Sermons Archives - Kyle Matthew Oliver

Christ the Light reveals us

February 8, 2020February 25, 2022 Kyle

A sermon for the Feast of the Presentation (Malachi 3:1-4; Psalm 84; Hebrews 2:14-18; Luke 2:22-40)

Last Saturday, my wife and I were stuck in traffic.

I’d been out of town all week and was feeling stressed and behind on my work. On top of that, we’d just moved, and there were a few more boxes to empty, a few more cables to run and straighten and secure.

And we were heading somewhere we didn’t *have* to go.

The stress for me in the moment led to one of those check-ins that are so important in any relationship. I said I was frustrated about the traffic but restated my commitment to the plan we had made together.

And Kristin said, “Well I’m not in any hurry.”

Now, this is a phrase I probably say more often than she does, and usually truthfully. And yet in this moment, my whole emotional being recoiled at those words.

“How can she possibly say that?!” I thought to myself.

But maybe because I recognized that this was a perfectly reasonable thing to say on a Saturday afternoon, and maybe because I didn’t want to feel any angrier, and maybe because I was literally inching down Nob Hill on Hyde St. with nothing else to do, I sat with this contradiction a bit longer:

I shouldn’t be in any hurry. My God am I in a hurry.

And low and behold, I learned something:

I am always in a hurry in the car. I am technically capable of having a relaxed, ambling sort of attitude on a Saturday afternoon. But not in the car, in gridlock, in the midst of a day that has other things on the agenda.

I feel trapped in those moments. I feel time slipping away. And I’m feeling that even more keenly given that Kristin and I have about 20 Saturdays left before we start sharing them with a newborn.

Those moments in the car gave me some important information about who I am and the challenges that I’m facing, and that we’re facing, right now.

In today’s gospel passage from Luke 2, Jesus’s parents bring him to the temple to present him before God. They meet the faithful and eccentric Anna and Simeon, who reveal by grace some essential characteristics of Jesus’s identity and destiny.

The whole passage is about revelation, about uncovering what God sets in motion through this Christ event. Jesus is a sign for Simeon and Anna, a sign for Mary, a sign for all God’s children.

Open your eyes and see this great Light, says Simeon. Our creator reveals our Savior and our path of redemption.

But he goes on to say something I find even more intriguing:

This child is … to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.

God’s salvation is shining forth, says Simeon. But be prepared to be revealed yourself.

This Holy Child will draw forth the disputations and ruminations and contradictions in the hearts of those who encounter him.

Of course Luke later shows us that this is so. In exchange after exchange, Jesus perceives the deep fears and longings that set his conversation partners on their various paths.

And Jesus represents something to those who encounter him. He is a sign:

to the crowds, of healing and deliverance;
to his companions, of purpose and empowerment;
to the authorities, of a threat to their tenuous grip on control the way they see themselves and their roles before others.

Jesus represents something to those who encounter him, but he is a person, not a principle. He doesn’t mean just one thing.

Jesus transforms us through our encounter with him, a conversation that lasts our whole life long.

This season of Epiphany is dedicated to the story of the Light of Christ shining forth for all the world to see.

This Feast of the Presentation offers, in Simeon and Anna, two stirring examples of what difference that illumination might make for those on whom God casts this light.

What difference does Christ make for us, today? What significance do we ascribe to Jesus, son of Mary, Son of God? What inmost thoughts is Christ the Light revealing?

We should start by remembering that the light of Christ shines in the silence of our hearts. Jesus is an invaluable conversation partner as we reckon with our own eccentric and sometimes shameful contradictions. I believe he is within us, loving us, loving us—even when we do not realize it.

As we learn to seek the light—as we learn to listen—our inner thoughts are revealed to us in ways that have the power to heal and to transform. In my example, it went something like this:

Am I really so selfish and distracted that a little Saturday traffic ruins my ability to be an attentive companion? And to my pregnant wife, no less, who just wanted a milkshake and to spend some time with her husband?

