sacrifice – By Another Road

The Ones Who Walk Away: A Sermon for All Saints

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 2, All Saints’ Sunday, at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Luke 6:20-31.

I read a lot of stuff, such that much of it kind of blurs together. Matt and I donated a few books the other week, and as I was sifting through the stack of titles I thought a few times, “now what was that one about again?”

But sometimes there are particular stories or texts that stick with you and rattle around in your heart and mind. I was looking through some old boxes recently, and I came across one of these on an old photocopied set of pages I’ve been holding onto since middle school. It is the text of a famous short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. Are any of you familiar with her? She was a forerunner of many writers these days who combine elements of sci-fi, fantasy, and pointed social commentary. If you know of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, or the Hunger Games series, or Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Ursula K. Le Guin writes in that sort of imaginative, prophetic space.

Anyway, when I was in middle school, our teacher had us read one of her best known short stories, and it has haunted me ever since. It is called, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” If you can get your hands on a copy, I encourage you to read it—it’s not too long, but it packs a punch. I can’t do full justice to Le Guin’s writing here, but the essence is this: there is a fictional, wondrous, joyous city called Omelas, where all the citizens are happy and healthy and blessed. They live simple, lovely, celebratory lives. But there’s a catch (of course). For mysterious reasons that no one quite understands but which everyone tacitly agrees to, the blessedness and the perfection of Omelas depends upon the misery of a single child, who is hidden away at the edge of the city, living in squalor, unconsoled by any human kindness. How the child came to be there, no one in Omelas knows, but they do know that if they were to set the child free, all their perfect happiness would come to an end.

And so they turn back to their festivals and their feasts and learn to live, somehow, with the knowledge of the child’s suffering.

But there are a few people—the ones alluded to in the title—who look upon the suffering child and do not turn back to the bright and beautiful city. Instead, driven by some ineffable word deep within, they keep walking, walking out alone, away from all that they have known and seen. As Le Guin writes, “the place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”

I am thinking of Omelas, today, friends, because I fear we are living in it.

I am thinking of Omelas today because children and other vulnerable people go hungry and have their rights bandied about as the collateral of partisan gamesmanship.

I am thinking of Omelas because we live in a society that does a poor job of distinguishing between true blessedness and mere privilege.

And I am thinking about Omelas because it is the feast of All Saints, and I wonder if this story has something to tell us, in a different sort of way, about what saintliness actually is.

I think for a long time, we have been taught to think of saints as the teacher’s pets in the Kingdom of Heaven—those people somehow born reciting the Lord’s Prayer or the Nicene Creed and easily believing every word of it, while the rest of us cross our fingers behind our backs and count down the seconds til recess. Top of the class Christians, those saints. Easy to admire, and easy to dismiss, too.

Because really, who has the time or the inclination to be a cow-eyed innocent, gazing blithely into the sky, when there are too many bills to pay and too many storms to quell and too many hearts being broken all around us?

And if that’s all the saints were, just the untroubled prayerful sort, then our eye-rolling would make sense.

But what if that’s not what sainthood is all about? What if it had nothing to do with being especially well-behaved or pious? What if, in fact, it was something wildly different ? Something far more subversive?

For we have all, I fear, been raised to be good citizens of Omelas, to climb the ladders of towers built on quicksand. We have all been formed by its false pageantry and asked to ignore its real price. Day by day, we are lulled and soothed and distracted, and asked to fix our gaze upon the pleasanter things our systems can offer us.

But following Jesus—which is all that sainthood could ever be about—is not, I am sorry, it is not about blithe piety nor about making an uneasy peace with the costly beauty of Omelas, or America, or wherever we happen to find ourselves.

No, following Jesus is about encountering that point in time when you are standing there, daring to look upon the face of suffering even as the festival flags beckon you back to forgetfulness.

And the saints? The saints are simply the ones among us who walk away. Driven by that ineffable Word, they walk in the other direction. And what we can say of them is this: they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

And if this is what saintliness is all about—not getting a gold star, but a refusal to accept the world’s usual means and ends—then today in our gospel Jesus gives us some perspective on that blessed path which beckons those who dare to walk away.

Blessed are the poor, blessed are the hungry and the sad and the hated, Jesus tells his disciples today in Luke’s more blunt version of the Sermon on the Mount. He calls these things blessed, not because being poor or hungry or sad are inherently good things, but blessed because God refuses to look away from them. God will not forsake them. Jesus declares that he will call them blessed even if we will not.

