bible – By Another Road

Photographs

A sermon preached on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, June 23, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Mark 4:35-41.

My fiancé, Matt, and I have been in the process of moving into our new apartment over the past few weeks, and combining all of our belongings and finding space for all of our stuff is an adventure. As with any time you move, we are realizing how much stuff we all carry around with us as we go through life. And some of that stuff can be pared down or donated or sold, but there are always those things that you hold onto, no matter what. And among these, probably for almost all of us, are boxes of old photos.

I have a big plastic tub of family photos that I keep swearing I’m going to sort through and organize…and I’ve been saying this for the past 15 years. Every so often, usually when I move, I will drag out that tub and open the lid and gasp in horror at the mixed up stacks and envelopes. Then I close it up and slowly back away.

But I could never give them up, of course, because our photos are valuable in a different sort of way than other belongings. They are like a pathway through the forest of memory that thickens as we grow older… a pathway that guides us back to other homes, other times, other faces, other versions of ourselves that would otherwise be lost from view in the shadow of the passing years. We pull them out to show others—and ourselves—all that we have known, all that we have been.

In my own collection, I see many things. Here is my mother, sitting on the back of a pony when she was two years old..land here is my father as a young man, laughing in his college dorm room…and here is my great-grandmother, her smiling face obscured by a wide brimmed hat in the summer heat, and here—oh goodness—here is a child that was once me, dancing on the sand on some forgotten beach, yelling something into the wind.

Memories and mysteries, all of these photos. Perhaps we carry them with us, wherever we go, both to remind ourselves of where we’ve come from and to reassure ourselves that whatever we have become, we were also, this. And this, and this. And that life is, somehow, holding together all these layers, finding the truth not in any one picture, but somewhere in the sum of them, in the shape of what they reveal.

It might sound odd, but I think it’s helpful to think of Scripture the same way, almost like a box of jumbled snapshots. Because our sacred texts, too, are repositories of memory and mystery, and just like a single photograph, no single Scripture passage can ever reveal the whole truth about the life of God. Remember that when someone tries to cherry-pick a verse to use against…whomever. No, we must gather all of these verses together, all these little glimpses of God’s face, and ponder the bigger story they tell.

With this in mind, then, I think the most striking image of God’s face we are handed this week is Jesus asleep in the storm-tossed boat, his disciples as panicked and furious as the sea itself. You can practically close your eyes and see it. So let’s pull that one out of the box and ponder it together, shall we?

It is dark. Bands of rain and wind are lashing against a small boat on a stormy sea. The disciples are looking at their teacher, sleeping in the tumult, and they are bewildered—they can’t begin to imagine why Jesus isn’t awake, why he isn’t helping them fix the situation, giving them direction, something, anything. And so they wake him up and, at a word, he uses his mighty power to still the storm.

Is it easy to see what’s going on here? Just a scary storm and a God who will make it stop? Look a bit closer.

As is often the case, there is much more to this image than what immediately meets the eye. Because it’s interesting—Jesus, after calming the wind and the waves, doesn’t look at them and offer soothing reassurance. He doesn’t say what we might expect God would say, “there, there, I fixed it for you, don’t worry, you’re fine.”

No. Instead, a better Greek translation of his words to them might be, “why are you so timid? Do you not trust?” And the Gospel says then, and only then, after the storm, that the disciples “ephobethesan phobon megan” — they feared with a great fear — not because of the storm, but because of the One who stilled it.

You see, in that moment, the disciples have a brief encounter with enlightenment—they realize, right then, that Jesus is more than just a sleeping teacher who can fix their problems—more, even, than the prophetic miracle worker they’d been following around.

You might say that it was as though a collection of old photos suddenly appeared before them, and for the first time they could really see Jesus—all of him—and there he was, sitting on the back of a donkey, escaping to Egypt with his mother. And there he was, laughing as a young man in the Temple, astounding the scribes in his Father’s house. And there he was, dancing on the sand of some forgotten wilderness, rebuking the temptations of Satan, yelling something into the wind. And there he was, too, even farther back, before time and image and memory itself, the Eternal Son, like light looking up from the brim of deep darkness–the original Creator of the water and the wind now riding with them on the waves.

