By Lay Preacher, Will Harron

​So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God

Amen. Please sit.

Good Morning Saints!

This morning’s gospel portion from Mark begins with one of my favorite stories about Jesus. Earlier in Mark’s gospel, Jesus has sent out the twelve disciples two by two, giving them authority over the unclean spirits, to cast out the demons, and to anoint and heal the sick.

I think about what that might look like today: Jesus calling his twelve together to transform and liberate communities from oppression, from paralyzing guilt, from the legacies of racism, sexism, homophobia and misogyny, from the crushing weight of corporate greed and environmental degradation - and to bring healing to communities where health care is inaccessible, unaffordable, or even illegal.

Two thousand years later, we still need that healing, that liberation.

And the disciples - these poor fisherfolk, renegade tax collectors, the scruffiest of small groups - did it. They healed, they cast out, they brought relief to the communities they entered and proclaimed deliverance to the homes they passed through. And they return to Jesus to tell him everything they’ve done. What a joy that must have been, to return and share their own good news.

Saints, this is where I love Jesus the most. Because Jesus wants to hear, and Jesus wants to give his disciples rest after their period of courage and ministry, and Jesus recognizes that they’re stretched to the breaking point - approaching burnout, unable to even find the time to eat. So Jesus takes them away to a deserted place, for rest, for a vacation, for a retreat, a withdrawal for strengthening and sustenance and recommitting to their work. Jesus knows we can’t work all the time. God rested on the seventh day and the Gospel is a record that the disciples, as good a group as they are, aren’t better than God. And so they get in a boat and go away to a deserted place to rest.

This doesn’t stop the needs of the world around them, though. People see them going, and follow on foot - there is such a desire for the healing they have brought, for the wholeness that Jesus’s good news shows is possible, for the casting out of spirits in a place sorely oppressed by legions of occupying powers. They follow on foot and show up at the deserted beach retreat Jesus has sought out for the disciples.

But - and saints, this line teaches me day by day- this doesn’t cut their time of retreat and rest short. God rested on the seventh day and they aren’t better than God. And in fact, God shows up to allow them to rest. Jesus takes charge of the arriving crowds, in compassion giving them what they so deeply need, and the disciples are able to continue to recover from their own shift on the front lines of ministry.

It might be hard to catch this message from today’s lectionary passage, because we hop twenty verses right to Jesus again ministering to the crowds. But early among those skipped verses is the disciples showing up at the end of their day of rest on the shore and finding Jesus still caring for the crowds - the disciples’ rest has been preserved.
Saints, that is a liberating image for me. I don’t know about you, but life, work, ministry - can sometimes feel nonstop. I need to hear that I can take my rest, my retreat, my time away. Jesus, God, my communities, will show up and support me in this, and support those who I support when I step out to take my rest. It is a delivering word to hear Jesus give his disciples, who he demands so much of, rest.

Saints - we aren’t Jesus in these stories. We are disciples. We are the crowds. We know there is always a savior there, giving healing, delivering from oppression, providing for us when we need him, alongside us when we are serving as his hands and feet, and shielding us when we need our holy rest. We are not machines. We aren’t made to run twenty-four-seven.
And yet it can be so tough to yield to that gentle voice, to let go of my compulsion to keep control and keep going, and to take my rest. I’ve got to keep going, to get to the end of my work, my projects, my communities needs, my obligations, before I am worthy of stopping and resting. It’s a challenge to unlearn the formation of a world of twenty-four-seven, but it is necessary.

I’m grateful for the teachers I’ve had in that task. One of those teachers was the Camino.

In the summer of 2010, I had just completed my junior year at Williams College. I had been attending Saint John’s in Williamstown periodically, my first Episcopal church, and I was trying to figure out what I was doing with my life. I had recently switched from a biology major to a history major, had spent a year mentoring first-year students, and was loving my time playing in the marching band. But I was seeking something more, and I was seeking a greater sort of belonging. I applied for a summer fellowship for a “personal spiritual journey,” something offered through generous alumni support, and was awarded a fellowship to walk the Camino de Santiago, the way of Saint James across northern Spain. I wanted clarity about my life that I hadn’t yet achieved. I was twenty one, darn it, I should have things mostly figured out about the shape of my life.

