Between noon and three

This sermon was preached on February 23, 2025, the seventh Sunday after the Epiphany. As with the previous few, the thought behind this is inspired and informed by the grief that many in Berkeley are feeling as a result of November’s election and the inauguration of the present administration. Despite the fact that our city’s preferred candidate did not win, as a parish we continue to pray for the president, the government, and all in authority, for the final triumph of God’s justice, mercy, and love.

Collect: O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you. Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Readings: Genesis 45:3-11, 15, 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50, Luke 6:27-38

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Sprit, Amen:

A friend of ours is getting married soon, and I have the honor of officiating, so it means I’ve had love on the brain lately. I haven’t finished my wedding homily yet, but I’m sure I’ll say at least something about love being a mutual enterprise, that it’s something embarked on together, a journey in which the one will hold the other and vice versa.

It’s the sort of thing you say at weddings, to encourage people in the life they’re beginning together — marriage is a life two people create together out of the love they share. And that’s usually what we say about love: it’s shared, mutual, something freely given and received. The full meaning of love, for the married and the unmarried alike, is for it to be given, as well as received; and the meeting between those two actions is what’s so powerfully creative about love.

Today, though, we get a very different message in our readings, a message implied in Genesis, and then made explicit in the Gospel. And that is, that love can frequently be offered in only one direction. Despite the mutual, shared nature of love at its best, it can also be offered in only one direction.

Recall, Joseph’s brothers had sold him into slavery years before, and then told their father Jacob that he was dead, eaten by wolves. Through an amazing sequence of events, Joseph wound up the viceroy of Egypt, and during a famine found himself selling grain to the very brothers who had betrayed him. Though he was tempted to work his vengeance on them, he took pity instead, and revealed himself to them in order that they might be a family again.

Then in the Gospel, Jesus says directly, “love your enemies” — and he says it about six different ways so it’s very clear he’s not just being spiritual, that he really means we’re to love those who wish us harm.

In both cases, here is a love that is being offered in only one direction. Between Joseph and his brothers there was no trace of the mutual, shared love that clergy preach at weddings; no trace of familial affection; not until Joseph made his love clear to them first. 

How can there be mutual love among enemies, between belligerent forces in conflict? If there were love shared among enemies, they would be enemies no longer. Yet Jesus says, “love your enemies,” instructing us to make the first move in a one-way relationship of love for people who are our adversaries or who otherwise wish us harm.

Life is full of hard lessons about what one-way love looks like. Consider the mother who painfully decides finally to kick out her drug-addicted daughter. The mother loves her daughter, but because of the addiction and because of the patterns it has imposed of crisis, withdrawal, acting out, and the rest, there is no possibility the daughter can return her mother’s love in any remotely symmetrical or proportional way. The mother’s love takes the shape of refusing to enable further destructive behavior — which for all her daughter can see looks like punishment or betrayal.

Or another example: consider the husband, whose wife’s dementia means she can’t remember who he is let alone return the love and care he pours out on her day by day.

Or to take another direction: what does it mean to love people who voted differently than we did? What does it mean to love the people they elected, who seem to be dead-set on inflicting pain and suffering on many of the most vulnerable in society? How can we love those who want nothing to do with us?

Each of us knows what this feels like: you love someone and they don’t love you back, you make a gift that took time and care and maybe even sacrifice, and it goes ignored or under appreciated. Your mother tells you to look after your little sister, but looking after is the last thing she wants.

Life offers no shortage of other examples. Even though it’s not what we usually think of when we think of love, even though we might otherwise affirm that love in only one direction is deficient, even defective in some ways, Joseph and Jesus today both seem to insist that it is still love. Jesus even goes so far as to command that we love our enemies: love those who are not just ungrateful, love those who not only have no desire to love me back, but love those who are actively intending to harm me. 

This is a hard saying. Usually we read it as if Jesus is just commissioning us for the work of reconciliation — love your enemies, so that they can hopefully not be your enemies anymore. Love the people who don’t return your love, so that hopefully they can, some day. But that’s not what Jesus says: he says, Love your enemies, full stop, whether or not they return the favor. It’s a hard lesson made all the harder by clergy and others who use it to counsel people to stay in abusive relationships rather than to seek help or separation. Just to be clear, while love can, and often does, go one-way, it can never be coerced; no one has the right to force your affection or keep you under their control.

“Come on,” you will say, “How can you say that? Love in only one direction is a waste, why bother?” We often think of love as this precious thing, beautifully wrapped, with a bow, that we give to the deserving in our lives. Why would we give such a thing to an adversary, who will reject it at best, and more likely just take advantage instead. Didn’t Jesus also say something about not casting our pearls before swine? But stay with me for a moment. One-way love actually helps to clarify what love is. 

By and large, when love is one-way, it’s not directed to the deserving, and it isn’t received with thanks or delight. Instead, what it feels like is a glass of water poured on dry ground — the water gets absorbed without a trace, or else the ground is so dry the water just hits it and runs off again. We’re right to say it feels like a waste — a waste of energy, emotion, spirit, hope, and all the rest, just thrown away, with nothing to show for it, and an empty place where it came from inside us.

