Grace Standard Time

Jeremy Funk

Matt 20:1–16

Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church

September 24, 2017

Given that I live with cerebral palsy, low vision, and hearing loss, I know that I move more slowly than many in the world—that tasks take me longer than they do an able-bodied person. Plus, I know that I don’t like to hurry, so I need even more time!

Yet time has a way of disappearing. In my twenties and in much of my thirties, life was happy, but life was also lonely. I longed for a partner, and I wanted to put down roots. In our late thirties Helen and I found each other, and I found Baltimore a place to spread those roots. My forties are very happy so far. But I find that they’ve brought more muscle pain and more wakeful nights. And in my forties life does not have the same vastness and mystery it once had. Mystery still exists to be found, but life has more parameters. And although I can’t exactly see to life’s edge, I’ve become more and more aware that the edge is there.

Maybe because I think regularly about the time that life takes, our Gospel lesson teaches me about the connection between grace and time—or about Grace Standard Time, if you will.

The Episcopal priest Robert Capon, who died in 2013, offers a memorable, if long, retelling of our parable, which I came across years ago. Capon calls the vineyard owner Robert Mondovi, and Mondovi decides to pay his workers $120 for the day. I’ll pick up the story as Mondovi searches for his last hires.

It’s a huge harvest, though, and with only one hour left before dark, Robert realizes he won’t get it in on time without still more help. So out he goes again, but the hiring hall is closed by now and the village square has only its usual crowd of up-to-the-minute losers hanging out in a haze of smoke . . . What the hell, Robert thinks in desperation: it’s worth a try. So he walks up to the group . . . and gets into his spiel: he’s Robert Mondovi; he’s famous and he’s fair; they could probably use a buck; so what did they think? What they think, of course, is also What the hell: whatever he wants them to do, it won’t take long; and whatever he pays, at least it’s a couple more six-packs for the night. Off they go . . .

Before they pick even a single grape, they make sure they find out from the workers already on the job the exact per diem amount on which Robert Mondovi is basing his chances at the Guinness Book of World Records. And since they are—like the rest of the human race—inveterate bookkeepers, they take the $120 figure, divide it by twelve and multiply it by the number of hours they’ll be working. Then and only then do they lay hand to grape, secure in the knowledge that they will be getting $110, $70, $40, and $10.

Robert, however, has a surprise for them. At the end of the day, he is a happy man. With his best and biggest harvest on its way to the stemmer-crusher, he feels expansive—and a little frisky. So he says to his foreman, “I have a wild idea. I’m going to fill the pay envelopes myself; but when you give them out, I want you to do it backwards, beginning with the last ones hired.”

When the first girl with the purple hair gets her envelope and walks away opening it, she finds six crisp, new twenties inside. What does she do? . . . She does not go back and report the overage; she just keeps on walking—fast.

But when her . . . boyfriends catch up with her and tell her they got $120, too . . . well, dear old human nature triumphs again: they cannot resist going back and telling everybody else what jerks they were for sweating a whole day in the hot sun when they could have made the same money for just an hour’s work . . . On hearing that Robert Mondovi is now famous for paying $120 an hour, [those on the job longer] put their mental bookkeeping machinery into reverse . . . They conclude that they are now about to become the proud possessors of, in order, $480, or $840, or even—bless you Robert Mondovi—$1,440.

But Robert, like God, is only crazy, not stupid . . . Robert . . . has his speech in his pocket. “Look, Pal,’ he says. “ . . . You agreed to $120 a day, I gave you $120 a day. Take it and get out of here before I call the cops. If I want to give some pot-head in Gucci loafers the same pay as you, so what? . . . All I did was have a fun idea. I decided to put the last first and the first last to show you there are no insiders and outsiders here: when I’m happy, everybody’s happy, no matter what they did or didn’t do. I’m not asking you to like me, Buster; I’m telling you to enjoy me. If you want to mope, that’s your business. But since the only thing it’ll get you is a lousy disposition, why don’t you just shut up and go into the tasting room and have yourself a free glass of Chardonnay? The choice is up to you, Friend: drink up, or get out; compliments of the house, or go to hell. Take your pick.”[1]

In addition to highlighting the humor in this parable, Father Capon captures the vineyard owner’s generosity, and his anger when the daylong workers suddenly perceive his generosity as unfairness, even stinginess. But Capon may answer too many questions, close off too many possibilities, in his retelling. New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine points out, for instance, that the parable does not invite us to characterize the last hires as inferior to the earliest. The last folks are not necessarily lazy, losers, or potheads (as Father Capon depicts them). Maybe, as Levine suggests, the five-o’clockers are mothers with young children, who can only now just find time to financially support their households. Or maybe these workers have already finished another job on this day but still can’t quite make ends meet.[2]

The point is, the latecomers are not distinguished from the early arrivals at all. And if we assume they are inferior to the first hires even to highlight the vintner’s generosity, aren’t we in fact committing precisely the sin the early workers do? Are we not relying on our own notions of fairness and then making about others judgments not ours to make?

Good news in this parable rests in the truth that it is God who judges us. Your judge is not another human being, and your judge is most especially not yourself. This is good news because the God who judges us justly also us saves us in Jesus Christ, and knows us through Christ’s own Spirit within and among us—a Spirit near to us as our next breath.

Students of this parable often equate the vineyard owner with God and the vineyard workers with Christians. Yet as I sat with our parable, the images that evoked Jesus for me came from the second half of the early workers’ complaint. When the first workers receive their wages, they grumble: “You have made them [the last workers] equal to us, who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.”

Sometimes kingdom work is hot. Sometimes kingdom work burdens us. And if anyone has from the first borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat for the kingdom of heaven, Jesus has. Jesus bore the scorching heat as he told stories in crowded fields, as he broke bread for hungry thousands. Jesus felt scorching heat as he hashed out Scripture’s meaning in synagogues or in the Jerusalem temple. Jesus bore the burden of the day whenever the sick or the struggling scuffled toward him, and whenever he heard the troubled cries of the possessed.

Finally, the heat was surely hottest and the burden surely heaviest when Jesus hung mocked and dying on a Roman cross. But God vindicated his life and work by raising him from the dead by the power of the Spirit. And now, good news, God has made us his sisters and brothers through the same resurrecting Spirit, through the same hope. So even as our time ticks away, good news is that time need no longer burden us. United as we are to Christ in his Spirit, living in hope of the resurrection, we have all the time we need. We live by Grace Standard Time.

Moments ago I mentioned that students of this parable often equate God and the vineyard owner. Professor Levine agrees that, yes, the vintner is an image for a generous God; but that owner is also an aspirational image for us—Jesus’s disciples. First, she points out that the parable doesn’t tell us why the vineyard owner keeps returning to the marketplace for more workers. Father Capon’s guesses—that the harvest is a bonanza and that weather forecast puts a rush on the harvest—are plausible, but still the parable itself doesn’t say. And Levine has another idea.

Maybe Jesus’s agenda is communitarian, not capitalist. Perhaps, if the resources are there in the hyperlocal economy, the vineyard owner simply wants to ensure that everyone has enough food to eat. Levine cites an example like this from the first-century Jewish historian Josephus: “When the Jerusalem Temple was completed, and the eighteen-thousand-plus workers were in want, [Josephus wrote,] ‘If any one of them did but labor for a single hour, he received his pay.’”