And so, I flew to Europe and took trains and busses to the start of the camino. I didn’t know anything about backpacking - I had a borrowed pack, too much clothes and equipment, heavy boots, and a fearlessness that in retrospect is both admirable and a little terrifying. And so I began walking. One day after another, the rhythm was the same - rise early in the morning in a hostel, eat the lightest of continental breakfasts, walk for a time, stop in a town and enjoy a mid-morning or mid-day meal, or pause at the side of the path and eat food I carried with me, arrive in mid-afternoon to a sleepy Spanish town in the middle of its siesta and check into my hostel, shower and freshen up, go to church if there was a pilgrim mass, have a big dinner at the hostel or a local restaurant that offered “pilgrim special” meals, go to bed early, and rise again early the next morning for another day of walking. It was a simple rhythm that was a soothing balm after three years of high pressure liberal arts college life.

As I walked, I met people - other seekers, Americans, Europeans, Spanish folks - as well as people out for the physical challenge, for the travelling party scene that could be found if you looked for it, for particular religious obligations, or to mentally recover from war and trauma. I met Episcopalians - some my age, some older, and Catholics, and Presbyterians and Lutherans and atheists and agnostics. I met locals, some of whom welcomed me into the local hostels they maintained, or opened ancient churches for a curious pilgrim to see, or who were just living their lives alongside the path. And I learned more about my own capacity - to walk, to pick up, carry, and lay down burdens, to muddle on day by day when the going got tedious or to be amazed by the new wonders each day of sunlight and shadow on the landscape. I learned about Saint James, about the people who ascribed miracles of healing to him, to the mystical set of stories about the camino that has draw people to Santiago for centuries, and about how to pray when I had learned to desire communion and yet, there was no worship where communion was available - certainly practice for the long drought of the pandemic. And I learned that I needed that rest at the end of the day, that there were limits to how far I could go, that my body would take me as far as I needed if I cared for it, and that there was joy in listening to those limits and cherishing the opportunities for rest.

After thirty three days I arrived in Santiago, and despite my joy, I hadn’t found the clarity I sought. I hadn’t figured it all out. And so I pressed onwards for three more days, towards the sea, to Fisterra where Europe meets the Atlantic, and one of the further endpoints of the Camino. I sat on a clifftop over the ocean, watching the sun set, while around me pilgrims celebrated. And I still hadn’t found the completion I sought. I turned my back on the ocean, turned my face towards the deepening night, and trudged back to the hostel. Where would I find this clarity, this certainty, this sense of knowing?

Saints, it seems that everyone who has hiked the Camino left their mark on every available surface. Every door, every sign, every flat surface has some sort of graffiti, pilgrim markings left in pen and sharpie, spanning the profound to the mundane. And on the door of that last hostel, amidst the signatures of pilgrims finishing their hike and leaving their final wit and wisdom, I saw words that spoke to my soul. “There is no end.”

My quest for clarity, for certainty, for finality, was one that wouldn’t end. My life is and ought to be marked by continual growth, continual change, continual seeking. I’m still on my pilgrimage, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, saints and strangers all seeking to live our lives in the way that gives the most life, that is delivered from the demonic lies that says we are not enough, we are unworthy of rest, that we don’t belong, that we are un-healable, un-savable, un-lovable. Saints, you and I are together seeking Jesus continually - whether we are the crowd seeking Jesus out for healing and knowledge, or the disciples returning to Jesus tired and with full hearts to share from our ministering.

We are constantly seeking, constantly following, constantly drawn on in our pilgrimage because there is something in this Christ we recognize. Like the crowds in Genessaret, we recognize that healing is here, that hope is here, that liberation is possible and we get up and we run towards it. In Jesus we recognize that there is more to life than an empire that says war is peace and slavery is freedom and that an unjust status quo is the best we can get. In Christ, we recognize love and we believe, we hope, we know, that transformative justice, healing, and reconciliation, are possible. In Jesus, we find ourselves changed from strangers into fellow pilgrims, saints and citizens, incorporated into a body that is more diverse and more expansive than we can even imagine, and more powerful than empires can dream. Our pilgrimage is one of rising and setting, of seeking and following, healing each other, and then resting, and experiencing our own healing. 
 
There is no end to our journey together, but there is rest for the weary. There is no end to the things we can do in Christ, but there is healing and wholeness for the wounded. There is no end to the wonders of love - but there is work for us to do, together, as saints and citizens and siblings in the Body of Christ.
Amen 

By The Rev. Ted Thornton

​From the Gospel of Mark Chapter 6: verses three and four: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us? And they took offense at him.”