And for them, in this moment, to see Jesus—to see all the images that make up who he is and what he is—is to realize that loving him and following him is not about fixing their problems..it is about re-creating the entire world in the image of Love.

We are the inheritors of that same encounter, you and I, that same collection of images. We, too, are reminded that Jesus will not remain the flat, convenient, utilitarian image that might suit us best.

If we want him to appear as a mere teacher, we must also discover that he is Lord. And if we want him to appear as the victorious one, we must also see that he is the crucified one. And if we want him to bless our health and our wealth, we will also find that he makes his home among the poor and the sick and the forgotten.

And he is all of these things–this whole jumbled stack of images, this whole collection of memories and mysteries–not to make our faith an impossible task, but to make impossible our tendency to render God in our own image–our propensity to make God as small as our own fears and misgivings. He asks, ‘why are you so timid?’ because he wants the disciples, and us, to see that God’s love is so much bigger than we can envision, so much bigger than our fear.

And so, even now, this Jesus asks us— today, here, in The Episcopal Church; here, in the United States; here, on a planet on fire; here among all of us who have tried to be diligent, polite, welcoming people of faith—he asks us, as we fear that the church is shrinking and the world is raging and the ship is sinking, he asks again, Why are you so timid?

Do we not trust that love is the strongest force on earth? Because it is.

Do we not believe that the world needs this good news more than anything else? Because it does.

Do we not feel that love raging in us like a storm of life giving water? Because it’s there, waiting to be set free.

And all of this—the storm of love and the memory and the mystery, and the countless revelations of eternity—if it is part of Jesus, we must let it become part of who we are, too. We must let this undaunted, unfaltering, fearless type of love become the shape of us, the sum of all the images we are, the precious treasure that we can never give away, no matter how many years go by.

And maybe, if we were to look for this in ourselves, and in others, we would brush up against enlightenment, too. Maybe we would see that every person we meet also carries with them a box of old photos. That they were once two years old on the back of a pony, or laughing with their friends or dancing on the sand or shouting into the wind or smiling in the light of the sun.

Maybe if we saw all of one another, we would be less timid, less overwhelmed by the storms we are navigating, because we would realize that Jesus isn’t asleep while the world falls apart. He is dreaming a new world into being and inviting us to dream with him. A world in which, instead of fearing with a great fear, we will love with a great love

It’s a beautiful image, isn’t it? I think I’ll hold onto it.

Greater Things: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 14, 2024 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 1:43-51.

This past week, we were in the process of finding a new person to clean our church buildings here at St. Anne, as our previous cleaner has moved on to other endeavors. And Greg, who graciously coordinated our interviews for someone new, joked to me in the midst of all of it that perhaps an exploration of cleaning services would work their way into this week’s sermon.

So I was reflecting on this week’s Gospel passage, where Jesus is calling his disciples and then encounters Nathanael (who, by the way, most scholars agree is another name for the apostle Bartholomew)…and I know Greg was kidding… but I got to thinking…and yes, actually, there is a connection to be made. Really, when you come down to it, everything we do, everything that we encounter, for good or ill, the sublime and the mundane, is an opportunity to look for God looking back at us—you can indeed glimpse the Kingdom of heaven hidden among the mops and brooms and cleaning rags.

My grandpa was a janitor for many years up in Michigan—he would clean the school buildings in the nighttime, when the halls were empty and the classrooms silent. He used to tell funny stories about some of his coworkers, and a few scary stories about things that went bump in the night in those old buildings.

And even though, in that role, he was not necessarily seen or lauded by any of the students or teachers or administrators, and even though he never made a ton of money, it was clear that he took pride in his work, and that he knew that what he did was something that mattered—one of those hidden-yet-essential roles that keeps things going day after day, year after year.

The people like my grandpa, and like all those who clean up and repair and fix and tend—like our cleaning staff and like our sexton, Tim, and like many of you who volunteer to keep this place standing—these are the saints behind the scenes, the ones upon whom we all rely.

Creation groans, and empires rise and fall, and the future might feel uncertain, and existential angst might swirl about like winter snow, but somewhere, at every hour of the day, there is someone who is nevertheless salting and shoveling the walks and mopping the floor and sweeping up the shattered pieces and doing all of the other little tasks that seem to say: this is what hope looks like. Because things may break, but it’s worth trying to put them back together again. And things may become a mess, but it’s worth scrubbing them down and starting anew each morning.