What might it mean for us to live by Grace Standard Time? Professor Levine urges us to take from our parable a lesson in economics: Let’s do what we can to make sure that more people have not just enough food but also meaningful work and living wages; let’s work to make sure that more people retain dignity. By telephoning or letter writing we might push for a law prohibiting employers from asking potential workers if they have been convicted of a felony. Or if we can, we might hire to work for us those with a past felony conviction who nevertheless now have turned their lives around. One of my colleagues at Wipf and Stock Publishers in Eugene, Oregon, for example, was once arrested for carrying hallucinogenic mushrooms on his person and now has a felony on his record. But David eventually found work manufacturing books in our production room and went on to study graphic design. Generously ensuring human dignity advances the reign of God.

We live under Grace Standard Time. That is to say, God has given us all the time we need. We can bear the burden of the day and the scorching heat because Jesus did, and because his same Spirit lives within us and among us here in the church. In faith we know that time itself belongs to our generous God. So whether we’re closer in life to the new birth we underwent in baptism or to our hoped-for resurrection in Christ, we’re all working in the kingdom together. We’re here today, ready and with our sleeves rolled up. May God bless us in our work. Amen.

[1] Capon, Robert Farrar, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002) 391–97.

[2] See Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (New York: HarperCollins, 2014).

 

Sermon for October 16, 2016

Genesis 32:22–31

Jeremy Funk

Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church

Baltimore, Maryland

In this morning’s Old Testament lesson we meet Jacob on a dark night, alone and afraid. Summoned by God from his mother’s homeland back to his own native territory, Jacob learns as he moves closer that Esau, his twin whom he’d tricked and wronged years before, is coming to meet him with four hundred men. Growing up, Jacob had lived up, or down, to his name, grabbing what was not his. Out of the womb he came clutching his brother’s heel. That earned him his name, which meant “heel grabber” or “supplanter.” Next, in their youth, Jacob had cornered hungry Esau into trading for bread and a bowl of lentils his birthright—his right as the firstborn to double the inheritance. Finally, with the help of their mother, Rebekah, Jacob had hoodwinked their father, Isaac, into giving his paternal blessing not to his oldest son, Esau, as expected, but to Jacob.

When Esau finds out he’s been tricked out of both his blessing and his birthright, he pledges to kill his brother. Rebekah urges Jacob to flee Canaan for Mesopotamia and her family, where he can find a wife and settle down awhile. That journey and more than fourteen years have led to this: a black and solitary night when Jacob knows he has it coming.

Despite advantages of birthright, blessing, and status over his brother, before we meet Jacob this morning, he’s already acted toward Esau less like a lord and more like a subordinate. Jacob has sent him animal flocks and herds—as tributes or gifts—to diffuse Esau’s anger. Next Jacob offered God both thanksgiving for blessing and protection as well as pleas for deliverance from Esau’s vengeance. And as a last resort, Jacob has divided his family in half (in case one group is captured or ambushed) and has sent them all across a stream. Now he waits to face his brother and his brother’s men.

But rather than Esau and a small army, Jacob meets a lone man: indeed, before we know it, with a single short clause, we find ourselves in the middle—even near the end—of a long, intense encounter: “a man wrestled with [Jacob] until daybreak.” We don’t expect a wrestling match. Yet we shouldn’t be surprised either that one breaks out for Jacob, given all the wrestling in his past—for the birthright and blessing, against his brother and father, growing up in Canaan; and for his wives and wages, against his father-in-law, Laban, in Mesopotamia.

The single clause that drops us into the middle of this match—“a man wrestled with [Jacob] until daybreak”—opens our imaginations. In the sweat-drenched dark we hear the men scuffling and stomping, grunting and groaning. Words, maybe only whispers, come with the sunrise:

“Let me go!”

“No, bless me first!”

“What’s your name?”

“Jacob.”

“Not anymore. It’s Israel now, because you’ve strived with God and won out.”

“What’s your name?”

“Don’t ask.”

After this dialog ends, we are told that Jacob’s opponent blesses him

A mystery of our lesson, an enduring question, is, who is Jacob’s opponent? Suggestions are many. From what I can gather, our lesson suggests that Jacob’s opponent is an agent of blessing; otherwise why would Jacob ask to be blessed? Also, our lesson ends with Jacob’s admission that, as one translation puts it, “I have seen God face to face and have come out alive.” Finally, our passage calls Jacob’s opponent a “man.” So even as the question endures, I’m content to hazard for now that Jacob’s opponent, in a humanlike form, represents God in some way. In some sense Jacob’s wrestling partner represents the God who creates, the God who blesses and saves creation, and the God who calls and blesses a people—Israel—for Godself.

From within this complex, layered story, I find myself drawn especially two verses. First, verse 25 reads: “When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.” Surely the first part—“When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob”—raises many questions. But the magnetic part of verse 25 for me is the last: “[God] struck [Jacob] on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him.”

God takes human form, and Jacob will not let God go until he receives a blessing. God touches or strikes Jacob’s hip in order to free himself from Jacob’s grasp. Earlier in Genesis, God had commanded Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, to mark all male members of his household as God’s own through circumcision. But in the story before us today, God marks Jacob’s body specifically, during this daybreak encounter.

I live with cerebral palsy, low vision, and hearing loss. And I’m getting older, so I know my body is changing and will continue to change. In light of all this, our lesson today challenges me to consider the ways my disabilities and difficulties signal that God is intimately at work in my life. Here is especially not what I am saying today: I’m not at all suggesting that we spend energy searching for lessons that God may be teaching us through our disabilities, illnesses, aches, or pains.

I’m not thinking of anything so didactic. Rather, I’m imagining the wrestling match: how near God and Jacob must have come to each other, how the air they breathed must have mingled, how tightly Jacob held on to God as dawn broke—even after wrenching his hip, not giving an inch until receiving God’s blessing. So I’m wondering, how might the marks of our mortality that we see and experience in our bodies bring us as close to God as Jacob found himself that night? Through them might we draw closer to the God who created us and loves us, closer even to the God we may wrestle against as we experience new bodily pains or discomforts and anxiety that may accompany them?

One night in 2007 while I was listening to classical music with headphones, I first experienced what’s called tinnitus, persistent ringing in my right ear that didn’t go away. The onset was random, and my anxiety spiked. My limited hearing was now more compromised. I became depressed. I missed the total silence possible before. I stopped using headphones. Eventually the ringing lessened, and during the day my hearing aids amplify other sounds so that I don’t notice it. Now I do everything I can to avoid loud environments. But just before moving to Baltimore in 2012, I aggravated the ringing and since have had it in both ears. Once again, before I made the adjustment, I became anxious and depressed.

Much about tinnitus is not known. There is some thought that the condition is neurological and that the ringing represents the brain’s adjusting to a sudden hearing loss. Working through my psychological response to these changes in my hearing, I wanted to find a way to hold on to God’s presence amid the changes. Eventually I realized that in the ringing I was hearing the sounds of my own body. So the tinnitus became for me a sign that I am alive, like my heartbeat. I began to understand the ringing as a sign that life, that Godself, is present in my body.

Even if we cannot seize upon God’s closeness while living with discomfort as a body, the good news of the Christian gospel is that God has already come as humanly close to us as God could ever come, taking on flesh in Jesus. Like Jacob’s opponent, who “saw that he did not prevail,” Jesus too lost out. He wrestled against religious elites who laid too many burdens on average God-seekers. His message of freedom and plenty for all kinds of people agitated imperial order. And Jesus ended up dead, nailed to a Roman cross.

Yet as Christians we trust that God raised Jesus from the dead. By the power of his Spirit whom he has given us, we trust that the risen and embodied Messiah Jesus is Lord of all. It is through faith that we follow this God who in body can identify with us. Our Christian hope is that our bodies will rise like his. Until then, as we follow the God made known to us in the risen and nail-pocked body of Jesus, may the marks on our bodies aid us in drawing ever closer to him.

