Rivetti's Blog

In the heat of late July, with our congregation spread around the picnic area in McGee Park, it wasn’t possible to preach a sermon. I had thought of posting one of my better St. James’ Day sermons from years past, but our Presiding Bishop did me one better. Here is her sermon preached at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London today, the Feast of St. James.

Feast of St. James

25 July 2010

St. Paul’s Cathedral, London

The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori

Presiding Bishop and Primate

The Episcopal Church

There’s an institution in New York City called the Doe Fund.  Its motto is Ready, Willing and Able.  Early in the morning, trucks bearing that logo can be found on the streets of Manhattan, and out of those trucks come workers with garbage cans, brooms, and equipment for collecting litter.  Some of the trucks disgorge workers with pumps and containers for collecting used cooking oil to be recycled into biodiesel.  The Doe Fund takes its name from John Doe, the traditional moniker for a person whose name is a mystery.  Its founder is a Roman Catholic layman who’s convinced that employment and learning personal responsibility are the key to ending homelessness.  The Fund assists people who are trying to leave homelessness by providing jobs, support in sobriety, and help with developing employment skills and a sense of their basic human dignity.

Each year the Doe Fund helps several hundred people transform their lives.  Those people are overwhelmingly from minority populations, more than half have been in prison, and most have substance addiction issues.  That motto, Ready, Willing and Able, is a proud witness to dignity gained.

That’s also pretty much what we hear when Jesus asks James and his brother John if they are able to drink the cup that he will drink.  Yep, they say, “we’re ready, willing, and able.”  Their journey in some sense moves in the opposite direction, but it is about the same kind of vocation.  James’ and John’s charge to fish for people is about serving whoever turns up, and following a leader who has nowhere to lay his head.  They are becoming workers without a permanent home because they’re focused on world-wide cleanup and the transformation of all communities.  The goal is a healed society where all have the dignity that comes of right relationship with God and neighbor.  We usually call it the Reign of God, or the common weal of God.

That commonweal of God work is a prophetic vocation, often deeply unpopular and challenging, and born of the dream that dignity for all is a deeply divine warrant.  That kind of prophetic witness, in both word and deed, is what made Jesus so offensive to the powers at hand.  The same kind of prophetic witness got James executed by Herod, the first of the inner circle of disciples to be martyred.  It is what Jesus himself pointed to when he said, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Matt 23:37).

But prophetic work is not primarily about death and homelessness, even though either may be a byproduct.  Prophetic work is about more abundant life for the whole world, and it is about a home everywhere, a home for all.

When Agabus and the prophets go down to Antioch and tell of a looming famine in Judea, the whole community shows itself willing and able to respond to that demand of the moment.  The people in Judea are losing their ability to build a home of the sort that God intends for all – enough to eat, freedom from oppressive government, the ability to worship.  Together the company of prophets and the early Christians in Antioch determine to respond in the way they are able.  They are helping to gather the chicks under God’s wings.

Prophets and disciples are meant to be ready and willing to respond to the challenge and opportunity of the moment, in whatever way the spirit is calling.  We continue to tell their stories and celebrate their lives so that we might be encouraged, and literally given a little more heart-strength to challenge indignity that results from injustice.

Dignity means a sense of worth, suitability, or honor, and it is the state in which God created all that is.  The indignities came later.  One of the eucharistic prayers in the Episcopal Church’s prayer book says that we have been created worthy to stand in God’s presence.  When we treat others as less than that, we reject God’s good creation, and in a very real sense, we deny our own dignity.

Prophetic work helps to restore the dignity of creation, and acknowledges that creation reflects the utter dignity of the creator.  We get in trouble when we limit dignity to lesser things, or deny dignity to some.  Dignity is really what James’ mother is after when she pesters Jesus to put her boys first when he becomes king.  She wants them to have the important chairs closest to Jesus.  Jesus responds by asking if they’re willing and able to suffer indignity, even die, in order to restore dignity to others.

