Between noon and three

Preached at St. Mark’s, Berkeley, on July 27, 2025, the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12).

Collect: O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Genesis 18:20-32, Colossians 2:6-19, Luke 11:1-13

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

“Yes, No, or Not Yet.” I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid we learned that God always answers every prayer that we make with Yes, No, or Not Yet. We might not like the answer, but God is faithful, and never just leaves us hanging. So if we don’t get the Yes we want, we have to start considering that the other two might be what’s on offer instead, and then try to consider what each might mean for us. Yes, No, Not Yet. In any case, once we receive our answer, we give thanks to God in return. In this way we grow in prayer and in faithfulness.

Today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke contains some extended reflection on prayer, and the passage from Genesis shows us Abraham bargaining with God. All these tactics are pretty familiar, aren’t they — bargaining with God, pleading our case as a child to a parent, repeated asking, insisting, banging on the door in the middle of the night, the quiet contemplation and trust commended in the Lord’s Prayer.

I’m sure I’ve tried every one of these tactics with God, and a lot more besides. If nothing else, seeing them here in the text of Holy Scripture gives us assurance that God is pleased to hear our requests, even though he already knows what we need, far better than we do ourselves. Or, put another way, our lessons assure us that God desires to hear and receive our own desires. In prayer, the desire I share with God is met by God’s desire for me, and this encounter, the church teaches, works both to heal and to elevate my own desiring, so that more and more I want what God wants, and I am satisfied with nothing less than God himself. This is the door that is opened to all who knock, that which is found by all who seek, the gift received by all who ask.

Do you ever stop to recall: what are some of the principal things you have prayed for in your life, and how did God respond? Speaking for myself, I’m often so caught up in the answers I want right at this minute that it’s easy to forget the fervent prayers I offered in the past. But at least once in a while it’s worth pausing to remember them, and to reflect on whether the answer was Yes, No, or Not Yet.

If you’re like me, the No answers, and maybe some of the Not Yets loom particularly large. Some of them still sting, either because I do not yet understand why the answer was No, or because I am now so relieved not to have gotten what I thought I wanted that today I am embarrassed to recall how fervently I prayed for it. Perhaps you fell in love with someone who didn’t love you back. Perhaps you were hoping for a loved one’s illness to be healed. Perhaps you went to great lengths pursuing a vocation or other pathway that never finally opened its door to you. 

There is nothing wrong with any of these desires or pursuits, and some of them no doubt reflect very noble personal qualities, deeply held convictions, and sincere loves, as well as overwhelming desires. When God says No to requests like these, it can feel like we ourselves are being rejected, or that God’s goodness has somehow failed or reached its limit. If we can muster the presence of mind, we want to know why; more often we simply suffer the loss and grieve. Parents of children lost in the Texas floods a few weeks ago know something of the grief of God’s No. But if you find God has said No to one of your most fervent prayers, I urge you not to consider it a personal rejection, or a failure of God’s goodness. I can’t pretend to open the mind of God to you. And I will not tell you that pain and suffering ever serves some larger, inscrutable, divine plan, because it doesn’t. But I will say that God does make good from ill, life from death, and that some day our eyes will be opened to see what he has made to grow from all the injuries and deaths we have suffered. In God nothing and no one is ever truly lost, and his power to restore is far greater than any power to destroy.

Of course it’s also true that in addition to noble virtues and deep pathos, our most fervent prayers also frequently spring from a poor and incomplete knowledge of what is good for us in the first place. As a child, if I asked my mother for ice cream for dinner every night, she would tell me no every night. Not because I didn’t ask nicely or frequently enough, but because ice cream wasn’t a meal, and no matter how much I wanted it to, it could not provide the nutrition I needed for dinner. God made me, God knows what I need better than I know it myself, and sometimes what I pray for simply isn’t good for me, and God’s No is a way of saving me from myself.

But if No is sometimes painful, at least the answer is definite. The Not Yet answer can be much worse, because it never seems to come with a clear timeline. Those with a heart for particular causes are frequently answered Not Yet: just treatment for immigrants and refugees, racial healing, renewed growth of social trust, a swift and effective response to the climate crisis, to name just a few. Not yet. We do see improvements here and there, but plenty of backsliding too, and sometimes it gets a lot worse before it gets better. So we wonder, why “Not Yet”? 

Again, there’s nothing wrong with any of these desires, they are all of them seriously good. It’s the same in our own lives. God, help me make the most out of the gifts you’ve given me. God, let my brother see his addiction for what it is. God, heal the relationship between my two neighbors. Not yet. Why not?

Remember, Not Yet isn’t a No — and, critically, it isn’t a Maybe, either. God doesn’t do conditions, “Yes if you do this, no if you don’t, maybe, we’ll see if you behave.” Grace is not conditional, if it were it wouldn’t be grace. No, a “Not Yet” from God is always really a Yes, but it’s a Yes with an unknown and perhaps unknowable horizon. Before we can properly receive some of the things we pray for, we need first to be ready, and Not Yet helps us to see where we might need to do some work ourselves, within ourselves and within our own communities. 

