Sermons

We have a mischievous expression in my family. It’s a phrase we use when one of us says or does something completely surprising—and you see something in someone that you never knew was there. The expression is: “Well, you don’t know everything, do you?” It’s a playful protest that while we think we know each other like a book—there are and always will be a few pages we somehow missed. There’s more to know about each other and this world we live in than we thought.

The Christian doctrine of revelation—in a more thoughtful way—says much the same thing. It’s a teaching that says, “You don’t know everything, do you?” The world around us, the people in our lives, even the God we worship and serve, we sometimes speak of and act as if we know like a book. Well, surprise. We don’t know everything!

Revelation means that something which was formerly hidden, and something we couldn’t have figured out on our own has been unveiled. A curtain has been drawn back to reveal something which was there all along, and something we can’t have known unless God himself shows us.

Let’s say that you know a man (let me interject to say that the man I’m going to tell you about is a real person but it’s no one here; at least not that I know of because I don’t know everything). So, there is a man who you know is a surly, grouchy curmudgeon. And to the human eye and ear he is. He doesn’t seem to have much good to say about anyone. He’s suspicious of what makes people tick and thinks by and large people are no darn good. He never gives money to any charitable organization because he thinks they’re all run by pie-in-the-sky do-gooders and that the recipients of charity usually only have themselves to blame for their misfortune. He opposes flowers on the altar as frivolous, and he doesn’t like expressions of affection.

One evening, you go to visit a friend in the hospital. On the way to her room, you stop in front of the large windows to look into the nursery at the newborns. Through the glass, you see the door at the back of the nursery open and a nurse comes in. The door remains open for a while. And looking through the door she’s just opened, you see into the room beyond. And there seated in a rocking chair, you are startled to see, is the old curmudgeon himself, gowned, with a newborn baby in his arms. You see the old man’s lips moving, his eyebrows arched, his whole face an open door of wonder. You can see that the man and the newborn only have eyes for each other.

A nurse stops beside you, sees what you are looking at and says, “Do you know Mr. Smith?” Yes, you do, you say, realizing in the same instant that maybe you don’t know him as well as you had thought. “That man is a saint,” the nurse says. “Do you know that he has been coming here every week if we need him for the past six years. He’s one of our nursery daddies. He holds the babies born to moms suffering from addiction. He helps them get through their first days and nights.” And then the door closes.

“Well, you don’t know everything, do you?”

When Jesus was transfigured on the Holy Mount, the door of God’s heart is opened, and the veil drawn aside. And we see that the love with which the Father holds his Son, is the same love that holds us like him too, the same love, like a shining light that the dark can never overcome. This light is God’s word of love that says, “we don’t know everything.”

Because when we get afraid, what we think we know is that we are all alone in this world. What we think we know is that if we don’t look out for ourselves, that no one else will. What we think we know is that ‘might makes right’ – always has, always will. What we think we know is that we’re not good enough for God’s loving kindness. What we think we know is that there is some darkness that the love of Christ cannot pierce.

The moment of God’s transfiguring love is his no! to all these propositions. Revelation is God’s light crashing into our darkness.

Recent scenes of the devastation and suffering in Gaza brought to mind a PBS special from many years ago about the life of Mother Theresa. During the worst fighting in the Lebanon of three decades ago, Mother Theresa came to Beirut to visit one of the Missionaries of Charity homes located there. But the convent was in a no-man’s zone where fierce fighting was taking place. In one of the scenes in this documentary, Mother Theresa is seen meeting with the American diplomatic envoy, Philip Habib. She is explaining through a translator that she will be visiting this particular convent the next day. Habib says with all due respect that she may not go as it’s too dangerous. Mother Theresa responds by saying that she had already prayed to the Lord Jesus for a ceasefire and so not to worry, she will be fine. Habib protests that this cannot be. It is too dangerous. We think we know what will happen if you try to go there.

The next day, there is an eerie quiet throughout much of Beirut, including the no-man’s zone where Mother Theresa will visit. And she does. A convoy of cars makes its way through cratered streets to the convent. Inside, Mother Theresa makes a tour and greets the sisters. She takes each sister’s head into her hands and touches her forehead to their forehead, and lingers like that, unhurried, going from sister to sister.