My grandpa cleaned those school rooms knowing, of course, that they’d be dirty again the next day, but he also knew that future generations were being educated and formed in those hallways, and so I think he hoped to do his small part. He wanted those floors to gleam with the promise of what they carried.

And it is a beautiful, sacred thing to care with such dogged persistence for some place, for some thing, to keep cleaning up the forgotten corners that gather dust and to mend the things that wear out.

We care for broken pipes and furnaces, just as we care for broken hearts and spirits—even though we know, in both cases, that the breaking is inevitable—because the caring itself is an act of resistance against the forces of decay and despair. It is a sign of our faith in a future time and place and reality where all of those small, loving, unremembered practicalities will have mattered, that they will have amounted to something greater than the sum of their parts, that they will be revealed, in truth, to have been the very foundation of the world.

For our lives have taken shape upon a thousand different floors that were mopped and swept by unseen hands. We have been fed by the labors of people we will never see, liberated by the sacrifices of names we will never speak. Our world is sustained by so many things—so many gestures of care and selflessness and quiet courage—that we tend not to see.

And in that sense, Nathanael in today’s Gospel is a bit like all of us. He is, we presume, a man who is keenly interested in knowing the Messiah, in experiencing for himself the way that God is going to act and manifest his glory in the world.

But Nathanael, like many of us, is looking for the obvious, impressive sorts of signs. And upon hearing about this nobody named Jesus, from a small village in an unremarkable region of the country, Nathanael is decidedly not impressed. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” he asks. Can the world be saved by a carpenter and his ragtag group of friends? Will oppressive empires fall to the power of the saw and the broom and the fishing net? Nathanael thinks not.

It is only when he thinks Jesus has some superhuman psychic ability—claiming that he saw Nathanael sitting under a fig tree before they ever met—that he starts to get excited. Maybe this Jesus does have some impressive tricks up his sleeve after all. Maybe he is about to reveal himself as a mighty king in hiding, and the whole humble carpenter thing was a just a costume, a front for the real sort power that God’s Son must surely wield.

And then Jesus says to him, knowingly, lovingly, devastatingly—do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree?

Do you still believe that God is like a magician?

Do you still believe that prayer is like a parlor trick?

Do you still believe it is the impressive, obvious forms of power that will save the world?

Do you still believe that the Messiah will be like any other king, with swords and stratagems?

Do you still believe that wars and the ones who wage them are the backbone of history or the gateway to an everlasting peace?

Do you still believe only in the world you can see in front of you?

You will see greater things than these.

You will see heaven opened you will begin to understand its true simplicity.

You will see the angels of God ascending and descending and the hidden, delicate interdependence of all creation and begin to understand true sustenance.

You will see the tearstained faces of the oppressed and the marching of the peacemakers and the work of humble hands and the bravery of trampled hearts and you will begin to understand true blessedness.

You will see the faith of the sick and the generosity of the widow and the fierce devotion of the parent and you will begin to understand true love.

You will see violence itself laid to waste, the nullification of the cross and the sword and the stone. You will see the dawn on the other side of death, and you will begin to understand true power.

You will see the unsung, unnoticed acts of care that renew the world each day and you will begin to understand true salvation.

Do you believe because I told you that saw you under the fig tree?

Well, brace yourself.

Because you will see that, in the end, the world will indeed be saved by the carpenter, and the fisherman—and the janitor and the cook and the mechanic and the gardener. And empires will indeed yield to the power of the saw and broom and net and plow, because the most enduring thing in the world is the persistence of care, the unyielding dedication of the ones hidden in plain sight who clean up and patch over and refuse to let things fall apart—for they are the signs of the one true God, who is also hidden in plain sight, and who has been cleaning and patching and refusing to given up on us since the beginning of the world.

The God who is, indeed, smiling back at us from amidst the mops and the brooms and the rags, who wants us to do nothing more than to care for what is in front of us, to fix what is broken, to make the world gleam with the promise of what it carries.

Thanks be to God for the ones who already do this. Blessed are they.

And, like Nathanael, blessed are we, when we finally see them.