God wills to give us everything that is good. But if we were to possess it all now, it would tempt us, like Adam and Eve, to forget that it was given in the first place, and instead we would grasp at it, consume it, like the apple on the tree, and thereby corrupt it utterly. Not Yet teaches us to hold some prayers, some desires, taut perpetually, tight, like a bowstring, or like the great rope threads which ancient shipwrights used to tie boats together, in order to give shape and form the rest of our lives and to all our other desiring; or like the string of a violin, to be the means by which the Holy Spirit makes music upon our souls. As Bianca of Siena put it in her famous hymn, “And so the yearning strong / With which the soul will long / Shall far outpass the power of human telling; /  For none can guess its grace / Till love create a place / Wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling.”

Prayer helps us see, the Nos, the Not Yets, and the Yeses all take place in God. There is nowhere we can go, no answer God can give, that sends us out from his presence, that closes our eyes to his love, though we can choose to turn our backs and stop our ears. Whether we understand the reasons or not, whether we are bowed down with grief or ecstatic with joy at God’s response to our prayers, we have not left his presence — in prayer we remain right in his very heart. 

So, when we go to pray, having sought and found, having asked and been answered, having knocked and the door opened, perhaps to the place we wanted to go, perhaps to somewhere else entirely, we can truly say, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

To conclude this morning, I simply repeat my invitation, to stop occasionally and take stock of your life’s most fervent prayers. Lay down for a time the overwhelming concern of the present, and consider the prayers that shaped your way here to this moment, whose ups and downs have created the landscape of your own spiritual life. Recall how God answered you in each of them, whether Yes, No, or Not Yet, and consider if your sense of that answer has changed over time. Then, give thanks: not for clarity, or even for satisfaction, because both are in short supply, even in prayer. Rather give thanks that your prayers offered to God are always met by God’s steadfast faithfulness to you, by God’s desire for your good and the healing of the world. 

His love makes a way through death itself to return to its source, prospering in that for which he sent it. So, in this Great Thanksgiving, this Eucharist, we find that the Nos and even the Yeses are all Not Yets: what has been affirmed or denied has been affirmed or denied only in part, and in the Eucharist of our Thanksgiving, both Yes and No find their restoration and their fulfillment in an endless communion of love, in God’s new and everlasting day.

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

Preached on Sunday, July 13, 2025, the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Readings: Deuteronomy 30:9-14, Colossians 1:1-14, Luke 10:25-37

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

Today’s Gospel brings us the parable of the Good Samaritan. So famous is this parable, so loudly does it echo through the ages, that the other readings almost disappear into the background. And rightly so: this is one of those passages that even hardened atheists seem to know by heart, and they treasure it at least as much as believing Christians do.

Most sermons on this parable preach the same message Jesus did: “You, go and do likewise: be a neighbor to those in need, in the way the Good Samaritan was to the man robbed and beaten.” In this reading, we might see Christ himself as the great Good Samaritan. St. Paul seems to take this approach when he says, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” That is, while we ourselves were incapable of helping ourselves, Christ came to the rescue.

In some of my own sermons on this parable, I’ve suggested we might find another layer of meaning in reading Christ not as the Good Samaritan, but as the man beaten by the side of the road, while all of us, who start out as Samaritans, foreigners, are made neighbors, members of the household of God, by our taking him in.

Either way, the Priest and the Levite usually get short shrift. They are the picture of what NOT to do, as they hurry about their busy, important lives. This makes it an especially tough passage for us to hear, because, in Berkeley, in the Bay, how many such helpless people in need do we literally walk past on a daily basis? The experience of simply walking down the street becomes an exercise in bitter moral failure. 

I don’t know about you, but “precisely zero” is the number of times I have walked or carried a homeless person to the Hotel Shattuck, gotten them a room, and then given my card to the front desk to open a tab for room service. And, to make matters worse, “more than I can count” is the number of times I have walked past them on my way to St. Mark’s for some appointment or a service in the chapel.

There are other ways I personally and St. Mark’s as a parish have engaged and helped the struggling on our streets, and you ought to proud of that: everything from impromptu conversation, occasional direct aid, and genuine welcome and inclusion in this worshiping community, to our feeding ministry and the weekly clinic we host, to the money we send to the diocese and the many housing and social ministries that funds. So it’s not nothing. But it’s still hard to hear this parable, knowing that the Lord’s demand of direct, one on one, personal engagement is mostly absent for us — and, worse, feels genuinely impossible most of the time.

So this morning I want to spend a little time considering that poor priest and Levite, whom we normally paint as the villains in the story. The fact is, they are not the villains, they didn’t rob and beat up the traveler — that distinction belongs to the bandits. And, far from being merely heartless to the poor man’s sufferings, they both happened to be members of an occupation governed by strict conditions and prerequisites, especially around contact with the dead. 

Jesus notes this poor man had been beaten and left for dead, and from a distance it might looked like he was indeed dead — so of course the priest and the Levite crossed to the other side of the road. Their job was an important one, one they understood to accomplish real social and spiritual good for the people in their care and the nation as a whole. It’s not that they didn’t care about this poor man. It’s that their job was important enough to have to rank the needs of the community over the needs of an individual, who in this case might have been beyond help anyway.

