Let Me Tell You A Story: A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 7:10-16

Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18

Romans 1:1-7

Matthew 1:18-25

St. Christopher's Episcopal Church

Kailua, HI

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, in a far off land, there lived a young king named Ahaz.  He was a young man who only came to the throne at the age of twenty.  He was king over a small, but a proud little kingdom called Judah, but was sandwiched between two mighty empires: Assyria and Egypt. 

Assyria was a mighty and terrifying empire.  Though its cities were grand and the largest in the ancient world, and its culture was exquisite, many of its artistic works are among the most spectacular in antiquity; to be on its bad side meant unfortunate things.  Enemies were killed in gruesome ways, women and children taken into slavery, and conquered people were scattered to the corners of their empire.  And though Egypt was certainly powerful enough to rival them, they were far away, and were slowly loosing the ability to challenge Assyria.  Indeed, they would eventually be conquered by Assyria in the future.  For Judah, and other small kingdoms caught between the two, to survive meant having to side with one of these empires. 

Well, our young king was placed into a difficult situation.  Two other smaller kingdoms, Israel and Aram, which is located in modern-day Damascus, attempted to force Judah into a coalition to defend against Assyria, as they believed that they were stronger together.  Their request to have Judah join them was accompanied with an invasion and an assault on Jerusalem, just for good measure.  Ahaz, fearing for his kingdom, sought to find ways to save himself.  He sought ways to make Judah great, as it had once been under David and Solomon.

There was a man in Ahaz’s court named was Isaiah. He was one of the king’s distant relatives as they were both descended from royalty.  Ahaz found him a bit odd, but others called him a prophet.  He rambled off some prophecy about a child who will eat cheese and honey, and that God will save Judah from the invaders.  But what use is this for Judah?  Judah was a tiny land, and it was clearly being besieged on all sides.  Over in Assyria, they had many mighty and powerful gods.  Ashur, the patron deity of Assyria had a whole city built in his honour.  Marduk, a deity second to Ashur in significance, had a spectacular golden statue in Babylon that granted kingship to those who took his hand.  All that the God of Judah had was a small golden box in Jerusalem in a small little temple. 

So Ahaz decided to meet with the King of Assyria, Tiglath-Pileser III.  Isaiah said not to, but why not?  Assyria is strong, Assyria is mighty, and Assyria is great, and so it is only logical to try and be with that greatness and hope it comes off onto you.  Tiglath-Pileser was a king of kings, a god to his people.  He could get things done, people feared him, and so better to be his friend.  And so, Ahaz became a vassal to him. 

And it worked, Assyria eventually conquered Aram and Israel.  And Judah was safe.  All it cost Ahaz was some money, and to worship the gods of Assyria.  The money, though a substantial amount of silver, could be afforded.  As for the Assyrian gods, well why not.  If they helped to make Assyria great, maybe they will make Judah great.  People will keep worshipping the ancestral God of Israel and Judah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but worshipping more gods means you have covered all your bases.  Besides, one little Ashera Pole, one graven image in the court never hurt anybody, right?

Time passes, Tiglath-Pilesar would come and go, and Ahaz would come and go.  About a century passes, and with all things made by people, Assyria eventually faded away and a new empire, Babylon, was on the rise.  Well, Judah was a friend of Assyria, and now Assyria is gone, and those who were friends with Assyria do not look so good in the eyes of Babylon, especially since Babylon was once a conquered nation of Assyria.  And now, Judah had no close neighbours except Babylon, as Israel and Aram were destroyed, the cost of vassalage to Assyria reduced the treasury of Judah to the point that the kingdom could not support its people, the cost of Egypt’s friendship for protection against Babylon was higher, and the cost of keeping Babylon from invading even higher.

