Sermon, Proper 9, Year A, Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30, 9 July 2017

 “Take my yoke upon you.” A yoke is an item that may not translate well in contemporary society. It’s a safe bet you or I have never worn a yoke, yet in some countries around the world animals and people still wear yokes. In this country, you might see, among Old Order Amish, two oxen yoked together to plow a field. In National Geographic magazine you might see a yoke on a water buffalo. You might also see people wearing yokes to carry buckets of water, or animal feed. When I lived in northern Germany, my landlady wore a yoke with buckets of manure to distribute onto the crops she grew.

In Jesus’ time there were two kinds of yokes, a double and a single. A single yoke was used for a single animal. A double yoke was used for a pair of animals. Good yokes were specially fitted to the animal or animals so the yoke did not rub or abrade the hide of the animal wearing it. A good fit made a difference in how the animal was able to bear the weight of the cart, or the burden being hauled. If a yoke did not fit well an animal would often protest by kicking and pulling against the load, or even refuse to move at all.

In Matthew’s gospel this morning, we hear about people who were offered two different yokes and refused them both.

The first yoke came from John the Baptist. John offered extreme asceticism: fasting and prayer and a call to repentance. People were shocked and many refused to put on John’s yoke.

The second yoke came from Jesus. Jesus offered a Kingdom of God that was at hand, the bridegroom was here and it was time to party. Worse yet, it was suddenly okay to party with notorious sinners, not just the law abiding and upright. People were shocked. People refused to put on Jesus’ yoke.

John was accused of being possessed. Jesus was accused of gluttony and drunkenness. Neither of the yokes were what people wanted to put on. John’s way of repentance and giving up seemed far too serious; Jesus’ way of eating and drinking with sinners seemed far too joyful. People wanted to wear their old yokes, the comfortable yokes, the yokes to which they were accustomed. They did not want to put on the new yoke Jesus invited them to wear.

Jesus invited people to put on a new yoke and they refused. People wanted to wear their old yokes. They wanted to continue wearing their comfortable yokes to which they were accustomed. They did not want to wear the yoke that Jesus was inviting them to wear. Just as we, today, often refuse to wear the yoke Jesus offers us.

         We like our old yoke, thank you very much. We are accustomed to the way our yoke feels. We do not want a new yoke even if it is lighter. We believe the yoke of God will demand things of us.

And it will. I would be lying if I told you otherwise. If we put on Jesus’ yoke it means taking off whatever we have ourselves yoked to now. Whether it is the way we do our job, how we spend what we think is “our” money, what we do with our possessions, how we use the power we have, how we deal with our anger, and our fear. To be yoked ro Jesus, whatever we are yoked to now must eventually go.

Yet when we are willing to let go of one yoke, we make room for the yoke God has designed for us. It will be a yoke that will fit us like no other because the yoke is as unique as we are, as unique as God has made us and knows us.

         Best of all, the yoke God has made for us comes with a yoke-mate. The yoke-mate is Jesus. Jesus offers to wear God’s yoke with us, to walk with us, to bear the weight and to show us how to bear the weight ourselves.

         God gave us our yoke-mate, Jesus, who bears our burdens and forgives our sins. Jesus came to fill us with his way of life, by yoking us to him and to a God of grace and glory.

When we walk with Jesus, when we are yoked with Jesus into a community of God, we are welcomed into joy. We discover that joy together. We grow into that joy day by day. When we put on Jesus’ yoke, we find Jesus was already there before us, already carrying his end of the yoke, already helping us bear whatever burdens we have, for his yoke is easy and his burden is light. AMEN.

The Rev Nicolette Papanek

©2017

Sermon Proper 8, Year A, Genesis 22:1-14; Matthew 10:40-42, 2 July 2017

  Today’s Genesis story is so chilling we can hardly avoid it. It’s what I call a “whiplash” reading. It’s something that snaps our heads around and makes us question everything we think we know about God. Even if I didn’t say a word about it, I suspect most of you would sit here thinking about that reading and not hear much of anything else. You might go home with unanswered questions about an angry God, a capricious God, a God who requires the sacrifice of a beloved son. Whether I will or no, no matter how I try to avoid it myself, the Genesis story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac is something at which we’re compelled to look.