So, blessed are the ones we’d rather forget. Blessed are the food stamp recipients and the queer couples applying for a marriage license. Blessed are the Black and brown neighbors and those who speak a different language or worship in a different way. And blessed, too, are all the ones who are your so-called enemies, political or religious or otherwise. Even if we choose not to see that that they are blessed—especially if we choose not to see it.

Because God is not seduced by our necessary evils or our expedient sacrifices. God is not deceived by Omelas–neither by its kings nor its festivals nor its monuments of triumph over its victims. God says either we are all blessed, or we are all lost, together.

And so the ones who walk away, the ones we call saints, head towards this other Beatitude-place instead: this land of unrestrained, unwitheld blessedness, where love does not extract a price, where satisfaction does not depend upon the misery of others and safety does not demand a scapegoat. We may not see it fully in this lifetime, but what a place it must be, that Kingdom of Heaven far beyond the horizon of Omelas.

St. Anne, today the Church remembers those saints who glimpsed that someplace else worth walking towards, often at great personal cost but also with the deep peace and joy of knowing what is true and then acting upon it. I pray that we follow them.

Today, too, we recall our own departed loved ones who have, in the mystery of Christ’s risen life, already been carried ahead of us towards that same true and joyful place. I pray that we will find them there.

And finally, today, we will place our pledges upon the altar of God—our pledges to this place and to one another that, for one more year at least, we will keep walking together, driven by that ineffable Word—that something which we have glimpsed in Jesus and in one another as we go. I pray its beauty and its promise will be revealed somehow, in the very act of walking.

Because they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

And wouldn’t you know—if we do, too, then I guess that makes us all saints.

Hospitality: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 2, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Genesis 22:1-14 and Matthew 10-40-42.

About a year and a half ago, a woman came to Trinity seeking some assistance. As most of you know, we are regularly visited by folks in our community who, for one reason or another, have come upon hard times and who need a little help. When they show up we try, as best we can, to assist them with the essentials—food, laundry, a bit of money to help with an emergency expense. Many of you contribute to these initiatives.

This woman was in a similar situation; she’d started a job at a fast food restaurant and wouldn’t get paid for a week or two, and needed some funds to cover her bills. But it wasn’t her request for help that stood out to me, or even her story, which had more than its share of heartbreak and hardship. What stood out was a question that she asked me—a question that nobody else who has come to the doors has ever asked me, before or since. After giving her what I could, she looked past me as if gazing down the hallway into the building, and then she said, “the people who go to this church—what do they think of people like me? Would I be welcome here?”

Would I be welcome here? She was asking, in other words, would people like me, people who embody an uncomfortable truth, people whose lives do not fit a neat and tidy narrative—would a person like that be welcome here? I’m not exaggerating when I say that it felt, in that moment, as if Christ himself was asking the question of me and of us: the people who go to this church—what do they think of me?

Now, of course I told her what a warm and welcoming community we have here at Trinity, and that she could worship with us any time, and I meant that. But the question has stayed with me ever since, perhaps because of its raw vulnerability, or perhaps because, in asking it, she was really getting to the heart of what we are supposed to be about in this house of God: true, sometimes uncomfortable hospitality.

Because it’s all too easy to say that we should love God and love our neighbor until we realize that God and that neighbor might deeply challenge us, and that loving them is going to ask something precious of us—something we were not prepared to relinquish. Our resources sometimes, yes, but also our comfort, our complacency, and our preconceived notions about the world.

We in the Episcopal church take seriously the notion, stated in today’s Gospel, that whoever welcomes the stranger welcomes the Lord himself. And we strive, as best we can, to create space for all who hunger, for all who seek, to say, “yes, you are welcome here, whoever you are, whoever you have been, whoever you are becoming. You are welcome.” And that is a gift that this community offers willingly.

But hospitality is a risky sort of gift, because it doesn’t always go according to plan. We might set out to welcome a guest with the best of intentions, with our house well in order, with the banquet arranged just so, only to discover that when those guests arrive, they demand more than we bargained for—not more of our material goods, but more of ourselves. A true, and deep, and holy hospitality is not just about opening our doors, but about opening our hearts, and our lives, to the possibility of truly seeing and thus being changed by the one who comes knocking.

When the woman at the doors asked me that question, “would I be welcome here” I have to be honest that a part of myself wondered—would she? Would she be fully, truly welcomed? Not just acknowledged with a polite smile, but embraced, in all of her complexity and pain? Are any of us? It’s a question, at least for me, without a neat and tidy answer, because, in truth, I think we can all be a bit afraid of the unfamiliar. We can all shy away from people whose lives seem so very unlike our own, especially those whose naked grief and brokenness demands an accounting of our own hidden wounds.