Celebrating the Eucharist together centers our worship. Every week we take into ourselves Christ’s body and blood. One of my favorite sentences in the Eucharistic liturgy is the concluding exhortation, “Feed on him in your hearts, by faith, with thanksgiving.” This sentence reminds us that just as we eat the bread in real time, we also feed on Christ in our hearts. Exercising the faith God has given us, we join ever closer to Christ both in body and in spirit.

The second verse from our Genesis lesson that rivets my attention is number 31: “The sun rose upon [Jacob] as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.” For Jacob the most intense struggle is now over, the sun has risen—but the day-to-day wrestling with life as a mortal and marked body continues. Jacob will finally weep to see the face of God in his brother Esau, but then he will keep searching for God’s blessing.

How are we as embodied individuals and as an embodied community seeking God’s blessings? How are we seeing the face of God here, in one another? As we pass the peace to one another this morning, may we see and be seen as the face of God; may we speak as well as hear God’s blessing. Let us be open not only to give but also to receive God’s blessings. Amen.

 

Sermon for April 3, 2016

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter

Jeremy Funk

John 20:19–31

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Baltimore, Maryland

Before I started writing these reflections, as I was sifting through a last bit of commentary on our Gospel lesson, my service dog, Levi, gave me a service he hasn’t been trained to give. He placed his forepaws on my chest playfully and tried to lick my face. I began to laugh, and as I gathered what I could of him into my lap, I wondered this: In today’s Gospel when the risen Jesus startles his gathered followers by showing up for the first time in their locked room, does he break up their wariness and weariness with something like Levi’s joyful exuberance? “Peace be with you! It’s me! I’m alive!”

At first, the disciples are anxious about what will happen to them. Of course they are missing Jesus. They have not gotten around to sharing memories of his healings or teachings. Shock and sadness are still the order of the day. Some wonder how they could’ve abandoned him. Others are bewildered by Mary Magdalene’s claims that she has seen him and that he spoke to her. Mostly, all are afraid that they might soon meet their teacher’s fate. Mostly, all are afraid that they might soon meet their teacher’s fate. During this time of grief, having only one another is not enough to sustain them.

We can only imagine the tenor of Jesus’s first greeting: “Peace be with you!” Perhaps he speaks like a friend who’s been away for quite some time. He might’ve added, “I told you I’d be back.” We learn in a few words that his arrival quickly spread the joy around: “The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord,” says the Gospel writer.

“Peace be with you”: Jesus repeats the words of peace. In his mouth they become more than the usual hello. They become a source of joy, a healing balm, a peace the world cannot give. The words become forgiveness for these close friends who had denied and abandoned him so recently. Then their forgiving Lord commissions his followers to offer his own forgiveness to others: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Throughout this first encounter the risen Jesus speaks the Spirit of his love. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” he says. “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” And with a single breath, he opens for them the new relationship to God that his whole life, death, and rising had finally now brought about. He instills within his followers his own Spirit, God’s own Spirit: the abiding, indwelling, living love he shares with God the Father.

No, having only one another is certainly not enough for these grieving disciples. One writer has said that in the Gospel of John, belief equals friendship with Jesus. Sometimes the friendship is secret, as it is for the religious leaders Nicodemus (who first visits Jesus at night, and who eventually prepares Jesus’s body for burial) and Joseph of Arimathea, who receives permission from Pilate to bury Jesus’s body. And sometimes the friendship is intimate and public, as it is for the one called “the disciple Jesus loved,” quite possibly the author of John’s gospel.

Even today, after two thousand years, trusting in Jesus does not center primarily on memorizing the Nicene Creed or a set of doctrines. Believing in Jesus, cultivating friendship with the Lord in our hearts, trusting the Spirit of the living Christ among us, centers on hearing again and telling again, week after week, the story of Jesus together in community.

After their first meeting with Jesus, the ten disciples cannot wait to tell Thomas about it, who had been absent: “We have seen the Lord!” But Thomas doesn’t take their word for it. Thomas wants to see the Lord for himself, just as his friends had. I understand that. I don’t at all like to be left out either. So a week later, the Lord appears again and gives Thomas what he needs—an opportunity to touch his wounds: “Put your finger here, and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side.” Thomas responds with a full-throated confession of faith, the central one in the Gospel: “My Lord and my God!”

No, in the wake of Jesus’s death meeting only with his fellow disciples is certainly not enough for Thomas. Being together is not enough. Being with Jesus is the point. Jesus is the one who enters a locked room and brightens a dark room. Thomas wants an opportunity to see Jesus for himself, and he receives the opportunity to reach out and touch his friend. But the encounter ends as the Lord blesses us, the future disciples: Jesus asks Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

So the question confronts us: blessed as we are, how are we to invite Jesus into our locked room here at St. Luke’s? How do we continue to cultivate friendship with Jesus? The Apostle Paul tells us that we are the body of Christ, filled with his Spirit. In John’s terms, we live and love in Jesus as Jesus lives and loves in God the Father.

Thomas’s encounter with the risen Jesus opens two arenas of thought for me. The first centers on the vulnerability of Jesus’s invitation. Jesus acts vulnerably by inviting Thomas to reach out and touch his wounds. If we are to be the body of Christ in the world, how might we work to welcome into our midst those persons—those bodies—whom society considers the most vulnerable, the most wounded, the most broken? And if we are to be the body of Christ to one another, how might we notice opportunities for greater vulnerability with one another?

Second, as a person who lives with low vision and hearing loss, I find touch to be a compelling way of connecting with the world. So I am fascinated that our lesson emphasizes touch as a way to encounter Jesus. We are not told whether Thomas does in fact reach out and touch his Lord’s hands and side. But each week when we gather here, I have an opportunity—you have the opportunity—by the power of the Holy Spirit to receive hugs and handshakes of peace from the body of Christ, just as his first disciples did that Easter evening. Each week when we gather here, I have an opportunity—you have the opportunity—by the power of the Holy Spirit to taste his body and blood.

Every week the risen Christ stands among us as a beloved friend, or leaps into our laps like a joyful dog. “Peace be with you!” says Jesus. “It’s me! I’m alive!” Amen.

 

Homily for March 6, 2016

Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church, Baltimore, Maryland

Jeremy Funk

Luke 15:1–3, 11–32

Nearly everyone knows today’s Gospel lesson. It’s often called the parable of the Prodigal—or wasteful—Son. That title refers, of course, to the father’s youngest son, who wastes the value of his share of family property in a distant land and returns, ruined, to find his father’s arms nevertheless open wide, ready to take him in once more. Even though the common title centers on the little brother, I find myself drawn this morning to the reflect on the two other major characters in the story: big brother, who feels taken for granted, and his foolish father, who nearly loses everything. They meet in the last scene.

Big brother had started sweating hours ago, as he did every day, working in the fields. Now trudging home he catches strains of music. As he nears the house the sounds grow louder—music and motion and laughter. He doesn’t remember that any plans had been made for the evening, so he asks a servant what’s up.

“Your brother’s back, and your dad is serving up the fattened calf to celebrate that he’s here safe and sound.”

Only after being let into the loop does big brother lose his cool. After such a long workday, he experiences this news as his last straw. Our lesson says, “Then he became angry and refused to go in.” When his father comes out, big brother doesn’t even greet him. Big brother’s first word is “Listen!” When had his father last listened to him—really listened to him? What comes next is righteous protest:

“I have followed all your instructions, minded all my p’s and q’s. But you haven’t given me permission to have my friends over, even for a small barbecue. Yet when this son of yours”—he can’t even bear to acknowledge his relationship with his brother—“when this son of yours returns, who’s called you as good as dead, who’s spent half the value of your property with riffraff, and who’s ruined our standing in this village, you pull out all the stops for him!”