The last king of Judah, Zedekiah, never listened to the prophet of his era, Jeremiah.  He continued to worship gods other than the God of Judah, hoping for their protection, and according to the Bible even offered up human sacrifices to appease them.  In the end, after a desperate political gamble, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon did away with Judah, destroyed the Temple of God, took the people into exile, stole the Ark of the Covenant, and did horrible things to King Zedekiah and his family.  Judah was no more.

Many generations pass, empires rise and fall, and we turn to a distant descendent of Ahaz named Joseph.  Though Joseph is descended from royalty, he is far from it; he is a carpenter.  He lives not in the independent Kingdom of Judah, but in a client state of Rome called Judea, or in Nazareth in Galilee according to the Gospel of Luke, but we do not need to split hairs over the details.  Rome itself had a leader, Octavius, who was taking titles like consul, tribune, First Citizen, pontifex maximus, Imperator, and Augustus Caesar.  And Augustus Caesar promised to make the Roman Republic great again.  But these matters were of little consequence to Joseph.  He had a business to manage, and a marriage to look to.

Joseph however discovers that his bride-to-be is pregnant.  He did not maker her pregnant, and so to him, there must have been some other sordid affair.  According to the Law of Moses, he could publically shame her, and the Book of Deuteronomy allows for him to put her to death.  But no, Joseph decides to be one of the good guys, he decides to let her save some face, and just quietly divorce her, even though she and her child will still be pariahs, it is a practical option, and it is better than nothing, right?

In his dreams, the an angel tells him, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”  All this was to fulfill the words of Isaiah “the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel.”  Who knows quite what happened in Joseph’s mind: how aware was he of his decent from Ahaz, how familiar was he with Isaiah’s prophecy, and how does he connect Emmanuel-God is with us, to Jesus-God Saves?  But somewhere in his heart and his mind, he decided to not do what society expected of him, he decided to not do the pragmatic thing, and he decided to accept what God was calling for rather than what would be best for him.  He did what polite society would call scandalous, and took a pregnant woman into his house to co-habitate with him, and together they would raise her child even though he was not expected to, or obligated to do so.  He, unlike Ahaz, trusted in God, and took Mary in when all of society would have rejected her. 

He was no longer a nice guy in the eyes of society; he did what was right though.  Unlike Ahaz, he did not trust in the powers and expectations of the world to make his situation better for him.  He did not choose pragmatism in the face of trial or opposition to avoid making he scene.  He chose love, and that is what we must do always.    

When we face the demands of society to conform to do that which is evil we must choose to follow God.  Sometimes, it is not enough to be a nice person.  Niceness gives us pretence of civility, when in reality it is cowardly.  We must follow Joseph’s example, and sometimes make the hard choices that no one expects from us because they are the right choices.  We must be willing to accept the person in need who is in danger of marginalization from our society; we must accept God’s love for those people.  God loves and blesses the outcasts, and so we must accept the outcasts into our hearts and our lives.  When society tells us to do evil, even if it seems pragmatic, or safe, we must resist and do the right thing.  Sometimes the person in need is someone close to us, sometimes they are a person who is homeless in the park across the way, sometimes they are a Syrian refugee, sometimes they are Muslim, sometimes they are a person of colour, or a member of the LGBTQ community, sometimes it is a woman who society is likely to reject based on their own beliefs about morality.  We must follow Joseph’s example and let the person in, because when we let that person in, we let God, Emmanuel in.  That is a Christmas miracle.

Amen.

Just Be There: Mary, Martha, and Black Lives Matter. A Sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Genesis 18:1-10a
Psalm 15 
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42

St. Christopher's Episcopal Church
Kailua, HI

+In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

We have seen a lot of violence lately on the mainland of the US, and abroad.  We pray for the people of Baton Rouge, LA, where three men who work as police officers were killed this morning.  We pray for the people of Turkey following a failed coup on Friday and in the midst of their political instability.  We pray for the people of France as they mourn over the death of 80 people during their Bastille Day celebrations on July 14.  As we pray for the world, we must pray for the violence that continues to grip the US.