Upstairs is a large room set up like a hospital. We see the sisters going about their rounds, caring for the patients, who are the sickest of the sick, the poorest of the poor. They have been discarded as unsavable in the harsh triage of scarce resources which is a war zone. Some will live. Some will die. All will be cared for.

In one of the beds, which is really more of a large crib, is a full-grown man—at least in terms of his age. But his body failed to grow properly, and he resembles one caught halfway between a child’s body and an adult’s body, with nothing in proportion. In the background, you can hear gunfire returning and distant explosions. The camera shows him reacting with a wild, terrified expression, unfocused in blind terror. His body trembles uncontrollably. His head thrashes from side to side as if looking for an escape. One of the sisters comes to his crib-side and puts her hand on the man’s heaving, bony chest. She leans towards the man, her lips moving with words we cannot hear. Her eyes are intent on the man’s eyes. She rubs his chest to calm him. She is trying to call him back from the dark place he is lost in. Gradually the man’s tremors subside, and his terrified eyes soften and begin to focus till he finds the sisters eyes looking at him. He locks onto her eyes, and as the gunfire increases in intensity in the streets, coming nearer, they continue to gaze into each other’s eyes, as the man breaths easier and easier and easier.

In the midst of a crazy frightening world, he only sees her. They only have eyes for each other. Can you see them? What we think we know is that here are two more ‘little ones’ swept into the dark. But as the veil is drawn aside, we see that the Father’s heart is open still, embracing that moment with the love he has for his Son.

The light that comes in that dark place cannot be overcome.

On the Holy Mount of the Transfiguration, Jesus stands as the door opens between heaven and earth. Standing between Elijah and Moses, he will shortly hang dying between two unnamed thieves—drawing the dark of all we think we know into his redeeming light. When the moment of revelation has passed, Peter and James and John look up and see only Jesus. Only Jesus. God-with-us who only has eyes for you and for this world he loves. Amen.

The Rev. David H. May

Did you notice that the Collect for the Day we just prayed includes a pretty bold assumption? The prayer assumes that Christ himself will call you. When? How? For what purpose? Well, who knows? But he will. And probably already has for each of us here, and not for the last time, I pray. What we ask God for is not the grace to be called, but the grace to say yes.

The Bible among other things is a treasure trove of stories of God calling to us. Actually, if you think about it, most of the Bible bears witness to all those times and places where God calls to one of us and we hear it, and something happens. The details of what God is calling us to do or say is usually a little fuzzy: go to the place I will show you, God says to Abraham; tell Pharoah to let my people go, God says to Moses; you’re going to conceive and bear within you the Holy One of God, God says to Mary. And in one way or another, every time God calls one of us, our hearts are broken by how big the love is that calls us: a love that calls us out of our world and into his, from our way of seeing things, to God’s ways of seeing things, and what God cares for become our cares, too.

For the Prayers of the People today, we’ll use a set of prayers that remember and thank God for all the great families in the household of Christian faith that started somehow, some way with God calling someone, and the breaking open of a heart by love. And I promise you, not one of them set out to create a new denomination. Luther did not set out to make Lutherans. Calvin did not answer a call to create Presbyterians. Wesley’s call was not to form the Methodists. William Seymour was not called to create the Pentecostal movement out of a warehouse revival on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in April of 1906. An Albanian girl named Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu never planned to become a saint named Mother Teresa when God called her. For all of them, there was a day and a place when God called them to love what he loves, to care for what he cares for, to heal and mend something precious to God, and their hearts were broken open.

And because it’s easy to think that God only calls these big important people, remember Moses at the time God called was on the run from the law, and Mary was a country girl in first-century Palestine whose unwed pregnancy was as hard to explain as you can imagine, and William Seymour’s father lived in slavery. So just in case you think God only calls the big important people, I want to tell you a story. It’s possible you’ve heard it before or some version of it. Most of us have a few stories like this that God has given us that are our spiritual North Stars, experiences of grace through which God is still speaking, still healing, still strengthening us, still picking us up when we’ve fallen. They are like the Holy Scriptures written on our lives that God gives us to read again and again. This is one of mine.