What’s clear from big brother’s tirade is that he’s lost respect for and connection with his father. He feels taken for granted. He is the less favored son. Yet he may be seething below the surface too, measuring other angles of his father’s behavior as pathetic. Commentators Richard Rohrbaugh and Bruce Malina discuss the cultural context of this parable and call out foolishness in the father’s deeds: First, flouting accepted norms, the father agrees to divide his property while he is still alive. “In village life,” the commentators point out, “nonconformity is always seen as a threat to community stability.”[1]  Second, besides upsetting life as usual by giving out his inheritance early, the father allows little brother to leave, to become a free agent, to separate himself from the interpersonal village economy, and so to become the object of derision and ostracism.

Little brother, in fact, sells off his half of the family property to non-Israelites. By selling to Gentiles, he doesn’t allow for the possibility (described in Leviticus and perhaps applied in actual practice) that the family might get its land back at the time of Jubilee every fifty years. As Rohrbaugh and Malina put it, “since land . . . is the welfare of any village family, the younger son has hurt far more than just himself. His entire extended family will forever live with diminished prospects.”[2]

To return to our story’s final scene, then, on one side of a closed door stands big brother: someone whom his father has likely too often taken for granted and who’s frustrated by that. Opening the door and stepping out into the anger is the foolish father who nearly lost everything. From his first son’s perspective, the father’s foolish because he capitulated to the whims of his youngest son; he’s foolish because he did this despite probably having a good idea of little brother’s character and of how that half would end up—and if he didn’t, he should have. After all, because of little brother, the entire family has been alienated from the village. Finally, from big brother’s perspective, the father is foolish for running down the road (something that should not be done) to protect a pariah, and for celebrating him.

Scholars of Jesus’s parables have reached little consensus about how to interpret them. Some students of the parables caution us against automatically assigning the role of God to a particular character, even if tradition has done so.[3] Still, in the parable before us today, the foolish father who nearly lost everything does remind me of God.

The father who’s nearly lost everything has nothing more to lose. One can only guess that he cut his property in half out of love for his restless son. Now he’s beyond grateful to have that youngest one back from a distant country, so he’s willing to open a closed door in his own house to try to restore connection with his oldest. Notice in what the father says the links he tries to make between himself and his firstborn son—with you and me, with yours and mine, with we: “His father came out and began to plead with him . . . ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate . . .’”

The father who’s nearly lost everything won’t stop until he’s done all he can to unite his family and to strengthen human connection. He throws a party, quite possibly for the entire village, to celebrate his son’s return and to repair relationships. “We had to celebrate and rejoice,” he tells his oldest son, “because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”

Doesn’t that sound a lot like our vulnerable, foolish God? We Christians claim that God became human in Jesus Christ. We trust that God came to us in Jesus because God wants to be deeply known, wants to be with us. Jesus came teaching us what the world can be like if we choose to live under God’s love. He showed us signs of its presence in his healings. Our barrier to God may be our recklessness, our own brittle vision of righteousness, or something else. Well, Jesus himself partied with all kinds—with prodigals as well as prudes. And for all that, he ended up dead on a cross. Was his life only a fool’s errand?

No. As the cross looms larger before us each week, let et us proclaim with Paul that in Christ’s cross God has made foolish the wisdom of the wise, that God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, that God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. In Christ God was reconciling the world to Godself. In the weakness, powerlessness, foolishness of the Christ’s cross, God identifies most closely with what it is to be vulnerable—to suffer, to come to the end with no way out, to be taken for a fool.

The good news goes on. Foolery is not the end. It’s only the beginning. In this season of Lent, let us marvel that—foolish as it sounds—the spent life of Jesus has become the divine life. God changed the cross of Jesus Christ, the instrument of his torture and execution, into an instrument of saving love for us. As we marvel, let us be changed.

How has Saint Luke’s worked out, lived out, this foolish love of God? Saint Luke’s stayed open when the folks who knew said we should close. Our congregation continues to meet, even if it’s in the church basement. Saint Luke’s reaches out to a neighborhood that some might call forgotten. We’re working to make Saturdays safe for children and working to form relationships here in Franklin Square. And now our missioner for community engagement, Trivia, has joined us in that work. The work is slow, and given the potential lack of results, some might consider it foolish. But what some take as foolish is not the end. The reckless, expansive, foolish love of God is only the beginning.

Maybe because I’m an eldest child I identify with big brother in our parable today. Though I don’t feel underappreciated, I do care about working hard, about pleasing my parents and family. So far as I know, my life has never gone wayward or been riotous! Over the last couple weeks I’ve realized that big brother may not like change. I hazard he’s gotten used to his kid brother, the party animal, being away. He spends his days in the field and likes coming home to a quiet house.

These guesses come as I’ve been looking over our lesson in view of what’s going on in my own life. Levi, my service dog, is living with us now. For the next two weeks of service-dog training, I’m in what’s called the bonding period: Levi is not to leave the house except to go to the yard or to training classes. My dog is remarkably well trained, but he is still a two-year-old lab with loads of energy. A couple days before Levi came to live with us, I began missing our quiet evenings and weekends at home. Home won’t be the same anymore—not with Levi and with Helen’s golden retriever, Emma, both on the premises. This change is exciting and hard at the same time.

So when big brother realizes that a party has broken out for little brother, and when Jesus says of big brother “He became angry and refused to go in,” I can understand big brother’s reaction. Home won’t be the same anymore—not with the kid back rowdy as ever, not with crazy old Dad taking him in again without ever admitting that the brat has ruined us. Sometimes we in the church feel the same way about change: if new folks come, if dear friends move away, if the priest retires and a new priest arrives, things will change and church won’t be the same anymore.

As we walk into and through the shadow of the cross, let us marvel and be changed. Our lesson ends with big brother and with his father, who nearly lost everything, still standing outside together. The father cannot plead forever. Big brother cannot stand forever before a closed door. Either he will refuse to go in, or he will go in. Either he will turn away from home and become like little brother, or he will go on in and find what is to be found.

I was having trouble focusing enough to write this sermon on Friday because Levi was pacing in my office and occasionally picking out paper scraps or old envelopes from my recycle bin. After I got over being annoyed for being bothered, I began to notice Levi’s curiosity and joy at discovering so many interesting things. As he started emptying my recycle bin, I tried to imagine him saying, “Look at this!” or asking, “What is that?” I pray that we as individuals and as a congregation are able to know such joy in finding what is to be found. Foolery is not the end. It’s only the beginning. As we walk into and through the shadow of the cross, let us marvel and be changed. Amen.

 

 

 

[1] Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (2nd ed., Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 290.

[2] Ibid.

[3] See, for example, Richard Ford, The Parables of Jesus and the Problems of the World (forthcoming).

Homily for December 27, 2015

Homily for December 27, 2015

Jeremy Funk

Luke 2:41–52

Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church

Baltimore, Maryland

Search yourself, search your heart, for gifts you have that come from God. When you find them, nurture them. When the gifts God has given you are mature enough, they will be ready to make God known in the world. When they are ready, release them lovingly into God’s loved world.

When you do this, you will become like Mary. Mary is not only the mother of our Lord. She is also his first disciple. And she is our pattern.