To which Jesus responds,

Whoa there. It’s a bit more complicated than that. There’s kind of a lot going on here, right?

Take a deep breath and let me remind you how to be gentle with yourself. If you can remember how to love Kyle, it won’t be long before you’re loving Kristin and the baby and maybe even your fellow drivers congesting Hyde St.

I know you’re capable of that love because I am the source of that love.

Let me love you, Kyle, and I promise the rest will start working itself out.

Did I hear these WORDS, booming through my consciousness in an unmistakable Nazarene accent? Of course not. But it’s in these intense and pivotal moments that we should be confident Jesus is there with us, working out our redemption breath by breath.

Even more important in these tense and frenetic times is that we let Christ reveal and restore what is broken and contradictory in the world around us.

The Light shines and brings the contours of society into sharp, sometimes devastating relief. Jesus offers a moral clarity that tests the way we treat the vulnerable, the way we treat the stranger, the way we treat the planet.

We write “All men, all people, are created equal.” Jesus sees a different reality in how we live this law.

We speak, “Give us your tired, your poor.” Jesus sees a different reality, one he finds familiar, yet all the more incomprehensible in our age of plenty.

Yes, the Light reveals us. The Light shows the biases and brokenness of our life together. The Light shows us lacking.

It can also catalyze the change we so desperately need, giving us energy and direction.

This child is destined for the falling of many, Simeon said. But also for the rising.

Jesus is a sign of love not just for religious insiders, not just for citizens, not just for homeowners, not just for the morally pristine, not just for human beings.

The Light of Christ shines all around us, showing us the way to live as the people of God, amid all of God’s creation.

A sign of love. A promise of love. A way of Love.

Image credit: “Christ the Light Oakland 17” by joevare via Flickr (CC BY ND 2.0)

Dancing with the Word (John 1 sermon)

December 29, 2019February 25, 2022 Kyle

A sermon for the First Sunday of Christmas (Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Psalm 147; Galatians 3:23-25 & 4:4-7; John 1 :1-18)

Our Christian Feast of the Incarnation is twelve days long. So no matter how things fall in the December calendar, we always have at least one Sunday in this short liturgical season.

And that means we will always hear those majestic verses from the prologue of John’s gospel. The lectionary asks us every year to make sense of John 1 as a kind of nativity story.

It’s a funny pairing: On the first day of Christmas, “shepherds keeping watch over their flock by night … go with haste and find Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger.” And then on the first Sunday of Christmas, “the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us.” Same message, very different style.

Luke’s Christmas story is full of charming, down-to-earth details. There’s plenty that we can easily get our heads around in his account, even if we don’t keep livestock. The challenge is for us to remember that many of those details derive from the political context of empire and the disadvantaged social positioning of the Holy Family.

Still I’m usually up to that challenge much more enthusiastically. It’s strange to be celebrating the birth of a baby, a tiny human, with such mystic and even cosmic poetry and theology as we’ve heard this morning.

John 1 tells us the Word came to dwell in “the [very] world that had come into being through him.” God becomes part of God’s creation. And probably we need this sense of the cosmic stakes and connections, because by verse twelve the prelude is already telling us that this Word “who is close to the Father’s heart” has come to make God known to us, and still more audaciously to “g[i]ve [us] power to become children of God.”

It’s worth accepting the challenge to reckon in some way with John’s prologue in the midst of our dazed holiday fatigue. John needs us to know that there is a connection between the baby in the manger and the creation of the universe, between a human infant’s frail vulnerability and our startling capacity to become God’s friends and co-creators.

Jesus was born to show us God. Or is it better to say “to show us God’s love”? Is there any difference in those two ways of putting it? And if the Word was with God and was God and is the one through whom all things come into being, how do we understand whatever or whoever else was there in the beginning?

We can derive plenty of intellectual benefit for our faith by putting this and other passages under the microscope, studying the Greek, studying the philosophy of the day, studying what sense the church has made of all this since. That would be a good response on any given Sunday.