Over spring break in 1993, I went with a group of kids from The University of the South in Sewanee on a mission trip to Kingston, Jamaica. These kids were the best and the brightest. They came from the first families of Savannah and Memphis and Dallas and Charleston. They were smart, faithful, and were probably bound for careers in medicine or law or finance. They sang in the All Saints Chapel choir or did community work down the mountain or mentored underclassmen. They were really good kids. I was a seminarian at Sewanee and went as their chaplain. We’d been meeting twice a month for months to get ourselves prepared and to learn how to work as a team. There were three different communities we were going to serve while we were there. One was a school, one was the Missionaries of Charity house, and one was a community in nearby Riverton City.

Riverton City is just outside Kingston. It’s not actually a city. What it is is the city dump. And it’s a place where at that time about 5,000 people lived. Somehow, in the middle of the trash heaps they’d cleared out a large open space and built a school and a community center. We went there to lead a vacation Bible school for four or five days. We taught Bible stories and sang songs; we did artwork and played games. But mostly each of us walked around with little kids draped all over us, carrying little ones on our hips and slightly bigger ones piggy-back or on our shoulders. I don’t know how it was possible in that place, but those children were filled with as much joy and mischief, as much wonder and silliness as any other kids anywhere.

One of the kids from Sewanee, a young woman named Sarah, is the point of this story. She was a part of the group but not really. She hung around the edges, and I only really remember her talking one time. She was with us, but she kept herself to herself mostly. She was one of the kids who went to Riverton City. Something happened to her there. She came alive. Literally she came alive.

One afternoon after lunch, we were all laying around in the community center. It was nap time and there were these clusters of children and our kids just flopped out on the ground. Sarah was sitting on the ground, leaned against a plywood wall. There were three little girls lying on her asleep, on her legs on her lap on her chest. A fourth girl was combing Sarah’s hair and whispering in her ear from time to time. Sarah saw me looking at them. And she looked at the girl on her legs and the one on her lap and the one on her chest and the one beside her combing her hair. And then she looked up and mouthed the words, Thank you! And then she smiled such a smile and I thought, ‘Oh, there you are!’ She had found herself. It’s like it was the first time I’d ever really seen her. Where before she’d stayed back, kept her cards closer to her vest, there she was, fully present, alive as alive can be.

We came home maybe a week later, back to school, back to our regular lives. Maybe a week after we’d gotten back I was crossing the grounds near All Saints Chapel and I heard someone shouting, Hey! really loudly. I looked around and saw Sarah storming towards me. She was furious. Her shouting made other people stop and look to see what was going on. She stormed up to me and shouted, “You have got to tell me something!”

I said, “Sarah, what’s going on?”

“What’s going on?! I want you to tell me when I will stop hurting! All I can think about is those little girls who I left behind living in a dump, a literal garbage dump, and look at us here! When am I going to stop hurting? All I want to do is sell all my clothes and shoes and my stupid BMW that my dad just bought for me one day and everything else and give it all to those girls! Like Sessee who is smarter and better than any of us but lives in a dump. When am I going to stop hurting?!”

The thank you she had whispered at Riverton City for those girls where she found herself and the breaking heart always go together, because that’s what God’s holy love does for us.

The Lord had called to her in Riverton City, and without quite knowing what she was signing up for, she had already been given grace to say yes, and yes with her whole heart. She had been taken out of her world and into God’s where what God cares for were now hers to care for.

When Jesus calls us, because that’s what he does, he calls us to a life like his. Which even when it breaks your heart is still your heart’s desire. Follow me, Jesus says. When he calls, Lord, give us grace to say yes. Amen.

The Rev. David H. May

I don’t know why exactly, but when we were kids, my sisters and I did something really rotten to our little brother. We told him that he had come to our family as a refugee from an Eastern European country. Why a refugee and why one from Eastern Europe? Who knows. But what that implied was that he wasn’t actually one of us, he wasn’t really a part of the family. Why did we do that? I have no idea. But we did. We were a pretty lively crew, the four of us, so maybe it was just a normal part of the general nonsense that regularly went on between us. Or maybe we thought it was just too ridiculous to be believed.

But it really struck a chord with my brother. For some reason, rather than just pushing back (which would have been the usual thing to do) he found himself wondering if maybe, just maybe, it was true. His memories couldn’t refute it because our memories only go so far back. Maybe he really was a refugee our family had taken in. Maybe he really wasn’t part of the family. It was pretty upsetting to him.