As we know, Luke’s Advent and Christmas stories set us eavesdropping on her, shadowing her. Throughout this season her wonder is ours. On Christmas Eve we heard again how a heavenly message and a heavenly host overwhelmed a band of shepherds working in the fields, how the shepherds ran to the baby in the manger, and how mother Mary treasured their words in her heart. Even now, just two days after Christmas, we easily imagine the blessed mother bearing two precious gifts—holding her newborn close and guarding the strong, new memory of the herders and their message. In our hearts and in Mary’s heart a glad and glorious song still rings. “We hear the Christmas angels / their great glad tidings tell. / O come to us, / abide with us, / our Lord, Emmanuel.”

But in today’s Gospel, Jesus is missing. This morning twelve years already have passed since the first Christmas. We’ve skipped over Luke’s telling about Jesus’s circumcision in the temple, about Simeon’s and Anna’s praise, and Simeon’s ominous words: Mary, this child will cause the falling and rising of many, and a sword will pierce your own soul, too.

We have no biblical accounts of Jesus’s first coos, babbles, or words. Before us today is the only biblical incident from Jesus’s childhood:

The joyous, raucous racket of the Passover has ended, and Mary and Joseph are on their way home. A day into the journey, Mary realizes that her twelve-year-old is missing. So she and Joseph return to Jerusalem to look for him. Once again this morning Luke places us along Mary’s path. Now we follow her frantic footsteps, and our hearts flutter with hers. Simeon’s piercing prophecy plays again and again in her head. All she can feel is that her only son is missing. All we can feel is that our Lord has gone from us—that Emanuel, God-with-us, is not with us, not now.

As our story says, Mary will see her son again—in the temple, talking with the teachers and asking them questions. And then her questions for her son will begin in earnest, although only one of them is in front of us: child, why have you treated us this way? Luke suggests it is asked with some astonishment. I also hear anger, exasperation, and relief—but also bewilderment, fear, and piercing anguish.

Mary goes on: We have been searching anxiously for you.

Jesus then asks her—his mother and his disciple—why she is searching. He lets her know that he is carrying out his Father’s business.

Mary does not understand what her son is saying to her. (In this way she takes her place with Jesus’s later disciples, even up to now, who follow even if they do not understand everything.) In this hard exchange with her son, even in her not understanding, Mary starts to lovingly release the gift God has given her into God’s loved world. She starts to carry on the Father’s business.

The New Testament tells us nothing of Jesus’s budding personality. Jesus is next introduced as an adult. We learn that Jesus undergoes baptism, feels God’s Spirit rest on him, and hears God call him the Beloved Son. We learn that Jesus has a deep, abiding, and far-reaching relationship with God: that his words bring insight, that his touch brings healing.

But we also learn that Jesus threatens powerful people: he talks about bringing good news to the poor and release for captives.

And so we remember Mary’s song and wonder how often she carried on the Father’s business—nurturing her gift from God, singing it to him: “God has shown strength with his arm; / God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. / God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, / and lifted up the lowly; / God has filled the hungry with good things, / and sent the rich away empty.”

Jesus’s friends and family try to stop his dangerous words. But his talk and his deeds get him arrested, mocked, tortured, and executed.

Mary found God’s gift within her, nurtured the gift, and finally released her Son into the world. For her trouble she found only soul-piercing sorrow. Yet her gift was not forgotten. Mary and all who follow her pattern know the good news that God raised her Son from death and through him gives to us God’s own indwelling Spirit.

So search yourself, search your heart, for gifts you have that come from God. When you find them, nurture them. When the gifts God has given you are mature enough, they will be ready to make God known in the world. When they are ready, release them lovingly into God’s loved world.

Sermon for October 25, 2015 (Mark 10:46–52)

Jeremy Funk

Mark 10:46–52

Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church

Baltimore, Maryland

The central character of today’s Gospel lesson, a blind beggar we know as the son of Timaeus, is certainly a compelling figure. From his post beside the Jericho road, at the moment this eager disciple hears that Jesus of Nazareth, the healer, is nearby, he goes from barking “Can you spare a dollar!” to “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Eventually he receives what he asks for: Bartimaeus regains his sight, and he follows Jesus out of Jericho toward Jerusalem. That Bartimaeus receives his sight is for many the major miracle, the good news, of our story. But this morning I want to suggest that the good news of our gospel lesson comes before the healing itself.

Many Bible students who live with disabilities find troubling the stories of Jesus’s healings in the New Testament. These stories can be troubling to us who are followers of Jesus with disabilities because they often equate finding vibrant faith in Jesus with experiencing healing in body, mind, or spirit. I have indeed struggled to live as a body with disabilities. But my life has been so full, challenging, and interesting that I have seldom preoccupied myself with praying for physical healing. Certainly I can appreciate how we who follow Jesus and who continue to live with disabilities might wrestle with Jesus’s healing stories. During my seminary studies I spent quite some time with at least two of these stories and have learned much. From the time I was a child, though, I have taken some comfort in Jesus’s healing stories because in them the Lord speaks directly to us whose bodies are different. And even as I clearly see the problems with linking vibrant faith to an able body, I find that the healing stories still spark my imagination: given my own physical limitations and the way my life has been shaped by them, for instance, I can readily imagine the mingled excitement and dread that Bartimaeus must feel as he finally gets close to Jesus.

This morning, however, my imagination dwells less on the possible inner life of Bartimaeus and more on this sequence of events from our lesson: “Many sternly ordered [Bartimaeus] to be quiet . . . Jesus stood still and said, ‘Call him here.’ And they called the blind man, saying to him, ‘Take heart; get up, he is calling you.’”

Many sternly ordered him to be quiet.

Bartimaeus is not the first person with disabilities to be scolded for speaking up. Many people with disabilities are silenced in an able-bodied world. A friend of a friend, a young woman I’ll call Trish, has cerebral palsy, as I do. She has felt called to be a pastor. After our common friend introduced us, she wrote to me about an experience she had at a church conference. She had been asked to assist in leading worship at the conference. After her service, she was told that her leadership had been distracting to some because of the way she walks. She was told, in effect, that she hadn’t carried herself elegantly or discreetly enough in the worship setting. Trish told me how angry and discouraged she felt receiving these comments.

Jesus stood still.

Jesus has been moving with the crowd, out from Jericho toward Jerusalem. But on hearing Bartimaeus’s shouts, he stops to listen. Just as, early in our chapter of Mark, Jesus had embraced the little children his disciples had tried to shoo away, so now he stops to listen to the blind man, Bartimaeus—to the one others silence, that others call a nuisance.

The good news of the gospel is that God in Christ has stood still among us, has taken time to listen to us. God took on human flesh in Jesus and made time to listen and to love the lowly and the lost. The powerful didn’t like what he was saying and doing, or whom he was listening to, so they killed him. But God raised him from the dead and made him ruler of all. And now the Spirit of Christ lives, listening and speaking within the deep silences of the world. The Spirit lives and listens in the hearts of Christ’s sisters and brothers—whoever we are. The Spirit listens and speaks through what we say, sing, laugh, or cry. And when we make no sound, the Spirit lives in our breathing. So often we are the ones moving, and we forget that God in Christ is with us, wherever we are, ready to listen to our prayers and to speak them for us.

God in Christ is here this morning too, standing still among us in this place. As he stands among us, we become the body of Christ. We listen to hear Christ himself through his Spirit and through his Spirit in one another. Christ calls us to listen well to each other, to listen well even to those with whom we don’t want to be bothered. In the world and in the church we stand for Christ. In the world and in the church we listen for Christ, we listen as Christ.

Jesus said, Call him here! And they called the blind man.