How do you respond when someone close to you abruptly changes course and you either aren’t sure or you just plain don’t like what you see? When your son or daughter says to you one day, “Mom or Dad, I want to spend my life working at vocation A,” when what you’ve wished for in that person you gave birth to and raised all those years is that they will work at vocation B, how do you respond?  When your grown son or daughter chooses a life partner very different from the one you were expecting and invites him or her to dinner, how do you respond? When your son or daughter says one day, “Mom or Dad, I’m gay,” or, ”I don’t identify with my birth gender,” how do you respond?

It*s easy to assume we’re living through an era when identities of all kinds are in flux. Advertisers call it “rebranding.” More and more companies and individuals are “rebranding” themselves: leaving behind old identities and putting on new ones.  

But, has it ever been otherwise? I grew up in a small town in Delaware. When I was ordained, some people who remembered me from my college summers working as a carpenter’s helper building homes throughout town shook their heads in astonishment. I had been a full partner in a rough bunch of guys on that construction crew. Some of my buddies on that crew remembered me cussing with the best of them when I made mistakes or when I hit my thumb with my hammer. And, some fellow sailors in the Navy who knew me well and with whom I shared some questionable off-base escapades were struck dumb when at the end of my four year enlistment they watched me head off to divinity school (“Divinity school? You? Really?”).

Some years later in Jerusalem, I studied with Hebrew University Professor Shmuel Safrai, considered by many the world’s leading expert on Jerusalem’s Second Temple period during which Jesus lived. He argued that Jesus wasn’t just a carpenter. He was also a very highly trained rabbi who worked closely with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek (the language of the Greek Bible, the Septuagint, composed in the third century BCE). In fact, he had memorized huge portions of the Bible: his Bible, the Hebrew Bible, the “Old Testament.” He either studied in person with prominent rabbis such as Hillel or was  deeply influenced by them. He was trained to adjudicate Jewish law in civil disputes. Expertise in that alone was and still is among orthodox Jews a skill that requires years of training. 

So, how do we square Jesus the rough and ready carpenter with Jesus the rabbi? This is the problem confounding the Nazarenes, the folks who watched Jesus grow up. The general fact is that rabbis in Jesus time often did work in more than one vocation, so apart from how he’s received in his hometown of Nazareth, it wasn’t a big deal. Saint Paul, also a rabbi and an expert in rabbinical scholarship and reasoning, earned his living making tents. 

There are only two passages in the New Testament that explicitly refer to the Jesus’ his neighbors thought they knew as Jesus the carpenter: today’s (Mark 6:3) and Matthew 13:55. The Greek word in both cases is τέκτων (tektone), a word better translated as “master builder,” not just a carpenter, but a person skilled in many of the building trades, especially limestone, of which there has always been an abundance in Palestine compared to wood which has been quite scarce since Greco-Roman times when whole forests were cut down to build Greek and Roman mercantile and naval vessels. In Jesus’ case, his hands were rough and calloused with labor and his mind was quick with Jewish law and philosophy.   

But, our problem today begins and ends with the fact that Jesus is no longer a “good ol’ boy” from Nazareth. His neighbors don’t like what they’re now seeing and hearing. And so, we are drawn into the vehemence and the violence with which Jesus’ Nazaene neighbors respond to his new life as a rabbi. 

Vehemence and violence! There are two passages that shed a poor light on Jesus’ Nazarene neighbors: Luke 4:14-30, where in verse 29, the townspeople drove him out of town and tried to throw him off a cliff. And, John 1:46, where we hear Nathanael saying to Philip, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth was a tough town in a hardscrabble region. 

The problem of how we should respond to radical change in the personal life of someone we have known and loved cuts to the heart of one of the most vexing aspects of our human nature. 

Aristotle said human beings are political animals. He regarded politics as even more important than ethics, the realm of individual behavior and standards.  His focus was on society, especially the rules by which communities govern themselves. 

Contemporary historian Keith Michael Baker defines politics more broadly as  “making claims...the activity through which individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce competing claims they make upon one another and upon the whole.”  