What do the English call the circle of greatest dignity in this realm but the Court of St. James?  It’s not just the site of royal courtesies and where the monarch receives emissaries from other realms.  The Court of St. James takes its name originally from a place of healing, the Hospital of St. James, a leper hospital dating from at least the 13^th century.  The dignity originally offered to lepers is carried on in the dignity and courtesies extended to representatives of other nations, whatever their political reputation.  All those lesser dignities have their roots in the dignity of human creatures who bear the image of God.  We miss something essential when we mistake the lesser dignities for the divine one we all bear.

The other difficulty we all know too well is the human tendency to insist that some are not worthy of respect, that dignity doesn’t apply to the poor, or to immigrants, or to women, or Muslims, or gay and lesbian people.  Prophetic work is about challenging human systems that ignore or deny the innate dignity of all of God’s creation.  That’s the aspect of prophetic work that’s dangerous, for those systems often respond with violence – the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, the disappearance of righteous Gentiles who rescued Jews during the Second World War, or the expulsion of a Ugandan bishop because he asked the church to treat the gay and lesbian members of his society with dignity.

Members of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (Philippine Independent Church) are engaged in prophetic work right now.  The IFI is in full communion with TEC and the Anglican Communion.  A month ago, two lay leaders were assassinated by masked men on motorcycles.  Four years ago a retired bishop was assassinated in his kitchen.  Two priests have been similarly murdered, as have leaders in other denominations.  All have been working to bring dignity and basic human rights to farm workers and laborers.  Our own prophetic solidarity and advocacy just might bring some accountability from the former government and justice from the present one.  Can you imagine what might happen if a good number of Anglicans and Episcopalians insisted that our governments pay attention to human rights in the Philippines?

The search for dignity is work that all members of Christ’s body share.  We’re invited to join the band of prophets, share the meal and drink the cup.  It can be dangerous work, but most prophets I know are also filled with joy.  Prophets generally decide that it’s not worth living in a system without dignity.  Better to lose that life, and exchange it for one that builds up, because we lose our own dignity when we tolerate indignity for some.

The journey down to Antioch and back to Jerusalem led our ancestors to discover that one’s own dignity is mixed up with that of every other human being, and indeed all of creation.  James made the same discovery.  The work of the cross is the most life-giving journey we know.  Are you ready, willing, and able?

The timing of the lectionary in the propers for the fixed dates in ordinary time has the story of Martha and her sister Mary entertaining Jesus – on the same Sunday that we conclude our annual Rummage Sale.

The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost – July 18, 2010

Luke 10:38-42

Margaret Rehberg and I finally get to be in church together at the same time. Not only was she on the road when I came back last Sunday, but even before I took off for three months, she spent a year serving as the Escort to the Grand Martha in the Eastern Star. This was a demanding role for her, one that required her to make journeys throughout the northwest, give speeches, and take on appropriate duties that support the work of the woman named for the heroine of today’s Gospel story.

We think that we know this story fairly well, don’t we? Jesus has come to dinner in the house of his friends, Mary and Martha of Bethany, and while Mary sits dreaming at the master’s feet, Martha calls out from the kitchen to ask Jesus to tell Mary to give her a hand with the chores. And Jesus surprises Martha by telling her that Mary has chosen the better part. For the rest of history, these two women have been idealized to represent the worker and the listener; the active life and the contemplative life. And Jesus tells us that the contemplative life is the better part. I used to try this out on my mother when I was a kid, except I wasn’t exactly sitting at the feet of Jesus when she would call me in to help out with the housework.

We think we know this story, but today I invite you today into its strangeness.. First off, I was struck by how very short it is. We’ve just had a fairly extensive story about the Good Samaritan that went on for several verses. Then there’s this little piece. The other thing that struck me is that in Luke’s Gospel, these are just some people Jesus knows in some village. There is no deep relationship like we know from their interactions in John’s Gospel. It’s almost as if Luke just pulled their names out of thin air to demonstrate a point, not to bring us those two impassioned women whose brother was raised from the dead, who challenge Jesus about resurrection, who anoint him with costly ointment. Somehow, this story becomes really different to me when I hear it again – different because it is now a couple of strangers in a strange setting. And the focus then becomes different, and strange.