To the grouchy crowd who sought to quiet Bartimaeus moments before, Jesus says, “Call him here!” The crowd had thought that Bartimaeus’s calls had inconvenienced Jesus. It turns out, from Jesus’s perspective, that the blind man’s shouts had bothered mostly only the people nearest him.

Bartimaeus’s healing is not the chief miracle of this story. The marvel of our Gospel lesson—the greatest good news—is that Jesus asks the crowd to do what it had not wanted to do moments earlier, and the crowd does it! The same prickly people who had been shushing, warning, and scolding Bartimaeus now usher him toward Jesus.

I see in this crowd an apt image of the church. We are not always our best selves. We can be prickly. We can be cliquey. Nevertheless, we are called to usher folks toward Jesus. And by heeding Christ’s call, we can do just that. We might do that by asking not only, how can I serve? But also, who might I invite to join us, to serve and share in our midst?

From my own experience here, I can say that I have met Jesus in the passing of the peace and in the sharing of communion and fellowship meals. Specifically as a person with disabilities, I can say that I’m grateful to have found a voice here at St. Luke’s, whether in the pulpit or now as part of the vestry. I’m also glad to be joining the vestry with Jamal, Bryant, and Diane—siblings of Christ who have much to teach us.

Let us listen for Christ, for he stands still, within and among us.

Let us look for Christ so that we can heed his call and bring others to him.

Amen.

Being, and Not Judging

When I’ve got writer’s block, as I do now, sitting here, I try to fight the urge to edit as I go, to type and then delete—an urge I never manage to squelch. (Throughout the course of typing this entry, I’ve edited this sentence now at least a couple times.) I hear every word, and so every sentence, in my head. So when I’m writing, I’m always editing—both internally and externally—because I seem to care about the sound of each sentence as I write it, even if I don’t know how the ongoing sentence will end.

Having writer’s block means, for me, that the self-editing function works in overdrive. When I have writer’s block, I may have plenty of ideas in my head to write about, or not, but each idea or image has the significance of a gnat, I think. So they add up to a whole lot of buzzing, so much itching in the ears and eyes, and nothing else.

When I have writer’s block, my mind feels lazy and my life seems featureless: a barren and baking desert.

When I have writer’s block, sometimes I still know I can work to write on assignment because I have to and want to (a sermon here, some devotionals there). But when I have this kind of writer’s block, what I have today, it’s because I want to do something different and can’t seem to get up the gumption—to get back to writing poetry, to try my hand at short story for the first time since college, to work on essays.

Starting a writing practice is all about sticking with a routine, maybe: the same time each day, the same amount of time each day, the same place each day. Sometimes I blame my writer’s block, or my lack of motivation to write, on the fact that I stare at a computer all day for work.

So I buy a couple notebooks that stay empty.

This blog might contribute to writer’s block. I think, If I blog and publish, then people will read. So it needs to be worth reading.

Beating writer’s block may be about trying to ignore the voice in my head that says, each sentence needs to sound perfect eventually, so start editing now.

I just want to get better at being where I am and not judging where I am.

I love listening to baseball. But when I’m listening, I’m not writing. Still, that’s okay.

Maybe if I can be where I am and stop judging myself for being where I am—maybe then I might be able to center down and really listen. I want to feel myself in my environment as a ladybug feels itself walled in by long grass. I want to settle into my environment as a bee settles into a flower’s cup to do her work. I want to take in the world’s love like the sun, with my arms stretched toward the sky, with my narrow hands wide open.

March 1 Sermon @ St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Two of my favorite Christian guides lived and died mostly in the last century: Mary Flannery O’Connor, the fiction writer from Georgia; and Karl Barth, the theologian from Switzerland. In one of her letters, I believe, O’Connor says, “Faith is walking in darkness.” And in a lecture after World War II Barth says, “In Christian faith, we are concerned quite decisively with a meeting.”

“Faith is walking in darkness.” I interpret O’Connor’s statement this way: We are not God. So we can’t know the path our life will take without walking it. And to walk it means only to put one foot in front of the other. To walk our path means to see only the very next step. To live our faith is to take one step at a time.

“In Christian faith, we are concerned quite decisively with a meeting.” I interpret Barth’s statement this way: We are not God. But we do trust that God created us, that God met and saved us decisively in Christ, and that God longs to meet us anew throughout our lives. To live our faith is to live in expectation that God will meet us again and again.

To take these two reflections together, then, might be to say, faith is walking in darkness, but faith is also expecting that God will meet us in the darkness.

As Christians, we might easily assume that light is good and darkness is bad. After all, the Bible brims with passages that associate light with God or goodness, with clarity or insight. Likewise, the Bible is full of passages that equate darkness with the absence of God or goodness, with confusion or folly. These associations reflect much of lived human experience. But let’s remember something else the Bible tells us: God is present in the darkness as well as in the light. In her recent book called Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us that, as Genesis 1 says, God’s good world emerged from a fertile darkness; dark places can be places of creation, re-creation, and growth. Faith can grow in dark places.

Abraham’s faith certainly grows in the dark. Our reading from Genesis presents the second extended meeting between God and Abraham in the book. Here God starts things off and does most of the talking. God appears to Abraham and promises that the ninety-nine-year-old will be the father of many nations, and that his equally geriatric wife, Sarah, will be the mother of nations. God also promises to be God for Abraham and his children, and to give to them the land, Canaan, where Abraham lives. God follows all this with a command that Abraham and his male descendants solemnize God’s promise with circumcision.

Confronted with the impossible promise of fathering nations with Sarah, Abraham ultimately laughs: “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?”

In the sense that Abraham doesn’t understand how he can possibly father children with Sarah, he is still (we might say) in the dark. But up to now, Abraham has taken the steps he has seen before him. A chapter before ours, between his two meetings with this God who promises him a child, Abraham agrees with his wife’s plan: he is to sleep with her servant Hagar and to accept Hagar’s child, Ishmael, as his own; surely this is what God means for him to do.

When God tells him clearly in our lesson that he will have a child with Sarah, Abraham still has a hard time wrapping his mind around the promise. So he says, “O that Ishmael might live in your sight!” The meeting continues: God and Abraham go back and forth again; Sarah is promised a child in a year. Eventually, God joins in the astonished laughter of Abraham and Sarah: Sarah births a boy named Isaac. (The name means Laughter.) Faith is expecting to meet God, meeting God, listening to God, and responding to God. But at the same time faith is also walking—and sometimes laughing—in darkness.

If we’ve been around long enough, we know that in the life of faith, the heart brightens and darkens and brightens and darkens—over and over again. The Christian story and the liturgical calendar we follow make allowances for this play of light and dark within the heart. Advent plunges us into the expectant dark, so we light candles. The child of Light is born and Christmas dawns, so we sing carols. The season of Epiphany brims with brightness—from the star the wise men see to the healings and teachings of Jesus to the splendor of Jesus’s transfiguration.

If Advent pictures darkness before the Christmas dawn, if Epiphany shines in morning brightness, then maybe our current season of Lent resembles a hot, dusty, dusky afternoon. Tensions emerge and tempers shorten. In today’s Gospel lesson, at least, the heat seems to be rising. Peter rebukes Jesus for moving unflinchingly toward the darkness of the cross. Jesus, in turn, scolds Peter for losing track of God’s light in the murkiness of human preoccupation. If Lent is a dusky, dusty afternoon, Holy Week is twilight, and Good Friday is deep night. But the intensity of this darkness only strengthens the dazzling light of Easter.