St. Paul writes, after last week’s epistle lesson left off and before this week’s begins, that “Christ must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet; the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” Does Jesus’s command to love our enemies extend to death itself? I don’t like that idea, but it’s often what one-way love feels like. Yes, love like this is water on the ground, imprudently and even flagrantly poured out. 

But isn’t this what we say about all love? It is abundant, profligate, never-ending, stronger than death; “It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things.” If this is true, and it is my firm conviction that it is, then love is less an equal and opposite exchange, and more a continuous series of wild risks — risks that the love we plant as seeds will finally take root and grow. 

Yes, love at its heart is a kind of insistence, often in the face of every evidence to the contrary, that there is a future for us beyond the present injury, beyond the present crisis; that there is more between us than meets the eye. Love is a recognition that part of me is bound up in you, and part of you in me, and that that makes something bigger than either of us; that makes something bigger of both of us. Love makes a future that we are both in, even if that future remains finally out of reach our whole lives long. The future love makes bears strongly on the present, firing it with every possibility of hope. Christ’s command this morning pushes us to hold this future even for our enemies, pushes us to make the first move in love.

Maybe you know the old legend, that when Adam and Eve died they were buried in a place very near to where Jerusalem would later be built; and that when Christ was raised on the cross, it was planted above the exact spot of Adam’s grave. As the Savior died, the earthquake which followed cracked open the rock below, allowing Jesus’s blood to run down into Adam’s grave and among his very bones. Here, at the cross, the life of God moved once again through the dust, as blood now instead of breath as before, creating life where there had been only death. Christ pulling Adam and Eve from their tombs while death lies bound under his feet remains the Eastern Orthodox vision of the resurrection — and of redemption — to this day.

Whether or not the geography is correct, the point remains true. When Jesus says “Love your enemies,” he is commending to us the same one-way love that drove him to say, from the cross, forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. He is commending the same love by which Joseph kept room in his heart for his brothers; the same love that sees our adversaries as people, like us, who are made in the image of God — even if their words and ideas are inscrutable to us and their actions hurtful. 

Jesus is telling us emphatically, in every way he knows how, that love poured on thirsty ground is never a waste, never a loss: his own love outpoured takes him to the cross, where his saving death opens the rock, cracks open the tomb. There, our love poured out mingles with his, and waters the dry, stony, waste places of the earth. There, where this water falls, dry bones put on flesh, and the tree grows whose fruit gives eternal life and whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.

This sermon was preached on February 16, 2025, the sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you: Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Jer. 17:5-10, 1 Cor 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

It’s a little ironic to be preaching a sermon on a sermon, and anyway I’ve always thought the beatitudes preach themselves pretty effectively without much help from the clergy; maybe more so without our meddling interference!

The version of the Beatitudes we get today is Luke’s version, which is a little grittier and less pious than Matthew’s more famous rendition. Matthew’s gospel gives us, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” where Luke gives us the decidedly more pointed, “Blessed are the poor,” full stop. Matthew’s gospel gives us, “Blessed are you who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” where Luke gives us, “Blessed are the hungry.” 

And then, where in Matthew’s gospel Jesus takes the beatitudes as a point of departure for a longer sermon about many things, in Luke’s Gospel Jesus stays on the theme a moment longer to offer a corresponding set of woes. As if his beatitudes themselves weren’t pointed enough, we get a further, “Woe to the rich, woe to the well-fed, woe to you when all speak well of you.” I think it’s fair to say, none of us are getting off the hook in Luke’s gospel, in a way it’s all too easy to spiritualize away the force of the meaning in Matthew’s.

I love Matthew, I love the sermon on the mount, there’s probably a reason it’s the more famous rendition. But then perhaps it’s fitting that this Sunday we hear from Luke; perhaps it’s fitting we get the unvarnished truth, less calculated to appeal to the masses. It’s becoming increasingly clear, that at least since the return from Covid, we live in an ever more confrontational age; here we have a fairly confrontational gospel. What do we do with it?

Most of the time, when we hear this text, we nod sagely and agree. This is exactly why it’s so important that the church be involved in social justice, why it’s so meaningful that here at St. Mark’s we have a feeding ministry, why we can be so proud of the shelter and housing ministries provided across the diocese, why we can take such joy in being a founding partner of East Bay Sanctuary Covenant’s refugee resettlement ministry: because we believe that the poor and those in need are dear to God, and that to help them materially, or, in the old language, to offer them “the corporal works of mercy,” is at the very core of how we live out our faith.

I never fail to be moved by the story of St. Laurence, the deacon, who, in a time of Roman persecution, was ordered to collect the church’s treasures and surrender them to the emperor. Instead of the alms boxes, gospel books, and precious stones, however, Laurence gathered a ragtag mob of the lame, the leprous, and the indigent. The emperor was incensed at the stink in his audience chamber, and demanded, “What’s the meaning of this?” To which Laurence replied, “Behold, O Excellency, the treasures of the Church.” And the thing is, he’s not just offering a good zinger — he’s telling the truth.