We remember that last week we heard the story of the Good Samaritan told in response to the lawyer asking how to inherit eternal life. Love God; love your neighbor. But who is my neighbor? A man was on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho…. The neighborly character in that story was the one who did what was totally unexpected, who breached the dividing line between Samaritan and Jew, who stepped out of his comfort zone to rescue and restore a man who had been left for dead, who went above and beyond the call of duty in providing for his care, and covering his bill at the local inn. Remember, our lawyer wants to know how to inherit eternal life – the shocking answer is to step out of what is normal, go beyond what has been the expectation of his whole life.

And now Jesus is being welcomed in a home – and Martha is quite rightly doing what should be done to welcome any honored guest. She prepares food, she makes the guest comfortable, she sees to it that there is water for washing, a place to recline, all his needs are met. This is exactly what should be happening. Except wait. What’s Jesus doing, exactly, going into a home of two women? By himself? When he talks to a woman of Samaria in broad daylight by himself, his disciples get nervous. And here he is unchaperoned in the home of this woman Mary and her sister Martha? (Dan Brown fans, this is where we start wondering about their relationship).

And what exactly is Mary doing sitting with the man listening to him? Martha is absolutely right to be concerned about the propriety of this situation. It is out of the ordinary, strange, stretching beyond what we normally expect.

I read a quote from Thomas Merton the other day – he keeps showing up, doesn’t he? It’s from his book, Opening the Bible, and showed up in a daily mailing I get from the activist Christian group, Sojourners, people who probably think Martha got a bum rap. Merton writes, “There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible — until we manage to get so used to it that we make it comfortable for ourselves. But then we are perhaps too used to it and too at home in it. Let us not be too sure we know the Bible … just because we have learned not to have problems with it. Have we perhaps learned … not to really pay attention to it? Have we ceased to question the book and be questioned by it?”

How do we question this story from Luke? How are we questioned by it? If you worked on the rummage sale this past week, maybe you feel some solidarity with Martha doing all that work, and maybe you have some feelings about Mary sitting there talking to the company when there’s still work to be done. And Jesus, very inappropriately, it seems, entering the triangle she initiates when she tells him to get Mary to help her, tells her that Mary has chosen the better part. So if you’ve heard this scripture your whole life, it might indeed make you question this story from Luke to have your efforts relegated to useless worry. Do we have a right to argue with Jesus here? And maybe in arguing we can step away from the story to see the iconic brush strokes that depict for us that reckless, inappropriate love of God that the law and the prophets call us all to do. How do we inherit eternal life? Love God; love neighbor. Can we pull them apart?

There’s another story about hospitality in the Bible that this brings to mind. Think with me of the story of Abraham when he receives the divine visitors at the Oaks of Mamre. The Lord God came to Abraham, says the Bible. Or three men. In the mythic telling from Genesis, that detail goes unremarked and unexplained, and leaves us room for strangeness and wonder. Early on, Christians wondered if the three men also identified as the Lord God were a type, a model, for the Trinity.

Abraham immediately sets out to get work done, or rather delegating it to Sarah – slaughtering the calf, baking bread, bringing out yoghurt. It is a time-consuming ritual that shows his devotion to the visitors, despite, or even because of the effort, the work, the busy-ness and attention to detail. The famous icon by Rublev of that visit is in more than one version. In one version, Abraham and Sarah are visible in the margins engaged in their efforts. But in the one most familiar, it is only the guests who are there in the center, seated at the table in mystical tension and contemplation. The icon is called the Hospitality of Abraham. What will your household be like when the Lord God shows up unannounced? The icon draws us away from all the norms of hospitable activity to what is really going on – and takes us to the holy table set in the midst of the triune company.