If you say, “Yes but this is the logic of Caiaphas,” you would be right. Remember, the night of Jesus’s betrayal and arrest, Caiaphas tells the council, “Better that one man should die than the whole nation perish.”The Church reads a deeper logic in Christ’s crucifixion, such that Caiaphas’s Machiavellian compromise turns out to be a true prophecy: this one man does die, so that all humanity might not perish but have eternal life. Still, any diplomat of any skill would have a hard time disagreeing, either with Caiaphas in the early hours of Good Friday, or with the priest or the Levite in today’s parable. They are not, in fact, wrong in their calculation of their duty. Yet Jesus lifts up the Samaritan as the example to emulate.

What’s going on here? If the priest and the Levite aren’t actually wrong, if instead they are the perfect image of obedience and dedication, what is the teaching? One way of reading it is to observe that this is the sort of thing that’s behind the charge of subversion so often leveled at Jesus, in his own lifetime and long after. If the priest or the Levite had followed Jesus’s teaching in the parable and helped the man, they would have neglected the temple and their religious duties, duties sanctioned by generations of historical development and by Holy Scripture itself. 

Is Jesus really suggesting we do away with all these structures and institutions for the sake of helping a single suffering person? And if we do, if they’re all swept away, what would be left to motivate the next good deed? Jesus tells the parable in the first place in response to a question about obeying the law. But if the law itself is swept away in the act of obeying it, then again the question remains, what’s left to motivate the next act of love? What’s left to hold power to account? The most Jesus himself says about this question is that he does not come to abolish the law, but rather to fulfill it; that the law in fact does not pass away.

So maybe Jesus is not as subversive as this reading suggests. But we’re still no clearer to understanding the logic at the heart of the parable, why it’s the Samaritan who gets lionized while the priest and Levite are not.

Many commentators note that the Samaritan is a foreigner. Remember, Samaria was the successor to the northern kingdom of Israel after its people were exiled and scattered by the Assyrians. By Jesus’s day, some of its people were descended from the Israelites who had remained in the land, but on the whole they were a mix of other tribes and nationalities. Even before the exile, the people of the northern kingdom had been rivals to the people of Judah from the days of Solomon’s son Rehoboam. That a Good Samaritan is the one who helps this poor man on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem — one of the quintessential Judean roads — makes for a much greater impact on Jesus’s hearers. This foreigner has compassion on a suffering man. And, most commentators note, this compassion fulfills a deeper law than the one motivating the priest and the Levite.

I want to maintain, however,  that the priest and the Levite are not without hope. They are being faithful in the way they know how. Indeed, they are maintaining the religious structures in which Jesus’s parable inheres and makes sense in the first place. And yet its the Samaritan who fulfills the law.

There’s no way around it, there is a real tension running through the parable. But then Christian life is full of the same tension: the tension between the world as it is and the world as it is meant to be, the world God is working steadily to build. One of the consequences of humanity’s fall from grace is a departure from a former intimacy with God. This present lack of intimacy is overcome in the rites and ceremonies of religion, in which we see as in a glass darkly what in the end we shall see face to face. 

The priest and the Levite work faithfully to keep this intimacy possible in the here and now, for all the people of God. The Samaritan, on the other hand, breaks in as a representative of the life of the world to come, in which every tear is wiped from every eye, and disease and pain and death shall be no more. The Samaritan puts aside every division, every social more, in order to heal and restore. 

When Jesus suggest that this is what fulfills the law, he is pointing to the life of the world to come, and suggesting that the fulfillment of the law, as a whole, does not finally occur until we enter the kingdom of God in full. And, by corollary, he is suggesting that whenever we go and do likewise, we ourselves initiate a momentary breakthrough of heaven on earth. The law which priest and Levite obey is not abolished or superseded, but it is transcended, in every instance of care and compassion.

I think this is really lovely, but it still presents us with a problem, because while we are in this life we still need the structures and institutions by which we can make sense of the acts which transcend them. And insiders, like ordained people and active, engaged members of churches, almost always err on the side of those structures and institutions. It can’t really be otherwise, these institutions are themselves signposts that a different, a greater life is possible, that the estrangement of the world from God is a sad thing, a temporary thing, which God is in the business of healing.

We’re left simply to thank God, that outsiders are not bound by the same law as insiders. They are free in a way we are not. And their freedom from the very laws and rites which, we believe, open our eyes and fill our hearts, by God’s grace shows us just how blind we are and reveals how stony our hearts can be. 

So, until trumpet shall sound, and the clouds be rolled back as a scroll, let insiders everywhere, and especially in the church, be glad for the presence and witness of outsiders, who, like the Good Samaritan, so often unwittingly inaugurate and even embody the very thing we long and pray for — till we ourselves wake up in the Innkeeper’s care, healed and restored by their quick thinking and selfless ministration. So we shall be made outsiders ourselves to our former lives, and as outsiders, finally free to enter the inheritance of the children of God.

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