Staying with ancient Rome for a moment, maybe you know the story of emperor Julian, sometimes called, “The Apostate,” because he lived after the empire had formally legalized Christianity and he fervently desired to return Rome to its ancient pagan customs. History shows he was not successful in his attempt. One of the principal difficulties was trying to get his pagan clergy to replicate the care Christians took to look after the needy, especially the needy among their own number. Julian recognized that this gave the Church tremendous moral authority among the people, but he could not get his pagans to care, at least not in the same way or to the same degree. Frustrated in a meeting one day, he finally burst out, “See how these Christians love one another!”

Why do we do it? “Blessed are the poor” — well, because Jesus established the pattern, and gave some fairly unambiguous commands about it. Furthermore, we believe that if Christ blessed human life with his divine presence, then every human life, from henceforth, is equally blessed by the divine touch, and serving the needy is tantamount to serving Christ himself. To give St. Matthew his due, we love the passage from his gospel where Jesus says, “When you fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick, and did these things to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did them to me.” Christian faith gives the pattern and the theological motivation for serving the needy; it’s part of the warp and weft of who we are.

You know me well enough now I think, though, to hear that there’s probably a “but” coming. Luke’s gospel is so stark — “Blessed are the poor; blessed are the hungry; blessed are those who mourn,” that it begs some real soul-searching. In this gospel, Jesus isn’t just telling us — the reasonably well-fed, well-educated, generous citizens of the world that we are here in Berkeley California — that we ought to be kind to our needy neighbors. No, he says, “Blessed are the poor.” 

“Blessed are the poor.” Not, I note, blessed are you if you help the poor out of their poverty, blessed are you if you educate the needy, if you comfort the afflicted, bury the dead, feed the hungry. No, “Blessed are the hungry.” If we stop and think for a moment, we quickly see what a hard saying this really is. Blessed are the hungry? “Surely, Jesus you can’t mean that; surely you must mean that we ought to help them, give them something to eat, lift them out of poverty, get them health insurance, legal assistance, a college education, a pension. Isn’t that what you mean?” “Well yes, you should be doing that anyway,” says Jesus, “But still I tell you, blessed are the poor.”

If we have trouble understanding what he means, and I admit I regularly do, then the fault lies with our ability to see, and not with Jesus’s powers of logic or reasoning. His Gospel doesn’t just give us marching orders to do this project or undertake that ministry. His Gospel upends our entire worldview; it is a “transvaluation of values,” if you will. Blessed are the poor; woe to the rich. At least as far as God is concerned, those nearest and dearest to his heart, those closest to the divine image, the ones in his sight who are kings and princes and heirs of all the earth, tre the poor, the outcast, the stepped over, and the stinky.

This is a great mystery, and I don’t pretend to understand it. Because it means, for example, that the man who sometimes lives on St. Mark’s sidewalk, who makes a lot of trash and other waste, and is often unsettling if not outright threatening to passersby, whom we sometimes have to ask police help to remove — that this man is of such high estate in the kingdom of God that even angels bow to greet him. And I, who have the position, the authority, even the duty, to get him to move, must, in forcing the issue, necessarily admit to a small and mean kind of existence.

This is a painful kind of reversal, but it is just the kind of reversal we ought to expect from the God whom we worship. “Blessed are the poor.” However we understand it, it certainly renders moot all the utilitarian philosophy that undergirds most of our philanthropy and moral thinking. “The greatest good for the greatest number” — sounds like a reasonable metric, and it is remarkably effective at producing results in macro. But then the outliers, the casualties, the cost never go away, and over time they grow to undermine the whole foundation. Perhaps at this stage of our national civic life they already have.

In the midst of all this, the Gospel insists there is a higher mystery at play here. The Gospel is not about “most” for “most,” it is about “All” for “One.” The eternal God, creator of all worlds, became a single human person, to invest with his presence human life for all time with all the whole glory of God.

“Blessed are the poor.” The Gospel is not about statistics in macro, but the individual soul as the temple and tabernacle of God. And in this, the poor, the hungry, and the grieving are the ones upon whom the favor of God rests; truly, they are treasures of the Church, while the rest of us still carry so much dross.

I’ll conclude this morning with a charge from Bp. Frank Weston, the famous early 20th century bishop of Zanzibar, which he gave to a congress of bishops and clergy in 1923. It’s a famous quote, so forgive me if you know it already, and it’s from a very different time. But it bears repeating, especially with this morning’s Gospel and the current conversation in Washington. Weston says,

“If you are Christians then your Jesus is one and the same: Jesus on the Throne of his glory, Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus received into your hearts in Communion, Jesus with you mystically as you pray, and Jesus enthroned in the hearts and bodies of his brothers and sisters up and down this country. And it is folly, it is madness, to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the Throne of glory, when you are [exploiting] him in the souls and bodies of his children. It cannot be done. . . 

“Here, then, as I conceive it, is your present duty. . . Go out into the highways and hedges. . . Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel of fellowship and try to wash their feet.”

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.