Our baptismal covenant calls us to see the face of Christ in all we encounter, to seek and serve Christ in all we meet. That is a call to action for most of us. Action spurred by the like of the prophet Amos who could be reading the headlines of the New York Times when he rails against fraud, greed, corruption, selling the poor for the price of a pair of Manolo Blahniks. But it is also a call to sit in awe at the feet of Christ. To listen. To breathe in the holy spirit that leaps between us when we meet; to hold in tension that running spirit of divinity that draws the holy circle in the center of the icon.

As we celebrate the conclusion of our 81^st rummage sale, which has once again grossed enormous receipts representing perhaps fair exchange for the countless volunteer hours involved in gathering, sorting, displaying, selling the items that others no longer need – we watch a community transformed with the work of welcoming Christ in those who otherwise could not afford the clothing, the furniture, the books, the toys, the rich offering of gifts. We watch a community transformed by its connection to the rest of the Palouse, as friends show up to help with the work, and work carries on uninterrupted for days on end. I helped with the teardown yesterday, when the goods that were left over, unbelievable abundance, were boxed up and carted away by yet another community outreach organization serving the poor in Moscow. The funds we’ve gathered at St. James will support the work of the church both in forming the Christian witness of our youth and in direct assistance to the community in need. When the rummage sale calls, there isn’t a lot of time for sitting in devotion, but there is time today to thank our volunteers and hard workers, and also to thank God for this incredible outpouring of generosity, creativity, and abundance in our midst. We give thanks to God for this opportunity to sit in awe at the face of Christ in our midst.

Back on the Palouse and a warm welcome into the blessing that is St. James’ Episcopal Church. The day after my arrival, my stepson Steven, who hosted me when I began my journey, arrived with his two children to begin work on the Rivetti memorial fence. I learned a lot through watching him work with the army of parish volunteers the importance of measuring, re-measuring, checking and re-checking the level before any piece of wood went up.

The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost – July 11, 2010

Amos 7:1-17; Luke 10:25-37

Midway through my sabbatical I spent a relaxing ten days in the home of my friend and seminary classmate, the Rev. Carol Westpfahl, in Newtown CT. Carol graciously welcomed me into her home, warning me that although we might make a few sightseeing trips into New York, she had a lot of work to do which meant that I, poor me, had hours on end to read, to pray, to reflect.

On Carol’s refrigerator is the usual sort of collection one might find especially in a home without children. Calendars. Notes from friends; a card from her ordination; and a picture that I remembered from the last time I visited her in the fall of 2005. A grainy photocopy of an even grainer black and white photo apparently clipped from a book or article, with the caption “Thomas Merton said this is the only known photograph of God”– with photo credits to Thomas Merton. There’s no background – only a somewhat familiar object rendered unfamiliar by it being suspended as if in space, or no space. A cable hung with a lead weight – an industrial strength plumb line in fact – at the end of which is attached a powerful grappling hook.

Maybe it’s the hours of solitary thinking, but the picture just rang true.

The Lord God said to Amos, “Amos, what do you see?” The text we hear in the prophet is one of judging. The wall is going to fall down; Israel is going to collapse. If we’ve heard this story before, perhaps a hundred times since we were children, it’s always one that seems to chastise, to tell us to get into shape, rise to Level 4 Christianity, get right with Jesus — or else. Or else. But Merton’s photo reminds us that the snapshot of God we hear about in Amos is only part of the story. There’s the hook made of the same hard metal – the unyielding embrace of God pulling us always back.

The legal expert asks Jesus for a judgment. For holding up the plumb line and saying, yep, you’re good. You fit. You’re upright and righteous. But Jesus adds the hook. Jesus summarizes the law and includes that bit about the neighbor, and the lawyer asks that question, just to make sure we’re clear about which neighbor we’re supposed to love with the same impractical and outrageously over the top love we’re supposed to give to God. And before we get to the rest of the story, let’s think about another time when a young man asks Jesus about how to inherit eternal life. Remember how Jesus says you know the commandments – and proceeds to enumerate the neighborly ones. Not the ones that get carved first in those tablets you can buy for your display. About God and graven images. But the ones that talk about relationship with our neighbor. Stealing, defrauding, cheating, honoring elders, releasing workers on the holy Sabbath – those commandments are the ones that roll off Jesus’ lips that time. And the young man answers, I have kept all these my whole life. Well, there’s just one more thing – we know it, right? Sell all you have and give it to the poor.