And yet, if I am to be hospitable, truly hospitable, then I know that I must go beyond politeness and venture into the far scarier and more uncertain landscape of true communion, where our wounds and our dreams and our stories brush up against one another, all so different on the surface, yet all so similar. It is not for the faint of heart, this type of hospitality, but it is the also the very thing for which our hearts were made.

And though you might not immediately see it, this invitation into risky hospitality is the unspoken theme of today’s dark and luminous reading from Genesis, one of the strangest and most compelling passages in all of scripture, in which Abraham must prepare an altar for his son, Isaac, to be offered, like a lamb, as a sacrifice to the inscrutable mystery of God.

It is a horrifying story. It is an inconceivable demand. And that’s good; the fact that we recoil from the story reveals our own innate tendency toward compassion.

But if we can take a step back from the emotional intensity of the narrative and consider how it fits into the broader story of Abraham’s experience of God, I think it also says something very important about this question of true, costly hospitality; of welcoming the stranger—the challenging stranger—into our midst.

Let me explain. Abraham’s story is based, in many ways, on the idea of being hospitable. You will remember (we just heard it in church a couple weeks ago) that Abraham and Sarah, who were childless in their old age, were granted as a divine blessing their son, Isaac, after offering hospitality to God, who appeared to them as three travelers seeking respite. They prepared a meal for the Lord and then they were promised a son. And if this were the whole story, if they lived happily ever after, it would be quite neat and tidy—they acted hospitably, virtuously, and they reaped the rewards of doing so.

But nothing in life is that simple, and nothing in Scripture is either. So we have this unsettling chapter today—one that hits hard for anyone who has lost someone or something very dear to them—with God coming to Abraham again and asking for something far more costly than a meal and a bit of shelter. Here, God demands Abraham’s willingness to offer up his very identity, his love, his hope. Here, on this cold and lonely mountaintop, far from his home, being hospitable to God, preparing a table for him is, for Abraham, the opposite of neat and tidy. It is earth shattering. It is heart-rending. And as he builds the altar of wood, as the wind whistles over the rocks, one can almost hear a question carried down from heaven—Abraham, what do you think of me now? Am I still welcome here? Will you hold fast to the promise, even now, even when it will seemingly cost you everything?

Now, of course, God does not actually demand Isaac’s life in the end; he desires mercy, not sacrifice, even if he has a terrifying way of showing it here. But in this story, which is less of a handbook for father-son relationships and really more like a parable, we are reminded in shocking terms that opening our homes and our hearts to God in our midst—to offer hospitality in that deep and true way, is not always a cozy get together. Sometimes it is a door thrown open to the truth, to the storm, bearing with it liberating wind and life-giving water and dreadful lightning all at once.

Sometimes being hospitable is finding the courage to stand in the threshold and to see there, in the whirlwind, the totality of life—the blessing and the curse, the beauty and the burden and the risk and the redemptive promise, and to somehow say, “yes.”

Yes, I open myself to whoever and whatever comes. Yes, I will risk caring for another, even though I know I must lose them someday. I will embrace what I do not understand. I will love past the point of calculation, I will be welcoming past the point of self-serving virtue, I will greet you, whoever you are, woman knocking at the door, God knocking at the door, and I will hear your story and I’ll tell you mine and if you ask me what the people in this church think; if you would be welcome here, I will say,

I hope so, because if you are not, then none of us is. For the love of God is costly, so very costly, but it is also fierce and free. It is all-encompassing, and there are no outsiders inside this place.

So come. Come to this table and behold the gift given abundantly—yes, a Son sacrificed upon a lonely altar, in the end, by not given by us to a angry God but given by God to a hungry humanity—given to you. Given for you. The once and eternal hospitality of God, terrifying, magnificent, transformative, and complete.

Yes, we are all welcome here.

And it will save us. And it will change us.

So brace yourself.

Sermon: A Tale of Two Liturgies

I preached this sermon today, November 27th, at All Saints Chapel, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, CA. It was given as my senior-year sermon for the Master of Divinity program. Lectionary texts are Revelation 14:14-20 and Luke 21:5-9.

“When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” (Luke 21:9)

This morning, in the midst of these apocalyptic readings from Revelation and the Gospel of Luke, I felt called to share a word…about liturgy. If my time at CDSP has taught me anything, it’s that there is nothing—absolutely nothing—more essential for us to talk about than liturgy.