Baker’s definition tracks closer to the kinds of politics Aristotle advocated for our individual lives. He taught the “golden mean.” The golden mean is the goal we should aim for in our dealings with others, the “happy medium,” many call it. Happy? Sometimes, it’s a pretty unhappy medium, isn’t it? Compromise? How many know the meaning of that word anymore in our society?   

What claims are Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth trying to assert upon him? What claims do you and I make upon others, especially those close to us? Are these claims all fair? Do they aim for Aristotle’s golden mean? What happens when they don’t? In our personal lives? In our lives as a nation? We like to speak of these claims using the softer word: “expectations” when the harder but more truthful word is “claims.”

The golden mean is a value that has been sought for millennia across a variety of world religions. Confucius called it chun yung (“the middle way”). The Buddha also taught the middle way using the Sanskrit term madhyama-pratipad. Muhammad used the Arabic word iqtisad advocating moderation in all things. The ancient Greeks carved the inscription μηδὲν ἄγαν- meden agan - “Nothing in excess” - on the lintel of their Temple of Apollo at Delphi, right next to the more familiar one: “Know thyself!” (Greek: Γνῶθι σεαυτόν, gnōthi seauton)

Striking the golden mean, the middle way is often very hard. Giving one another time to adjust to change is among the best ways to begin. But, ‘fact is, as we all know, relationships can be permanently broken. And, where repair is possible, it can take a long time. 

One way to begin is to examine ourselves for signs of narcissism and nostalgia. Narcissus is the dandy of Greek myth who falls in love with his reflection in a pond and thereby becomes stuck, unable to grow, unable to live in genuine community with others, so self-absorbed he’s unable even to acknowledge the existence of others. 

Narcissism may be an obstacle to our ability to accept change in ourselves and others. Narcissism begins when we become frozen in our attitudes toward ourselves and others, when, like Peter Pan, we think it’s possible to make time stand still, to live in an eternal childish past, stuck in our ways and wishing everyone around us would do the same. 

Paul knew the challenges of people having trouble living together in harmony. In First Corinthians 14:20, he writes to his divisive congregation in Corinth, "Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature." Narcissism and its cousin nostalgia are signals that part of us is still locked in childhood, that we are resisting changes somewhere in our lives where change may be necessary and more healthful. William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, is one of the best fictional depictions of Paul’s notion of “infants in evil.” 

A nineteenth century Polish rabbi named Simcha Bunim offered this aid to his followers: write “The world was created for me” on one piece of paper and keep it in one of your pockets. Then, put a different piece of paper in the opposite pocket, with “I am but dust and ashes” written on it. This, he proposed, is a necessary tension. 

There are other guidelines we could put in our pockets. What would you put in yours? For example, I could write on pieces of paper things to remind me of my human condition: “I am capable of kindness” on one piece of paper and put it in one pocket, then I could write, “I am capable of cruelty” on another and put it in the opposite pocket. Muslims like to put it this way: Everyone walks through life accompanied by two angels: one angel sits on the right shoulder and records all good deeds, while the other sits on the left shoulder and records all bad deeds.

In one pocket we might write “Be open to change.” In the other pocket, we might write  “Don’t be too open minded.” That latter saying reminds me of something Arthur McKinstry, Bishop of Delaware in my early childhood used to say, “Don’t be so open minded that your brains fall out.” 

Notice that none of this is about striking a balance. Balance is not the right word here: it’s tension, not balance, isn’t it? We deceive ourselves when we think of the golden mean, the middle way, compromise as a balancing act.  We live our lives in tension most of the time, not balance. That’s why life is hard and faith and prayer are so important. Another way to read Paul in that passage from First Corinthians is that once we grow up and leave our childhood behind, we realize that you and I were made to love the world, sometimes even when it hurts; the world was not made to love us. That’s the meaning of sacrificial love. That’s the meaning of the cross. 

I think in the end, the best way to tolerate the discomfort of tension in our lives is to strive for inclusivity. This doesn’t mean sacrificing our core values, but it does mean giving space where possible for others to live out theirs. In her opening remarks at General Convention in Louisville the other day, House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris perhaps said it better than most: 

“Inclusivity,” she said, “is the sacred work of recognizing the image of God in every person. It means honoring the beautiful diversity of the human family.” And, as Bishop Michael has been telling us over and over again, that’s the center of Jesus’ “m.o.”

In which areas of your life will you strive to become more inclusive in the coming weeks and months? 
 
Amen.