In our mourning, let us not forget that it has been two weeks since the killing of two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile at the hands of police officers.  In the days that have followed, there have been protests, discussions, debates, and a whole lot of hand wringing over what to do.  Indeed since the death of Philando Castile on July 6, there have been at least 5 more black men killed by police: Micah Johnson, Alva Braziel, Andre Johnson, Delran Small, and Tyler Gebhard.  In the midst of this, we have also seen the death of five men who work as police officers following a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas.  Law enforcement agents killed the accused shooter, the same Micah Johnson I mentioned earlier, using a remote controlled drone, the first such killing on US soil.  In the midst of mourning, there has been many people asking how and why we got to this point, and a great deal of hand wringing on the part of many seeking solutions.  We have heard a lot of calls for unity, for calls to respect our common humanity, calls for us to come together as we mourn.  But many of these calls for unity, even some of the calls from President Obama himself, seem to miss what is at the core of many of these tragedies.  

If I may be so bold, I would say that the deaths of these black men are not rare occurrences, but are so common that many of us might treat it as a normal thing.  In fact, since the beginning of this year, there have been at least 114 incidents of a black person being killed by a person who works as a police officer.  Bear in mind that Black Lives Matter has emerged in our national consciousness as a result of the deaths of Treyvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner at the hands of law enforcement agents and vigilante citizens over three years ago.  And perhaps the retaliatory violence against people who work as law enforcement agents has emerged because of the apparent lack of justice that fails to hold the people accountable for the death of people of color accountable for their actions.  Here’s the thing, extremism begets extremism, and violence begets violence.  These things do not form or emerge in a vacuum, but emerge because of the powerful exercising violence against the powerless, and the powerless responding back with violence.  There are longstanding cycles of violence that continue to perpetuate themselves, and these cycles are older than all of us.  We may  not be personally responsible for these cycles of violence, but we choose actively in our day-to-day lives to either further the cycle, or to work to break it.

I believe as Christians, we are called to serve and love God, and to serve and love our neighbors.  But we sometimes become frustrated over how we do this.  And perhaps in our collective frustration, inaction occurs.  And in our inaction, more violence happens.

When I look at our Epistle reading, and hear the words of Saint Paul, we hear the promises of Christ.  Jesus, who is firstborn from the dead reconciles all to God.  He is the Resurrection, and the Life, he is the promise of salvation and redemption, and he brings hope and mercy to a battered and broken world.  I have also sat with the words of this morning’s Psalm, “Lord, who may dwell in your tabernacle? who may abide upon your holy hill?”  I sit with these, and contemplate over what they mean, and I find myself looking over and again the message of Jesus.  

I do not believe that Jesus’ incarnation was an accident, or incidental to his ministry.  He was born to a poor, working-class Palestinian-Jewish family in a land occupied by the mighty Roman Empire.  Of course, we all know and hear how Jesus served and ate with the poor, the outcast, and dispossessed, but we sometimes hear less about how he also ate with the wealthy, the powerful, and the elite.  He interacted with priests and Pharisees, and even healed the servant of a Roman centurion who served his very occupiers.  We may take this as a sign of Christ’s universal love for the whole of humanity, but to different groups he had a different message.  To the poor, the outcast, and the oppressed, he brought a message of hope and mercy, but to the powerful came calls and commands to change their ways, to repent to look beyond themselves, and see the poor, outcast, and oppressed in their midst as human beings.  To see them as just existing.  Perhaps to put it bluntly, God gives to the powerless hope and mercy, and God gives to the powerful warnings of their sins and evil.  

It is the poor, the outcast, the dispossessed and the oppressed that the Son of God became incarnate to be among.  They are his people.  In the midst of the violence and fear: the violence in the US, the violence on Bastille Day, the violence in Turkey, the ongoing violence in the Middle East, and much, much more; in the actual violence, and in the retaliatory attacks, we who have power, we who have privilege must see the challenges and realities of what is going on and name it.  If we indeed want to call for peace, for unity, for justice, we who are powerful have to be willing to listen to the voices and cries of the oppressed, and acknowledge how we might be contributing either directly, or indirectly to this state, namely, we must follow the words of Jesus, and pull the log out of our own eye that keeps us from acknowledge our own sins before we can have the presumption to ask others to do anything, let alone ask for unity.