But I’m not being glib or preciously High-Church when I say this, nor am I just giving a shout-out to Dr. Meyers. Liturgies—understood broadly as those ongoing structures of relational action in which we participate—are what define us. The daily liturgies of our lives shape our reality and determine the parameters of our hope.

And so, in light of today’s Gospel passage, I would ask that we sit here a moment with Jesus, gazing up at the finely ornamented temple of 21^st century life in this country, and I would ask us to consider the “wars and insurrections” of our time, and how they form a twisted, macabre liturgy of their own. A liturgy of Death.

In this liturgy, the hymns are composed with the staccato of gunshots, and incense rises up in clouds of tear gas. In this liturgy, the Gloria is sung to acclaim the power of whiteness and the prayers of the people read like a shopping list. In this liturgy the prophets preach the commodification of well-being and the anesthetic of endless, consumable content. This Death liturgy is the shiny, shambling procession toward the void of human possibility: the howling emptiness we sometimes call sin, and we perceive its highly effective “missional outreach” whenever we read the daily news headlines.

But this liturgy is not the exclusive possession of our age. Our compulsion for death, both physical and spiritual, has always been with us. The blood in the ground cries out to bear witness through the generations. And this is why Jesus tells us, “these things must happen.” Because we are enthralled by sin. Wars and insurrections and toppling temples must happen, not because God needs them or delights in them, but because they are the perverse oblation of the liturgy of Death, the destructive “work of the people” that inevitably occurs in the absence of God’s grace.

It is this liturgy of destruction that is attested, also, in the book of Revelation, where the harvest of the earth is crushed by God’s winepress. But lest we misread the text, we must remember: the blood that flows from the winepress is not that of the wicked in the hands of a vengeful deity, but the blood of the martyrs. We kill the martyrs. Like Christ before them, they are trampled by Death’s liturgical procession and their lives are poured out over the earth.

We see this already, every day. In the liturgy of Death, the innocent are slain on the altars of nationalism, economic exploitation, homophobia, misogyny…and the list goes on. And in our complicity, in the things we have done and left undone, we bow at the altar of death and drink the blood of our victims. It is a bitter cup, and in those last days it will taste like wrath to those who drink it. This is the liturgy to which we are bound.

Except…

We are here, now, because we have encountered and been reborn into a different liturgy. The liturgy of God’s love. The liturgy of Life with a capital L. This is what Christ offers us in his resurrected body: the promise of Life, and the absolute rebuke of humanity’s penchant for death and destruction. His empty tomb destroys the lie that Death’s liturgy leads to our final resting place, or that God’s ultimate posture is one of destruction. God is revealed in the resurrection of Jesus as God has always been—permanently creative, eternally life-giving, infinitely merciful.

And God’s liturgy is so beautiful, so poetic, because it takes the very instruments of Death’s liturgy and transforms them into signs of hope. The cross, an instrument of torture, becomes the banner of victory. The innocent blood poured out becomes the cup of life, the cup of forgiveness. And thus the winepress of the wrath of God is revealed for what it truly is: the beating, bleeding heart of Christ, spilling out, flooding the earth, inundating the liturgy of death, drowning it with life.

This is our choice then: which liturgy will we inhabit today? Will we orient our hearts toward the altar of Death, or that of Life?

We are here, at CDSP and in the Church, because no matter how loudly Death processes in the streets, we choose the liturgy of Life, over and over again. We have been given the gift of spending time here in this community, exploring the contours of God’s love, finding words to describe it and to share with those whom we will serve elsewhere. We are here to embody that Life-giving liturgy with one another, and to let it shape us. We are here, too, because we have seen the liturgy of Death, each in our own personal way. We have peered into the void, and we have heard God’s NO:

NO to death’s proclamation of expendability,

NO to its mockery of the life which God has declared good,

NO to its glittering idols of self-interest.

We have heard the NO to Death and we are saying Amen, Amen, Amen, come, Lord Jesus, come and give us Life once more.

When we choose to be swept up in the liturgy of Life, when we perceive its unconquerable movement, we come to understand Jesus’ words a bit better: these wars and insurrections must take place, this temple will fall, this river of blood must flow, but you, child of God, you do not have to be terrified, because you know that the Lord is not guiding us toward destruction, but is reshaping us, guiding us back into our proper relationship with Life. Death itself is the only thing that will be destroyed.

This is the Good News that our liturgy tells us. May we be ever mindful of its power, and ever grateful for its promise.