6th Sunday after Pentecost Sermon

Years ago – long before I’d been ordained a priest – I was a florist for a while. And there was one occasion when my boss asked me to deliver the funeral flowers to a large Episcopal church. She knew I was an Episcopalian and that this was delicate situation. A baby had died unexpectedly. And the family and community were in turmoil.

I arrived at the church and there was an older woman at the greeter’s desk (a volunteer from the church). I told her I had a lot of flowers to deliver.

“We’re Episcopalians,” she said. “We don’t do ‘Lots of flowers’ for funerals. It’s tacky and common.”

“I know,” I said. “But in this case, the rector’s made an exception.”

“Oh right,” she said, “because it’s an itty-bitty little baby. Why does the baby get an exception, when no exceptions are made for all my friends when they die?”

I was so caught off guard by her response. It was so venomous and uncaring.

The weight of grief she carried from so many lost friends, coupled with her experience of aging (of feeling overlooked and undervalued), had hardened her, had rendered her incapable of feeling the most natural and human of emotions: sorrow for a family who’d lost their baby.

This is the risk of being human – rather than growing in wisdom and compassion and a broadening wonder at God and all God’s work – we become jaded instead: “hard, gnarled, and self-contained,” unwilling to venture in hope beyond the confines of our own disappointments and disillusionments.

This was Jesus’ critique of the society he lived in. “You’ve become so jaded, you can’t even tell when it’s time to dance or time to cry. Open your eyes, people, and see what’s before you!”

And in this case, what was before them was Jesus himself and the Kingdom of God being made manifest in their presence, in their generation. Jesus came: healing the sick, setting people free from demons, proclaiming the good news of God’s deliverance. Everything about his ministry should have filled them with delight: God is doing a new thing – a good thing – in our midst. And we can hope afresh – for this world and for ourselves. We can have the kind of hope we had as children.

But that’s not how they responded. And we are not unlike that generation. The vulnerability of aging is to become cynical, including the hope that we can change, especially when it comes to faith – to our belief in God and Jesus and our own spiritual potential.

And – to be clear – this is not easy. Not only because it’s hard to keep hoping when we’ve been disappointed again and again, but because figuring out “who Jesus is” is no easy task. What have we got to go on? He’s not before us in the flesh. The Bible has just a handful of stories about him. And history has passed down a whole host of conflicting theologies about him alongside the witness of a church, given more to power, corruption, mediocrity, and self-survival than to the outworking of the Kingdom of God.

So, yes, it is hard to keep ourselves open – to keep seeking God and the knowledge of God. But what else can we do if we want life and wholeness and ultimate meaning?

And as I age, and as I resist my own temptations to rigidness in faith and hope, I find an increasing permission to wonder about God in general and Jesus in particular. It’s okay – a kind of prayer, even – to ask, “Who are Jesus?” and then to try things on for size. “Is this who you are? Or this?” (And as an aside, part of what I value in our liturgy is how the stability of the same prayers, week after week, keeps me anchored in a heritage of faith, forged over the centuries, that is so much bigger than what I could safely discover on my own. My “wonderings” are held within a tradition and a “communion of saints” where I am safe.)

So I keep asking the question, “Who are you, Jesus?” And the answer I’ve been trying on for size these past couple weeks is this: Yes, Jesus is “fully human, fully divine,” as the tradition teaches us. But as such, he is the uniquely human expression of God, a God whose totality is vastly beyond our human comprehension.

Afterall, we have no capacity whatsoever to see beyond our human vantagepoint. And we don’t need to! It’s not our responsibility. But it is absolutely our responsibility to be the most complete humanity we can be. And in Christ, God reveals to us what that means. Christ is making manifest that aspect of God which is distinctly relevant and perceivable to us humans, and to which we are accountable.

Other creatures may well have other responsibilities for different aspect of godliness. Bats can hear shapes, I recently read, and plants can eat light. Bees can dance maps. And in so doing, they may well be living out their responsibility of godliness in ways I cannot do or understand, to say nothing of tidal forces and plate tectonics, or even the role disease itself. Those are not our duties. Our duty is to be like Christ.