Jesus tells us that we see him in the face of the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, and the prisoners.  For us today, to see Jesus, we look to those who carry the face of Jesus today to listen to those who are willing to speak, to learn from those willing to teach, and to serve.  For Jesus, Black Lives Matter, Latino Lives Matter, Asian Lives Matter, Muslim and Middle Eastern Lives Matter, Migrant Lives Matter, Indigenous and Native Lives Matter, Native Hawaiian Lives Matter and LGBTZ Lives Matter.  Though Jesus loves all people, we must remember that Jesus identifies with and has a particular love for the marginalized people of the world.  They are his people. 

Though this can all be overwhelming, we should not be paralyzed though into inaction, we as a church and as a society need to find a way to move forward.  We cannot do that, until we know what the problems are.

This leads us to our Gospel.  In our Gospel, we see Mary sitting, and being present before Jesus.  Her sister, Martha, is running around, busting her backside, and trying to be a good host for Jesus.  She isn’t doing anything wrong, far from that, but Jesus praises Mary for just being present with him.  I find that this Gospel story can provide for us a model for how we proceed.  Martha runs around, as we sometimes run around, and we loose sight of what matters, of who is in our midst.  We get preoccupied with the idea of people that we forget that people are around us.  Mary however, is present with Jesus, the only thing that matters, and thus chooses the better part.  We need to follow her example, but how do we do that?


Well, I have one answer that I can give to you.  Dr. T.J. Tallie, a scholar of African History, and a Facebook friend of mine, posted a video on Facebook a few weeks ago briefly explaining his experience of being a black man in America, and some advice for people, particularly white people, on what we can do in the face of tragedies like the shooting of black men by people working as police in the US, and the daily injustices that people of color deal with here in the US.  I would also add that this can also provide a guide to us who are white about what to when the inevitable retributive violence against Muslims, and people from the Middle East and North Africa, occurs in the US and abroad in response to the attacks in Nice, as there are those blaming Muslims for this attack.  I have received permission to refer to this video, and would like to read you the transcript of it.

“I wanted to say a little something to my white friends.  White friends, this is a terrible and frustrating and exhausting moment, and you may be feeling at a loss for what to do or what to say, or how to make things possibly better.  I think it is important to know that you can’t fix things.  But I also think it is really important for you to check in with the people of color in your life, especially black, and Latino, and Native American, and Middle Eastern people.  Just check-in and love them.  Don’t weedle them for how they are feeling, don’t show them how you are a good ally, Just be there.  Ask if they need anything.  Get them a coffee, give them a hug.  Just be.  It is so hard to exist every fucking day here, to move through a world that implicitly tells you that you do not matter, that you do not exist.  And yes, we are calling upon you to join us in dismantling all of this white supremacist fuckery.  But we are also calling you in the day to day to keep an eye out for how hard it is to fucking breath everyday.  Go check in on your friends, that’s what you should do right now.”

We alone cannot fix the evils that exist in this world.  If we try to get the political power necessary to do so, we might end up compromising ourselves along the way. We can run around and try all we want, but we will loose sight of the people who are in front of us in this very moment, the people who we call friends, the people who exist around us, and even the people we pretend are invisible.  But even just being with a person is not always easy.  We have to accept that we might not get an answer, and that we might be spurned in this action, and that is okay.  But we cannot get upset; we cannot give up on doing this because this is not about us.  We have to step aside, stop running around, and allow others to just exist.  We have to step aside, stop running around, and allow Jesus to exist.  If we allow Jesus to exist, we can begin to have hope in this world.

Amen.