Plumb line. Oops. The young man is on the wrong side of it. He goes off in despair because he has many possessions.

And today there’s another guy asking for the plumb line again – you know the law says Jesus – love God, love neighbor. And he thinks, I’m doing better than that poor guy who was told to give away all his stuff, but JUST in case, I want to make sure I’ve got the line in the right place. OK, I’ll bite. Who’s my neighbor?

A man went to Jericho. …Who’s my neighbor?

I was riding in to Whitefish, Montana, on the train, having departed at 11 from St. Paul, and not succeeding in getting much sleep. The car was cold, and in my rush to check my bags I had left my Amtrak blanket packed in my checked luggage. That and the steward kept coming through to rearrange the seating and to warn us not to get too comfortable since there would be passengers getting on in the middle of the night. My neighbor was a woman in her 70s who got on in the middle of the night. We exchanged brief greetings then went back to the business of closing our eyes. When morning came I crept over her to go downstairs and buy a cup of coffee – and another Amtrak blanket so I could fall back to sleep while we crossed North Dakota and Montana. When we both woke up she told me she had had to leave in a hurry from Brainerd because her son was not well, and she was hoping to get to Sandpoint in time. Hurry up and wait – ride a train across the country because that’s the only way to get there in time. To pass the time I asked for her story and she told me of her life growing up as one of 10 children on the plains, and marrying her husband who worked on the railroads his whole life – he built and maintained the tracks – and who retired as the writing appeared on the wall when Burlington Northern was sold. Her story sounded like the stories I’d been reading in Kathleen Norris’ books about life on the northern plains, about the lives described in Amazing Grace, Dakota, Acedia and Me. Hard lives, with joy carved out in snatches of memory against harsh elements, joy and loss shared with tenacity and fierce neighbors. She worked in the schools as a classroom assistant. She worked in her church as the secretary of missions. Her son had been an adventurer, hard time settling down, traveled to Alaska, then the wilds of Idaho. Life ate him up from the insides. When she was able to get cell phone reception in Havre, she learned he didn’t make it. We prayed together in that train car, we told stories, we laughed a little, we passed the hours, now longer and slower as we approached the point of my departure. She’d be getting off in the middle of another night. Meeting a daughter who had driven up from Billings, before they made that hard journey to Sandpoint to join her daughter-in-law and take on that solemn task no mother dreams of doing. I told her that if she were in my parish we’d have a prayer shawl for her to remind her of the prayers of our community. Oh, yes, they had a prayer shawl ministry in her own congregation back in Minnesota. Fortunately there was this new Amtrak blanket that I could place over her shoulders with another prayer for her safe journey.

Well, I don’t know who got the neighborly treatment that long day on the train. Was it my seatmate who got the pastoral presence she deserved as she went to join her family in their awful duty of burying her child? Or was it me, after two months of traveling away from this place, after a week spent in quiet prayer with monks in Minnesota, who had the honor of remembering my priestly care of souls?

The plumb line of judgment is never there because God wants to knock down crooked walls. The plumb line is there so we can remember, we can be recalled If we have a hard time remembering, the hook is there, too. The story that grabs us, recalls us, brings us back.

When we were talking on the train my neighbor tentatively ventured a question, careful in that she knew I was an Episcopalian, about whether we’d had, um, problems in our churches, you know, with the gays. Oh, how to be gentle with a grieving mother now! I think all of our churches, I replied, your church as well as mine, have been disrupted from their comfortable places as we keep remembering how to do what we’re supposed to do. Heck, my church has been in turmoil ever since they started ordaining women, and that was back in the 1970s.