So the Christian story embraces both darkness and light, from Advent to Easter and beyond, just as the life of faith encompasses the heart’s light and darkness throughout our lives.  God meets us in the brightness of Epiphany, in the murkiness of Lent, in the darkness of Good Friday, and the radiance of Resurrection.

Since I live with hearing loss, low vision, and limited mobility, I also struggle with anxiety about maintaining my current level of functionality.  I live on the edge, without much margin space.   I am prone to falling. I’m at risk of blindness and further hearing loss.  All this makes me fearful and anxious sometimes.  These worries can keep me up at night, obsessing over my health, feeling sad, and withdrawing into myself.  For a long time I didn’t realize that my worries were more limiting than my physical disabilities.  But they are.  God met me in a particularly dark time of anxiety several years ago in Oregon.  Betty, a friend from church, who also happens to be a no-nonsense nurse, took care of me when I was really low. She told me point blank that I needed to learn to manage my anxiety.  At the time, her advice felt like a slap to the face, but also like a ray of light.  Betty spoke out of her experience of having learned to manage her own anxiety. And in that moment, through Betty, God met me.   Though I still walk through the darkness of anxiety sometimes, now the darkness feels less threatening. In this darkness God continues to meet me, and my faith continues to grow, however slowly.  God doesn’t take away the darkness; God meets us in the darkness.

Kelly Renee Gissendaner is scheduled to be executed tomorrow night in Georgia.  She has been convicted of hiring someone to kill her husband.  The New York Times recently told the story of how God met Kelly and brought her out of darkness to light in prison.  Kelly embarked on a one-year program of theology study in prison. She was particularly helped by theology about faith and hope.   One of the theologians she studied was Jürgen Moltmann, whose work focuses on the theology of hope. When Kelly discovered that her teacher in prison knew Moltmann, Kelly asked whether she could write to him.  They have exchanged between twenty and thirty letters.

As a result of her study and letter writing, Kelly has developed a strong faith.  She is able to counsel other inmates, especially those considering suicide.  However, recently, her request for clemency has been denied, even though there is a groundswell of support to commute her sentence.  When I read the New York Times piece profiling Kelly, I was struck by two things. First, darkness of her own actions cast a long, long shadow; second, that darkness, plus the darkness of prison, allowed her to see the light of God.  God has met her in darkness.

As I mentioned earlier, our Old Testament lesson presents the second extended meeting between God and Abraham.  In the first meeting, two chapters earlier, God directs Abraham’s gaze skyward at night.  God says, “Count the stars if you can; so many will your descendants be.”   Those stars are far away from Abraham, and far away from any future he can envision for himself or his descendants.  When she went to prison, Kelly Gissendaner probably could not have imagined how her life would be transformed or the brightness that her life in prison would bring to so many, in prison and without.  God is always at work, strengthening our faith, whether God meets us in darkness or in light.

My Letter to the Fidos for Freedom Training Staff

On February 7 I begin my newest adventure: training to eventually be matched with a Fidos for Freedom Inc. service dog. The process will be at least a year and a half long. Although I’ve really been in no hurry to begin, I have waited quite a while for a start date. The final step before starting was to write a letter to the Fidos for Freedom training department. I was told the letter needed to help the trainers get to know me. Writing the letter was a bit of a challenge, mostly because I wanted to craft an engaging piece but also wanted to communicate necessary information. Here is the result.

Before my wife, Helen, and I met, she lived in Baltimore City with two golden retrievers: Dibley and Emma. What became our fast romance started in the summer of 2011. By March 2012, I was moving from the Emerald City—Eugene, Oregon—to Charm City. I planned to arrive in Baltimore on a Monday. On the Friday night before my coast-to-coast move, Helen called to report that twelve-year-old Dibley was distressed. During a rollercoaster weekend, on Saturday morning Helen and her parents put Dibley down, then on Saturday afternoon and Sunday Helen worked to make her house ready for both of us, and on Monday night I showed up.

Since that Monday night, a new and happy life has emerged in Baltimore for both of us: we moved into a walkable neighborhood, we got married, we sold our old house and renovated our new one. For me, settling into this new life has included getting used to Emma, the golden retriever who’s now nearly seven. I grew up with small dogs. During my childhood and adolescence, my family owned miniature schnauzers, a miniature poodle, and a bichon frise. Before meeting Emma, I thought it uncouth for dogs to lie on a bed or a sofa made for humans. But getting used to the affectionate Emma did not take long. Helen and I still remember the evening when Emma took her place on our futon, and instead of trying to shoo her off, I began petting her until she stretched out and laid her head in my lap. That night I was sold on big dogs.

Today Emma will often lie at my feet under my desk while I work at home as a copy editor. If Helen is heading downstairs, Emma may barrel past her. But when Emma follows me down, she’ll slow her pace. After they noticed how well Emma and I got along, my parents recommended that Helen and I watch a PBS program profiling an Atlanta organization that trains and matches service dogs and handlers. At least one client featured on that program lives with cerebral palsy, as I do.

For most of my life, the possibility that I might benefit from a service dog never crossed my mind. Although I live with cerebral palsy, low vision, and hearing loss, I spent much of my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood seeking to minimize the role my disabilities played in my overall identity. As a student and young adult, I put more emphasis on training my mind than on caring for my body. So I earned a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees. I’ve cultivated interests in Christian faith, in the Bible and theology, in the English language and its literatures, in classical music, and in the pro sports teams of Chicago, where I grew up.

Yet as I’ve gotten older, I’ve felt the bodily benefits of regular physical therapy and massage. I’ve come to learn that my disabilities have shaped my life and personality in profound ways. I’ve grown to see that my disabilities are at least in part created by an able-bodied society that stigmatizes my way of moving in the world. So my interest in a mobility dog has taken hold, not only because of my relationship with Emma, but also because I want to begin to claim my identity as a person with disabilities and to meet and interact with others who live with disabilities.

As I’ve visited Fidos and observed clients and their dogs, I have come to believe that handling a service dog will help me live better with my disabilities in a number of ways. First, learning to handle a mobility dog will boost my sense of self-confidence and independence. So I look forward learning to be more assertive as I work with dogs on the training floor and in public. I am eager to learn new skills and to take on new responsibilities that will come through interacting with dogs and learning to care for my own dog.

As I acquire new knowledge and skills, I hope to move about in public more confidently—whether on foot or in my power chair—with a dog at my side. I don’t drive, and given our walkable neighborhood, I have not made use of Baltimore’s public transit system. (I do currently take taxis.) But learning to use the buses is one goal I have for the future.

Second, walking with a service dog will, I hope, improve my balance and stability. (Since Helen and I have been together, I have learned that as much as it signals our affection, our holding hands also improves my balance and stability and so quickens my walking pace.)

I work at home, and though I enjoy my job, working alone can feel isolating at times. Living with disabilities can also be isolating. I sometimes walk with Helen and Emma, and Helen (who walks Emma exclusively) knows all the dog owners in the neighborhood. I hope that having a dog trained to walk at my pace and to obey my commands will decrease my sense of isolation.

Given the body that I am, I face anxieties that come from feeling physically fragile and vulnerable. My experience with Emma has shown me that living with a dog makes me happier. My hope is that building a close bond with a dog that I train and care for will help to relieve some of the anxiety I face.

As I anticipate working with you and the dogs on the training floor and in public, I need you to know that I’m eager to please, and I’m conflict averse. I’m something of a perfectionist and can be hard on myself. Helen says that when I feel frustrated, the frustration shows all over my face. I like to think of myself as a patient person, and I know that working on the training floor will teach me more patience! In fact, one of my goals during my Fidos experience will be to learn not just more about dogs but more about myself.