And you know what? How fabulous is that? We’ve got an awesome job description! What did Jesus do in his ministry? He healed the sick; cast out demons, and proclaimed the good news of God’s redeeming. Or to put it in more accessible language: We get to make things make healthy; we get to eliminate evil; we get to share good news of hope in a hurting world. These are the priorities of our human vocation.

Which means, they also lie at the heart of all worthwhile human endeavor. What should the role of government be, for example – of congress and the courts and the president? To promote health; to eliminate structures evil; to enact systems and policies that foster hope for everyone.

In the face of so much social and political turmoil these days, I heard a refreshing story recently of what this can look like. A friend of mine’s father was a lawyer. And when he was fresh out of law school, he clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Harlan.

In his memoirs, he remembered when the boxer, Muhammad Ali, had been convicted for refusing to step forward for the draft, claiming conscientious-objector status based on the teachings of the Nation of Islam.

“Ali was an intensely divisive figure at a highly polarized time,” he wrote. “The country was thoroughly torn up over civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and the draft, among other issues. Ali and his claim to be a conscientious objector pushed a lot of buttons in those areas. It didn’t help that he was a professional boxer claiming to be a pacifist at heart, or that at the time he was widely considered to be a loudmouth, a provocateur, and a bit of a clown.”

His conviction had already been upheld unanimously by a court of appeals, and, after the case was argued orally before the Supreme Court, they voted 6 to 2 to affirm the conviction.

Then it was time for Justice Harlan to write the majority opinion. And it fell on my friend’s father to prepare the initial draft. But when he tried to explain the rationale for affirmance, he found it “wouldn’t write;” it wasn’t persuasive or satisfying. So he told Justice Harlan the difficulty he was having, and he, in turn, invited him to his home to work it through. “Perhaps it will succumb to a little bourbon.”

But as they talked it through (despite the reasoning power of bourbon), Ali’s testimony about his beliefs and the basis for them struck a chord in Justice Harlan. “There’s the ring of truth in what this fellow says,” my friend’s father remembers him saying. The justice continued to chew on it, then finally concluded, “I think an injustice has been done. I’m going to talk to Black about this case” (referring to justice Hugo Black, another the member of the Court).

And so a memorandum was circulated to the other members of the Court explaining why Harlan thought Ali’s conviction should be reversed. All the participating justices agreed, a turnaround that was virtually unheard of in the Supreme Court.

“Because his conviction was reversed, Ali was able to return to the ring and later regain his title as heavyweight champion of the world. By the time he died, Ali was one of the most respected and cherished figures in sports.”[1]

And this young clerk had a role, the first to insist the argument wasn’t lining up. And Justice Harlan had his crucial response: “There’s a ring of truth in what this fellow says.” And “I think an injustice has been done.”

Create health. Eliminate evil. Foster hope.

We may not have the privilege to influence directly the work of the Supreme Court, but we all share this human duty – this vocation of Christlikeness. What is before us? And how do we join in God’s work?

Now here we are, decades beyond Muhammad Ali’s case, and race relations remain an enormous area of conflict in this country and in the world. Look at what’s happening in France. But if we want to follow in the way of Christ, the first step is often to recognize and admit when hopelessness or jadedness has infected us, and then to repent, and then to embrace afresh the gospel of hope: that God and God’s redeeming love is in this place, too. And then to step into the pattern of God’s healing.

Which is why I’m so grateful Eric Dudley is leading the Sacred Ground course this fall – an Episcopal ministry designed expressly for this purpose – to help us Christ followers deepen our understanding of the nature and effects of racism in America on everyone, and to become part of God’s beloved community.

And as we do so – as we step into this pattern of Christ – we do not do it alone. Not only are we side-by-side with other seekers and doers of the Way, we are, as Christ said, yoking ourselves to Christ himself.

“Come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you reset. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

So this, too, has become my recent experiment with Christ: “Will you carry my burdens with me, Jesus? I don’t want to walk alone, weighed down by fear and regret. Walk with me, Jesus; share this load. And lead me to the Father.”

[1] Memoirs shared privately with the Rev. Eric Stelle