I’d only earlier that day been reading about the dustup over the Archbishop of Canterbury making our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, present evidence of her credentials before being allowed to celebrate and preach in Southwark Cathedral in England. A dustup that makes us wonder whether our church can ever be relevant. What are we supposed to be doing? Fighting over mitres and credentials? Or proclaiming God’s new creation, God’s constant outreach to us throughout time and most especially through Jesus, the incarnate Word.

Urgency about embracing our neighbor, the ones who seem so different from us all, so scary. We have an opportunity coming up next month in fact to participate in the Diocesan Training in Anti-Racism, “Seeing the Face of God in Each Other,” in Moses Lake at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church. We who take this course, who train others in this course, are building a grass-roots cadre of people who unite as allies in combating racism. All the clergy of the diocese are required to take it; all the lay leadership of the diocese are required to take it. But it’s open to anyone who wants to join.

As we find ourselves stumbling in national discourse about immigration, reaching for just solutions that are also compassionate, we may think of the plumb line and the hook. My father-in-law, that French chef whose picture you see guiding you into my kitchen, was an illegal immigrant from the south of France when he came to this country in the 1920s. He worked in Hell’s Kitchen in New York, and married a young woman from Connecticut who had been brought here from Italy when she was a toddler. They moved to New York and had a son, Robert, within their first year of marriage. And only after that did Michel Henri Rivetti go to Cuba and re-enter the United States with a valid US passport. ICE raids in the fruit-growing communities of Eastern Washington tear apart families, exiling to Mexico children and adolescents brought here as toddlers by parents risking their lives to pick in our fields the fruit that goes rotten when the immigrant workers are removed because no one else will pick the fruit. Our fear is of the less than one percent of illegal immigrants who are involved in the drug trade; our fear is of too few jobs going to people who do not deserve them. Our fear is of losing everything we have. Our hope is in the one who enables us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light, whose perfect love casts out fear, and holds us ever upright and true in the holy fellowship of righteousness and peace.

The congregation at All Saints’, Columbia Falls, Montana, is a blending of two congregations at Whitefish and Columbia Falls, that were united in a single building exactly halfway between the two parishes. The really long-term interim there, the Rev. Bradley Wirth, agreed to let me supply there one Sunday while he was away on vacation. Which was fortunate for me since I was still staying in his family’s guest cottage on the Fourth of July. This is the sermon I offered there on July 4:

The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost – July 4, 2010

2 Kings 5

Let me begin today by thanking you all for the hospitality you have shown me these past few weeks as I have sojourned in your land – actually as I have holed up in the Wirth guest cottage on the tail end of my sabbatical. The last time I was here, around five years ago, I was traveling with my husband George, who died last summer after a long illness. Bradley and Jeannine were at our wedding nearly 19 years ago. But before George and I ever met, Bradley and Jeannine first introduced me to the beauties of this part of the world, encouraging me to take a couple of camping trips to the Grand Tetons, and up into Glacier park. When George and I did meet some 20 years ago, it was our mutual love of the Tetons and the Continental Divide that drew us to one another in the first place. The Wirths have been a part of our love story for a very long time, and it is my honor to stand with you today so that they can continue their well-deserved time together.

If Bradley were preaching today, of course there would be some good quote from a book about United States’ history or politics. There is no-one quite as eloquent that I know who is capable of taking the deliberative procedures of governance, whether of nation or of church, and transforming them into pure poetry. I will not be able to do that. Instead I’m going to talk about the Old Testament. He warned you, didn’t he? I want to talk about the Old Testament for two reasons. The first is that Our Lord was formed by the Law and the Prophets, he was bathed in that world, and it was that world that provided the context for his story, and for the commentary on his story that so richly infuses Paul’s letters to Gentile believers. But the second reason is that this story about the prophet Elisha is just dazzling, and perfect for talking about politics.