I used to think I had finally sorted out this sacrifice of Isaac business. I read a commentary in which the author wrote that the story was about God no longer demanding human sacrifice from the Israelites. The author’s theory, based on in-depth biblical research, was that Abraham “misheard” God about sacrificing Isaac, and so, God was compelled to retrieve the situation by providing the ram caught in the thicket to replace Isaac. The author, whose name escapes me unfortunately, said this was the way the Hebrew people explained and differentiated themselves from other ancient peoples who sacrificed human beings on the altars of their Gods. It’s a wonderful theory. And it certainly has scholarly merit. liked it a lot. But, at least in my view, it does not deal directly with the text we hear.

There is nothing in the text as it is translated for us, to make us think Abraham misunderstood God. God calls Abraham. Abraham replies, “Here I am.”[1] God tells Abraham, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”[2]

There is no way to get out of this. Nothing to indicate that Abraham might have heard God incorrectly, no messenger who might have garbled the message. God speaks directly to Abraham. If we’re really hunting for an explanation of Abraham’s mishearing God, you could make a case for it as being implied when the story shifts.

The story shifts when Isaac asks his father Abraham, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”[3]  And Abraham replies, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.”[4] The problem is, there really isn’t a shift. The story continues on its same trajectory. Abraham built the altar, laid the wood, bound Isaac, laid him on top of the wood, and reached for the knife.

It is only then that we hear what may be the voice of sanity. The voice of reasonableness, cutting clear across the insanity of sacrificing a son to the whim of a God Abraham cannot and does not understand. And we note the voice is the voice of an angel of the Lord, not the Lord. The angel says, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”[5] Yet here is some confusion: is it the voice of an angel? Is it God? Is the voice speaking in the first person or the second person? It sounds at first as though it is an angel, then suddenly it seems to be God. “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And then, regardless of who is speaking, the ram is provided and Isaac is saved.

We can breathe a sigh of relief and wonder again why God would let Abraham get so close to killing his own son. What kind of God demands that we be willing to kill our children for God’s sake? What kind of God would be an abuser of children and allow Isaac to suffer as his own father bound him and put him on the altar and raised a knife over him? What about Isaac’s mother Sarah? What was she thinking? She saw Abraham leave with Isaac and nothing for the sacrifice. Did she guess Abraham’s intention?

What kind of God is this?

I wish I knew. I do know two things. The first is this. The great Christian writer and mystic C.S. Lewis described Aslan the lion, who represents Christ Jesus in his stories, in this way. To the question, “Then he isn’t safe?” C. S. Lewis’ character replies, “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”[6]

The second is this. There are no easy stories in scripture. There are no easy answers either. These are stories to be wrestled with as we practice our faith. These are stories to laugh over and shed tears over. These are stories in which to find God. These are our stories: your stories and my stories.

         Our God is seldom safe but always good. This is the God in whom we place our trust: The God of death and the God of resurrection. AMEN.

The Rev Nicolette Papanek

©2017

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[1] Genesis 22:1 (NRSV)

[2] Genesis 22:2 (NRSV)

[3] Genesis 22:7b (NRSV)

[4] Genesis 22:8 (NRSV)

[5] Genesis 22:12 (NRSV)

[6] Lewis, C. S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. HarperCollins. New York: 1978 (1950) Page 80. (Italics mine.)

Sermon, Proper 7, Year A, Matthew 10:24-39, 25 June 2017

         “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”[1] Wait, what? What happened to the gently peace-giving Jesus we know and love?

Instead we get a Gospel lesson about following Jesus. About becoming an imitator of Christ, of making Jesus Christ the pattern by which we measure ourselves. Imitators of Christ act like Jesus so they may become like him over time.