Thoughts on the Orlando Shooting

I did not hear the news about the Orlando shooting until after Mass this afternoon.  I will admit, I do not pay much attention to news on Sunday mornings until after Mass, mainly for the sake of focusing on the liturgy.  There are days however that I regret looking at the news, and wish I never opened up Facebook on my phone while walking back from church.  Today was one of those days, and I do not know what else to say or do, so I am writing down and sharing these thoughts of mine.  I am so thankful that I was able to spend the day with a good friend of mine, because I was able to hide from my sorrow, pain, and anger for just a little while.  I was able to smile for a bit, and able to be myself.  But eventually I had to confront my feelings on this.

50 are dead in Orlando.  A shooter came into a gay club in Orlando and opened fire with a gun he legally purchased.  He was angry at the sight of two men kissing apparently, so he decided to be a good guy with a gun.

Though there are a lot of people who are mourning for the events that have happened, and say this is a crime against our common humanity, I have to admit, I find no comfort with that.  To know that the largest mass shooting in the history of the US, and the largest act of violence in the US since the 9/11 attacks were directed towards the LGBTQ community, my own community, cuts and hurts in a way that not everyone can understand.  Society hopes to soften the pain by generalising it, and yet I find that only those who are a part of other communities that experience violence en masse in the US are the ones who truly can begin to understand this pain, for though the pain is different among our communities, the hurt is the same, and in that we can find empathy with each other.

The blood of the oppressed cries out for justice from the ground of Orlando, just as it cries out throughout much of the land, and yet we do nothing.  We Americans believe that the right to own tools of murder is more important and more sacred that the lives and bodies of black people, brown people, queer people, and children.  We will never be able to end oppression in the US until we get rid of the very tools of that oppression.  Yet we do nothing.  How many more people have to die for the sake of this golden calf our society worships?

As selfish as this may sound, there are days that I am thankful that I live in Canada.  I am thankful I can walk out the door and believe that I am safe as a gay man here.  I am thankful that I do not have to live in fear for my safety, much less my life here in Toronto. I cannot imagine the fear that my LGBTQ friends in the US are feeling.  Now, because of Orlando, I am afraid to travel home to the US lest I come across someone who decides I do not deserve to live.  It is terrifying that the academic conferences that I attend, or may attend, have to send out emails about ensuring that conference spaces are safe from gun violence.  I know that because I am white and male that I am considered more acceptable in the eyes of American society, so I cannot imagine the fear that black or brown queer people are feeling in the wake of this attack.

To make matters worse, politicians and others in the US are being terrible about this.  People have been posting responses on the Internet praising the shooter, and others have attributed the shooter as being part of God’s justice against the LGBTQ community.  We also see people shifting the blame for this violence onto Islam, even though those same people have spent years demonising the LGBTQ community.  Again, though our pain may be different, we must not allow the forces of hate to divide those of us who are oppressed.

As I write this, I am listening to a Requiem Mass so that I can pray for those who have died.  I do not know how else to express the pain except to listen, to write, and to pray.  I can only hope and pray that someday that the justice of God may come and that the poor, the oppressed, and the destitute are exalted finally.  Until that day comes, I pray for the victims of the Orlando shooting, and all those who live in fear and are distressed, particularly the LGBTQ community in the US and throughout the world.

If you can, go to a rally, go to a vigil, pray, meditate, be silent, be still, mourn, cry, weep, and keep your thoughts, minds, and hearts on the victims of Orlando.


Look with pity, O heavenly Father, upon all thy queer children who live with injustice, and terror as their companions. Have mercy upon us and forgive us our sins of deed or neglect against these our neighbours. Give strength to those who work for justice and opportunity for all, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

May light eternal shine, O Lord, upon them the victims of Orlando, for endless ages with thy blessed ones, for thou art gracious. Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord: and let light perpetual shine upon them, for endless ages with thy blessed ones, for thou art gracious.

Amen.