First – let’s tell the story again. We get most of the story in today’s reading, but I commend the entire chapter to you for some light reading this afternoon when you’re home. Naaman is the commander of the armies of Aram. We never hear the names of either the king of Aram or the king of Israel in this story. Just the Naaman. Schwartzkopf; Eisenhower; MacArthur, Washington. That big. He has defeated the king of Israel in battle, but big and important as he is, he has a humiliating skin condition that under normal conditions would make him an outcast. If he lived in Israel, he would be forced to stand apart from the community, ring a bell to warn people away. He would beg for his living. He has leprosy. A girl whom he has taken as a prize of warfare and given to serve his wife tells the wife that there’s a holy man in Israel who can help the master. So Naaman tells the king that he needs to obtain this cure, and the king writes a letter to the wrong person. He writes to the king of Israel. Because that’s what kings do. They don’t write to holy men. They write to their equals. The king of Israel immediately suspects a trap. He tears out his hair, rends his garment, swears and stamps his feet. If you’re hearing this story being read, which is how Jesus would have heard it when he was a child, you’re rolling on the floor laughing at this point. But Elisha comes to the rescue – and says, “There, there. I’ll take care of the situation. Send him to me.” Naaman shows up and offers the rich and generous treasure of Aram. But Elisha leaves him outside, cooling his jets, and sends word that he doesn’t need the ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of designer clothes. The leprosy will leave him if he just washes seven times in the Jordan. Now it’s Naaman’s turn to become apoplectic. More comic relief as he struts and storms and refuses to be consoled and almost blows his chance at being healed. Who does this guy think he is? Doesn’t he know how important a man he is? And he won’t come out and see me? He won’t perform an incantation or ritual or sacrifice or prayer service on my behalf? He just tells me to get into that trivial little muddy river Jordan? It takes another servant to calm Naaman down enough to convince him that maybe, just maybe, this will work. And it does. Even though Elisha won’t accept the gifts, Naaman does pledge to take a little of Israel home with him, some holy ground, that he can carry around with him in his pocket so that when he has to do his duty back home, which does include escorting the king into the temple of Baal, and, can’t be helped, bowing down with the king when he does obeisance to Baal, we’ll all know that he is truly a servant of the one true lord, the most high, the God of Israel. There’s a little coda we don’t read but it’s important just so you can get the symmetry of the story. Elisha has a servant named Gehazi who is pretty chagrined that Elisha has turned down the rich offerings for the healing. So he runs after Naaman and says, “Funny thing, we forgot to mention the fee….” When Elisha confronts him and he tries to pretend nothing happened, Gehazi himself ends up with the leprosy. So we move in a nice symmetrical pattern from the outsider – the girl/slave/captive to the outsider/insider – powerful general with leprosy to the insiders – king of Aram / king of Israel – to the outsider who is truly inside, namely Elisha – and then the comic ending with the leprosy landing on the servant, like the yukky mess in the Cat in the Hat.

It’s a funny story. And memorable. In its day — perhaps when it was being told to the exiles living in Babylon — it subverted the structures of absolute power with the faith of the outsider, as so many of the stories of the Hebrew scriptures do. God’s saving acts in history are effected throughout scripture by the folks who have no authority to do so. Younger brothers; Canaanite women; Ruth of Moab; Elisha the bald, understudy acolyte of the great Elijah, Daniel the vegetarian prophet, Jesus the working class kid from Nazareth. Those last, least, lost, little and dead that we hear about so often from Fathers Capon and Wirth.

