there.

Even the young, the strong, the athletes will “faint and be weary”, will be exhausted trying to keep up with God, Isaiah tells us. “But those who wait for the Lord will renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles…” says the prophet.

Isaiah isn’t talking about sitting back until God does the work. No, those who “wait for” God are those who focus expectantly on God, who lean in to readiness for God’s action, and are renewed and strengthened; lifted and energized.  

That’s how Jesus does it, by the way.

You noticed, maybe, that after healing all those people on Simon’s doorstep, he goes off to a place where he can pray. He’s “waiting for the Lord” there; focusing his attention and heart on what God is doing next. And then he’s ready for more. And more.

My smart friend Amber, the one who reminded me that healing one of us restores the whole community, also points out that healing and restoration are not exclusively hard work and heavy lifting. So I’ve realized that sometimes, healing and expelling demons actually feels like love, like creativity, like empathy, like laying down the burdens of hurt and expectations, impatience and shame.

[Jesus tells us – the choir sang it for us – that joining Jesus is about laying down those burdens.  That taking his “yoke” – absorbing his teaching, obeying his direction, and taking part in his work – will actually give rest to our souls.]

I suspect that this is what Paul is talking about, underneath that exhausting “all things to all people” language. 
About laying down the burden of expectation – what others expect of him, as a strong, righteous, Jew – to connect with people unlike him, however and where ever they are, to share the confidence of Jesus’ grace. And about getting to remove the burdens of expectations and shame from others, who know, who’ve been taught, that they aren’t good enough, can’t keep up with God. 

I think he’s actually describing that as…well, not restful, (Paul never seems restful) but energizing, renewing, freeing – as filling himself with those benefits of the gospel.

It’s what Jesus is doing, as he heals and teaches. He’s steeping himself in the will of God, and finding more and more miracles in his hands; God’s strength constantly renewed in him.

Over and over again, this year, I’ve prayed with one of you when my heart has had no more energy for someone else’s troubles that day.  And I’ve found myself refreshed, more hopeful, less tired. Healed, just a bit, by praying to heal someone else.

Or I’ve gone into meetings about our buildings, programs, or budget with the Vestry or staff or other leaders, feeling too tired to be creative. And come out energized and hopeful again, because someone in that meeting needed me to say what God has energy for. 

And hearing that, I could trust God again. 

I don’t know what that is for you. 

Maybe it’s taking up a giant jar of peanut butter, or a pile of deli meat, when you’re really tired of meal planning and meal prep and taking care of other people, and making sandwiches for Cathedral Kitchen, and discovering that you feel more energized when you drop off twenty or forty sandwiches than when you started making them.

Maybe it’s calling someone who has received bad news, even though you can’t take one more sadness, or loss, right now. And hanging up the phone ten minutes or an hour later with a soul refreshed from weeping together, or a stronger sense of love in the world from the stories and lousy jokes you shared.

In other seasons, it might have been the feeling of renewed hope and strength when you left a full day of Habitat house building you didn’t have time for.

The work that renews won’t be the same thing for all of us, but it’s important – it’s essential – in this pandemic, and always, to pay attention to where work renews you, to where taking on one task makes all the others lighter, to when an all-out effort fills you with restful joy, or a difficult, listening, stillness gives you energized peace.

Because those are the places where you or I become like Paul – renewed, strengthened, capable of so much; amazing to others.  Not necessarily all things to everyone, but so much more than we expect of ourselves.

Seek those things out, in the times of exhaustion. 

For those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength, soar with the eagles, rest in the energy, hope, and wonder of the heart of God among us here and now.