Last Saturday Pat let me test the Fidos power chair on the training floor during class. (I hope to spend part of each training session on foot, and part of each training session in a power chair or scooter, so that the training mimics my regular life.) Once I got out on the floor, sure I was nervous (even without a dog). But mostly I was surprised how happy I felt out on the floor, after having observed trainings for so long.

Thank you for being willing to guide me on this adventure. I’m eager to begin.

Mending the World

Mending the World

Jeremy Funk

Mark 1:4–11

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

January 11, 2015

During the season of Christmas, stretching from Christmas Day through January 5, we celebrated the coming of our Savior as a baby. In last week’s service we remembered the child Jesus visited by the magi, Gentiles who traveled far to see the Jewish boy that the heavens hailed king. They rejoiced to see his appearing (his epiphany). Today we enter the season of Epiphany. We celebrate Jesus as an adult. We remember his baptism—his first appearance of the new season—at the Jordan River.

Mark takes us to an austere place. Even in his terseness, he transports us to the wilds of Judea. We accompany those flocking to this forbidding and foreboding place, to terrain both rocky and chalky: a place far away from any first-century notion of civilization.[1] And out in the boondocks we meet John the baptizer, a prophet like Elijah: both men followed hard after God and urged others to do so. Both cinched leather belts around their waists. If we really use our imaginations, we might get a whiff of John’s camel hide or catch the scent of honey on his breath.

In the time of Jesus, baptism was a ritual washing for a number of Jewish groups, including for followers of John. In the Gospel of Mark, the Baptizer recognizes Jesus as the one coming after him and talks of little else. Some scholars speculate that before Jesus began his own ministry, he might have been a disciple of the Baptizer. From outside the Gospel of Mark, from Matthew for instance, we gather that John the Baptizer was leading a renewal movement among the people of Israel. He called listeners of many kinds to change their lives and follow after God. Undergoing baptism was part of this call.

Mark tells Jesus’s baptism story this way: “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’”

To my way of thinking, the church celebrates the baptism of Jesus for several reasons. First, in this baptism God announces to Jesus himself, and to us, who Jesus is: Jesus is God’s representative sent with authority to act and speak for God. Second, in this baptism Jesus begins his mission: to go about mending a tattered and torn world. Third, Jesus’s path of mending the world opens for us a similar path. And fourth, we celebrate this baptism because in it, as in any moment of baptism, God takes part in the story, not to destroy but to restore.

In the very first line of his gospel, Mark announces, this is the good news of Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. In the Hebrew Scriptures the term “Son of God” often describes kings or prophets: folks who have a special relationship with God, whom God anoints and gives authority and power to speak and act for God. In Jesus’s baptism God anoints Jesus and announces this special relationship.[2] Notice that, as Mark tells the baptism story, only Jesus can see his anointing by God’s Spirit: “And as he was coming up out of the water, he saw . . .” And as Mark tells the story, God’s affirmation is addressed to Jesus alone: “You are my Son; with you I am well pleased.” Yet not only Jesus but we also see and hear. Mark lets us in on God’s secret about Jesus. This announcement is for us as well.

But how is this announcement good news for us? After last week’s events, we might be forgiven for feeling that our world has been torn apart. Gunshots sounded in Paris, terror descended and lifted, and lives there have ended. Those left living, loving the newly dead, have been permanently changed, irreparably ripped. Violence, whether deemed newsworthy or not, severs our own city again and again, day after day. The family of Tom Palermo may rest in our consciousness today. So we pray for them. And we pray for Bishop Cook, who, as the Sun reported on Friday, will face charges in Palermo’s death. So we pray for those inside and outside our diocese whose lives have been sundered by this incident.

Jesus’s baptism is good news for this world. Our lesson today shows us that Jesus the divine representative is Jesus the human being. Jesus takes part in a very human ritual washing. Jordan’s waters clean his mud-caked feet and his sweaty armpits, and those of many, many others. And in the Gospel of Mark, the word baptism becomes more than a term for ritual washing.

The term baptism becomes shorthand for Jesus’s mission to redeem us:[3] to teach, to heal, to feed, to die, to rise. In Jesus’s baptism, God sets him apart for the special work of speaking and acting for God in his teachings and healings. These we celebrate during the season of Epiphany. Even though Christmas is over, Epiphany too centers on the truth that God is with us. Today and for the next several Sundays we hear stories of Jesus making important appearances: calling disciples, casting out demons, healing the sick: mending the torn-apart world.

As we move into Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, our attention will turn to the end of his mission. Later on in Mark, Jesus tells his disciples: “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized.” In his death, Jesus confronts the forces that routinely tear our world apart: alienation, violence, and death. And in his resurrection, Jesus embodies God’s promise that the world will not always be torn apart, that God is at work knitting the world together.[4]

We celebrate Jesus’s baptism because it opens his path for us. Jesus’s baptism is different from ours. At our baptism we likely did not see a vision of God’s Spirit or hear God’s audible voice. But, if our liturgy speaks our faith, then we “are sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever.”[5] And no doubt many of us could share testimonies of God’s Spirit at work in our lives, in the lives of those we love, and in the life our community.

“I baptize with water,” John the Baptizer says, “but the one who is coming will baptize with the Holy Spirit.” We, the followers of Jesus, marked by his Spirit, who hear this gospel, fulfill that promise of the Baptizer. And our baptism calls us along Jesus’s path. We are beloved children of God, marked by the Holy Spirit, mending the world in the name of Christ and in the Spirit’s power.

God knows the world needs mending. And precisely because it does, I’m finally struck by this detail from today’s lesson: “Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart.” Through this tear in the sky, God makes an unbridled appearance in Spirit and in voice. God inserts Godself into the story. As Christians we trust that God aims to restore and renew the world—to mend it, not to tear it. But our hope is that no matter how sturdy the fabric of our world seems, God is always working to find more ways into it. God wants more ways into us—from birth to baptism to breath to breath to breath.

The following story of world-mending grace comes from the StoyCorps podcast of January 2.[6] “Last summer, Rafael Hameed and his five-year-old son, Ish, were walking to school when they were hit by a speeding car. Rafael lost his leg, and his son was killed. While her sister was awaiting trial for vehicular homicide, Megiddëh Goldston,” a single parent, tried to assist the Hameed family. “Now she visits Rafael and his wife, Heidi, and helps them in their day-to-day life.” The Hameeds also assist Megiddëh and her child, who is the same age as their deceased son. Heidi Hameed recalls how, just days after committing the crime, “the driver reached out to ask her for forgiveness.”

Says Heidi, “My heart broke for her, actually, because I knew that she has to live for the rest of her life with this. And I told her immediately, yes, of course I forgive you.” Rafael and Heidi talk about the sorrow they felt when first meeting Migiddëh’s little boy. In spite of the pain, Rafael says, “We love; that’s how we roll.” Loving this little boy has been “like a tonic” for Rafael. “It’s like if you’ve ever stitched anything together. There’s a tear in the fabric, and we’ve been stitching it.”

Let us follow the path set out for us in Jesus’s baptism and ours, mending the world in the name of Christ, by his Spirit’s power. Amen.

[1] Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 147.

[2] Malina and Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary, 408.

[3] See Michael Rogness, “Commentary on Mark,” http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2313/.

[4] See Rogness, “Commentary on Mark.”

[5] bcponline.org/

[6] Storycorps.org/, “We Love—That’s How We Roll,” http://storycorps.org/listen/raphael-hameed-heidi-hameed-and-megiddeh-goldston/.