         Yet being imitators of Jesus involves that word many of us don’t like: sacrifice. Jesus’ description when he speaks about the challenges and difficulties of following him is risky business. Imitating, or following Jesus, asks things of us we likely don’t want to do, let alone think about. The great Episcopal writer Verna Dozier once said, God wanted His people "to follow Jesus and not merely worship him,"[2] 

We have easy lives, you and I. Some of you may have grown up in households where food was scarce, but I’ll venture that most of us don’t worry too much how to get that food on our plates now. Most of us don’t worry about shelter or clothing. We may budget, but we can get what we need, and likely more than we need, to sustain lives of comfort and comparative ease.

Our materially easy lives have given us a sense that the gospel is easy too. We come to church, we listen, we pray. We pray for the poor of the world, most of us without thinking much about where the poor actually live. The poor are not next door to us. They are not highly visible here. Our own households fill our horizons, and a problem these days is coming up with the money for a down payment on the next car or van.

         Yet in this gospel Jesus speaks about sacrifice. Jesus speaks about believing and acting and being in a way that alienated him from his own family. He turned his life and that of his followers upside down and inside out. And, he died a horrible death. Some of the people who have imitated Jesus through the centuries also made that same sacrifice and went to their deaths because they followed him. Does that sound peaceful?

         Do you suppose the peace Jesus speaks of elsewhere in the gospels is the peace that comes through sacrifice? Is it possible that if we want to really be imitators of Christ, we must find a way in our own lives to sacrifice so we may know God’s peace?

What does peace mean to us when we are willing to give all of ourselves to imitate Christ? Can it mean that we will no longer have the ease and prosperity to which we are accustomed? Could it mean we would feel some deprivation in order to know the deprivation of others?

         I’m asking us to think about sacrifice; sacrifice in all areas of our lives, not simply financial. Because the peace which passes all understanding – the peace Jesus holds out to us – is a peace that comes at a cost. The cost is sacrifice. It means the difference between sticking your toe cautiously into the pool to check the temperature and instead running off the diving board and leaping without testing the water first. It means being willing to examine one’s life and to ask ourselves, “What do I need to move from worshiping to following Jesus?” What would it take, to paraphrase Verna Dozier, if we approached God the way she described: "What we do from Monday to Saturday is most important and we come to our Sunday experience to be refueled."[3]

            When we move from worshiping to following, we expect to lose something of our lives. But we will find our lives in the losing.  We may expect we will not have enough if we give something up. Yet we will gain much more than we lose. We may expect that we will struggle. Yet our struggle will open us to the peace of God.

When we are willing to lose our lives for the sake of Christ we will find our lives. And in the finding will be the everlasting peace Jesus offers us. AMEN.

The Rev Nicolette Papanek

©2017

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[1] Matthew 10:34 (NRSV)

[2] From Verna Dozier’s obituary in the Washington Post, 2006.

[3] Ibid.

Sermon, Trinity Sunday, Year A, Matthew 28:16-20, 11 June 2017

(Prior to preaching I cut 2” wide long strips of red, gold, and white fabric and tied the strips together to make longer strips about the length of each pew. There was a long multicoloured strip at the end of each pew when people entered their seats. As people entered that morning, the ushers told people the strips were there for the sermon.)

Today is Trinity Sunday, one of the principal feasts of the church year. Trinity Sunday is a day of celebration, a day when we honor and celebrate God in three aspects, or persons, or beings, or perhaps ways of being and acting. One of the other things I love about the Trinity is the concept grew mostly from the bottom up rather than the top down. Bishop Frederick Borsch, retired bishop of Los Angeles, who died in April of this year, had this to say about the Trinity:

There are probably a number of people who imagine that the idea of the Trinity was thought up by ivory-tower theologians who, typically, were making things more complicated than they needed to be and were obscuring the simple faith of regular believers. In fact, it seems that the process worked pretty much the other way around. Practicing believers and worshipers were driven by their experiences of God’s activity to the awareness that God related in several different ways to the creation. Thus what those believers came to insist upon was that God had to be recognized as being in different forms of relationship with the creation, in ways at least like different persons, and that all these ways were divine, that is, were of God. Yet there could not be three gods. God, to be the biblical God and the only God of all, had to be one God. This complex and profound faith was then handed over for the theologians to try and make more intelligible. They have been trying ever since.[1]

The Trinity is (are?) complicated to understand, and for some of us the more we think about it the more confused we get. Trying to comprehend something that is three separate and co-equal beings, yet at the same time is (are?) inseparable, is about as confusing as it gets. See, you can even get tangled up in the grammar if you over think it.