I didn’t exactly understand his reaction at the time. Why didn’t he just push back in the usual way? Maybe I didn’t understand his reaction then, but I do now. We had touched on a really tender place in us human beings without knowing it. It’s a basic need we all have to have, or our lives can go sideways. We all need to know that we belong, somewhere to someone.

I do want to say before moving on that there was hell to pay for this little prank we pulled on our brother. Our mother took care of that. But in a surprising way. But it also happened in the ways that it does for all of us, I’m afraid, where we’re on the receiving end of messages and actions that say you don’t belong. The world is called ‘the school of hard knocks’ for a reason. Who belongs at the cool table in the school cafeteria and who doesn’t. Who belongs in this neighborhood and who doesn’t. All of it. There’s a kind of great sorting of the wheat from the chaff that seems to be a part of human nature, or at least fallen human nature. Rich, poor, educated, uneducated, black, white, immigrant, native, believers, non-believers, and on and on, answering the question who belongs and who doesn’t.

Which on this day, the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, in one way or another is the situation Jesus wades right into the middle of, standing in the Jordan River. His cousin John is there thundering away at the miserable state of affairs of people who assume they belong to God, or assume that they don’t, or aren’t too sure. None of that matters to John. For John, the people are grass, sprouting with dew in the morning and gone by sunset.  He shouts that God is coming and you had better get it together and clean up your act as if your life depends on it, because it does. But then he spots Jesus making his way with the crowds of people by the water. He knows at once who he is. He says, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” So why is he there with all the rest? John didn’t want to baptize Jesus. He isn’t worthy and besides, Jesus doesn’t need it. But Jesus won’t have it any other way. His place right beside us has nothing to do with being worthy or not. His baptism upends all of that because with his baptism he says, “Here I am, with all the rest, right where I belong.”

After Christmas time, our lost-and-found basket here at church is generally fully restocked. There are scarves and reader eyeglasses and car keys and gloves and other little thises and thats that wash ashore from the high tide of Christmas. I was looking through all those things the week after Christmas to see what was there. I saw a sporty pair of green and black gloves, the kind that don’t have fingertips. I picked them up and thought about the hands that fit into them and wondered if they would ever be reunited with the hands they belonged to. Which, from that thought, in my mind at least, was just one small step to bringing to mind the lost-and-found basket that Jesus puts himself into with us when he is baptized. John thinks all of us lost gloves can find our way back to the hands we belong to. Jesus knows better; sheep get lost and can’t find their way back. John thinks we need to clean up our act to save our own skin. Jesus says God will do the saving for us. Jesus finds the place our lost lives belong.

I told you there was hell to pay when my mother caught wind of what we’d done to my brother. She would have been perfectly within her rights to have gone John the Baptist on us, putting the axe to the roots as John said God is going to do. But that’s not what happened. What she did was go to the closet where there was a big box of pictures, stacks of black-and-white Polaroids back then. She picked through them, found the ones she was looking for, and then got my brother and they sat down at the kitchen table. And she told him a story, his story, using those pictures. A picture of her in the home stretch of her pregnancy just before he was born, him wrapped up in a blanket carried by our dad when he came home from the hospital, her sitting on the floor with him in her lap while our dog licked him, his first Christmas with the rest of us in front of the tree, between his sisters on a sled.  She said, “Trust me, I brought you into this world. You’re mine. You belong in this family. I’ll deal with your sisters and brother.”  That sealed it.

Isn’t baptism like that too? In the prayers over the water, we hear the story of God’s great saving deeds from the first day the Spirit blew over the face of the deep till that same Spirit rested on Jesus in the waters of the Jordan, and throughout the life he led to show us what it looks like to belong to God and to live like that. And what that looks like is a table around which are seated down-and-outers who suddenly feel like up-and- comers, and people you wouldn’t be caught dead with from the wrong side of the tracks and from the right side of the tracks and everyone in between. And because of the one breaking bread for us all to share, you see, we belong.

In just a few minutes, that same Spirit will be hovering over the water in that great baptismal font, and God will establish an indissoluble bond with Kate and Charles and Coleman and Brooke and Davis; they will receive the grace of heaven through the sacrament of baptism and be sealed as Christ’s own forever. And a place at the Lord’s Table will always be set for them. And for you. Because it is the Lord’s Table – the place we belong with him. Amen.

The Rev. David H. May