When Americans tell the story of the Revolutionary War, they, too, like to tell the story of the unlikely success of the war. Of citizen patriots, the ragtag army, fired by a dream of liberty, overwhelming the superior armies of the king. We in the Episcopal Church also have another story of what was going on in our own history. For many Christians in the colonies who were members of the Church of England – the church established in Virginia, in Connecticut, in New York, in Maryland, in Pennsylvania – it had been a solemn aspect of daily prayer to offer prayers for the king. Clergy when they were ordained swore an oath of conformity to the king as God’s chosen ruler on earth. When independence was declared in July of 1776, those same prayers for the king became an act of treason. One priest wisely offered “Prayers, O Lord, for those whom we have been asked to pray for.” Other priests went into hiding, struggling with their fellow Anglican Christians throughout those uncertain years to grasp what their new role might be. After the war, as the church began to reform itself the bishop elected in Connecticut, Samuel Seabury, could not be consecrated by bishops in England because he would have had to swear anew his allegiance to the king. The solution, as we know, was that Seabury would have to go to Scotland, where the non-juror bishops had moved after the Glorious Revolution. These men, too, had taken a sacred oath to another king, James II, as God’s chosen representative on earth. And then there had been a revolution that imported a new regime, and the bishops were required to swear a holy oath in support of the new monarchs, William and Mary. Some of them could not so lightly give up that first oath, no matter how glorious the new political situation. Like the American clergy, they were caught in the midst of the development of nations, in the wrenching divorce between nation and religion. It was these non-jurors –the non-oath-takers– who consecrated Seabury, assuring continuity with the uninterrupted line of bishops of Canterbury, and thus of the apostolic laying on of hands. In exchange for this act, the bishops asked Seabury to include a little something special in the new prayer book that would have to be written if Americans were to begin anew. Not just prayers for Independence Day and the Nation – though that was an important piece of the new prayer book. But an expanded form of the Eucharistic prayer, something they’d found in their exposure to the Orthodox Church in the East, something they’d been trying unsuccessfully to get the Anglican Church and the Parliament to adopt, something we now take for granted every Sunday, but something that distinguishes us to this day from the Church of England, which has never received permission from Parliament to replace the 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer. A key part of that expanded prayer of consecration is something called the “epiclesis.” The what? Listen today as I speak the words on behalf of the assembled people of God, as I call on God to send the Holy Spirit – that’s “epikleo” in Greek – on these gifts – to sanctify this bread and wine – and then I ask God to send that same Spirit on us, to sanctify us. Or as the old Prayer Book used to say, “fill us with thy grace and heavenly benediction,”so that the blessing on the gifts of God and the blessing on us carries us from this table, to a mystical place where the substance of bread and wine, and the substance of you and me, meet and become one communion of faith and one fellowship beyond time and space. In our communion here each week we have a glimpse of that new creation Paul talks about in Galatians, new creation that wipes out ethnic differences, that takes us beyond the borders and dividing lines that separate us from one another. All that. From those outsiders up there in Scotland, consecrating that outsider American bishop so he could bring that back to us as the special gift, that little piece of Scotland perhaps tucked into Seabury’s pocket and reminding us of the marvelous ways we are interconnected.

Fear of that lordly power of English bishops urged the newly formed government to create a constitution that drew a bright line between church and state. The Episcopal Church that was formed here on the other side of the struggle for independence embraced that separation, and created governing instruments that reflect a revolutionary, radical, and even holy concept, that the “outsiders,” the unordained, the laity share authority in the church as baptized members of the Body of Christ. One of the ongoing gifts of our Anglican heritage has been the realization that people who gather in worship in the one, holy, church universal, are humans who order our lives in communities through negotiation and government and local understanding – that is, through politics. In our weekly gathering of faith, our holy meal of bread and wine, we members of the Body of Christ are lifted up beyond time and space into that heavenly banquet offered from before time. But here in Columbia Falls, Montana, on this Fourth of July, we come as citizens of a nation that fought hard to be freed from the tyranny of monarchy, a nation that has struggled with its own story of hardship and success, its dire history of genocide and slavery, its unprecedented might and vast if finite resources, its great capability and challenge and promise. On this day we come with special prayers that God will bless our nation’s constant project of renewal and reformation as once more we dedicate ourselves to the founding principles of justice and liberty to which our forebears once pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.

I stopped recording my impressions and gave up on the technicalities of posting to the blog somewhere in the midwest, but I’m back in Pullman after three incredible months of rest and travel to visit friends, family and holy places.  A tech-savvy college student in the parish is going to help me with a slide-show presentation for both of us to give to the parish about our respective travels. She promises I will sart to look as if I know what I’m doing. In the meantime, I’m delighted to be home, and I will now figure out how to upload my sermons to the blog page so you can read them here!