         This Sunday, Trinity Sunday, let's think about what the Trinity means for us and our faith. At its essence, the Trinity is about a relationship, or perhaps relationships plural. That is, the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Or, if you prefer, the relationship that exists between the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer. All three are in that relationship as co-equals, each with a way of being and operating, yet so far as we know, there is no arguing about who does what. And while these three co-equals operate independently, they are at no time separated. They are always and forever joined in relationship, to one another and to us.

         Throughout the centuries various theologians have used different metaphors to describe the relationship between the three aspects or beings of the Trinity. Legend has it St. Patrick used a cloverleaf to describe the Trinity. The church continues to use metaphors such as interlocked circles, or overlapping rings. There are many ways to describe something none of us fully understands, and probably never will, at least in a way that communicates to everyone in the same way.

         This feast day I’m going to ask you to do something a bit different to remind us of what Trinity does for us and for our relationships with one another. I think sometimes our faith can be just a little abstract, a little separated from us. And often, when we get the rest of us, more than just our brains, involved in our faith, surprising things happen.

         At the end of most pews or row of seats, there is a pile of fabric strips. What I’d like you to do is start in the pews on either side that are closest to the front. Some of you may have to move forward to pick up the strip. Whoever picks up one end of the strip passes the rest of the strip to the next person. And so on. The important thing is that everyone is holding on to the strip. What we’re doing is connecting us to one another by using this strip. When the last person on one pew gets the strip, pass it back to the person behind you. This may involve some moving around. When you run out of a strip, tie the strip to another strip and keep going. There are enough strips to connect us all, but you still might have to (Oh my goodness!) be a little closer to one another than you normally are on a Sunday morning.

Keep adding strips, and keep holding on to those long strips as you keep tying on more strips and the strips keep getting longer. It’s fine to go back and forth across the aisle. When we finish we’ll have everyone throughout the church connected along one big long strip that goes back and forth and across the aisles and around the church, and everyone will be holding part of the strip.

         Remember Karen at the organ. And the ushers in the back will move forward to join everyone. The Eucharistic Ministers at the altar will come down to join the congregation too, as so will I. That long strip will connect all of us so everyone is touching some part of the strip. (I waited until all the strips were tied together and everyone was connected.)

         Now, that is what I know about the Trinity, God in three persons, blessed Trinity. The Trinity connects us to God and to one another through an inseparable relationship that none of us can destroy. We can part from one another, the strip can even look a little frayed, but the Trinity still holds us, separately and together. We can move to a different place on the strip, but the tripartite or three-part God in relationship with God’s self is in relationship with each of us and and all of us, and never lets us go. And God’s relationship with us and within us connects us to one another. We are connected, one to another, by a blessed Trinity that nothing can separate. And we are connected through that blessed Trinity to family, workmates, housemates, spouses, partners, lovers, friends, enemies, acquaintances, those we have met, and those we have not, the alien, the poor, the prisoner, the living and the dead.

         Is this astonishing? Is this comforting or uncomfortable or both? Is this challenging? This is the God in Jesus Christ who tells us in this morning’s Gospel that even though we may doubt, we are to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. And this is the God who gives us strength to do this by reminding us God is with us, even to the end of the age. Look around you at the people holding their part of the strip. This is what holds us together: this is God in three persons, blessed Trinity. AMEN.

The Rev Nicolette Papanek

©2017

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[1] Bishop Frederick Houk Borsch, The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles (Retired 2002). www.textweek.com/Trinity. Accessed 06/12/03.