But our celebration of God’s Incarnation at Christmas is an especially sensory feast, with a baby at the center, getting glamorous and pungent presents and probably crying a bit more than the hymns would have us believe. So let me make a different suggestion.

If we want to experience John’s prologue and its proclamation in a more accessible and embodied and maybe Christmasy way, we might consider the metaphor that means so much to us here at St. Gregory’s.

I’m sure someone had remarked from this seat that when one looks up at Jesus on the Cross, one also sees him directly behind as the leader of the dance of saints. What if we see him in similar fashion behind the manger as we read from John 1:

In the beginning was the Word: the Word danced with God and the Word and the Dance were God. God danced in the beginning. Through the Dance all things came into being, invited to join another circle, invited to get in formation.
The Dance brought form and movement to the world, showed creation how to participate and also how to resist. But no wallflower could bring the Dance to a halt.

You get the idea. In Christ, the Word stepped aside from the transcendent but exclusive choreography of eternity and into the studio or the club where we enthusiastic amateurs mostly pull hamstrings and embarrass ourselves.

Jesus enters the created circle and teaches us, reminds us, of the beauty and simplicity of the Dance.

He shows us it is no less sacred if we sometimes step behind the beat or on our partner’s toes or even unexpectedly in a pile of manure. Even a baby can join the circle strapped to mom or dad’s torso, which, by the way, is how I invite you to look at the next Madonna and Child icon you encounter.

So, if you’re feeling lost in the cosmos upon hearing today’s peculiar Christmas gospel, it might be that the most faithful words from and to the preacher are something like, “shut up and dance.”

Merry Christmas: The Word has been made flesh and dances among us.

Image: “Andes Virgin & Child” by Artemio Coanqui via Enchanted Booklet (CC BY SA 2.0)

Holding tension with the Root of Jesse (Isaiah 11)

December 9, 2019February 25, 2022 Kyle

A sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent in Lectionary Year A (O Root of Jesse; Isaiah 11:1-10; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12)

I have some deep, visceral, and thoroughly mixed emotions associated with this Root of Jesse text from the Prophet Isaiah.

This year in our repeating lectionary cycle was also the year I took my first preaching class. One of the first sermons I ever gave—it must have been nine years ago now—was on this text.

As part of our preparation, we had to memorize and perform our chosen passages for our classmates. And here is where the trouble began for me. Hebrew poetry is both lovely and often extremely repetitive.

[sing]
The beginning of a verse sets out and feeling or idea *
   the conclusion repeats or expands the message.
The wolf shall live with the lamb * 
   the leopard shall lie down with the kid
the calf and the lion and the fatling together *
   and a little child shall lead them

This poem is a beautiful but detailed list of messianic virtues and clothing, followed by another list of improbable animal and behavior pairings. It was a disaster to try to memorize, at least for me: counsel and might *then* knowledge and fear; cow, bear, lion, ox; child, asp, child, adder.

I remember, I can feel, the tense muscles and the pounding heart and eventually the watery eyes that accompanied my shameful attempted recitation. I won’t soon forget what it felt like to fail to speak the words of perhaps our most treasured prophet to a room full of eager disciples who had had no difficulty embodying their own proclamation.

A part of me would like to unambiguously loathe this text, and that assignment. But the story is more complicated.

A couple weeks later, I got to preach. I’d been assigned the short message at our delightfully informal family service, and that meant sitting in the aisle with the children of the parish and playing with the biblical passage together.

I knew we would be sitting down, so it had occurred to me that we could embody this text by each becoming one of the animals in Isaiah’s imaginative tableau. I spent the evening before making oversized animal ears for us to wear while we chatted about God’s hope for creation: cotton ball sheep ears, Sharpie-spotted leopard and cow ears, pointy gray upright wolf ears.

It was a bit of a gimmick. But it worked, and it was fun, and I remember it fondly.

In fact, it helped redeem the ordeal I’d been through a few weeks earlier. Both stories are now a part of my story. Both moments exist together in my body’s experience of this text: terror and humiliation, joy and playfulness.

Deep, visceral, and thoroughly mixed emotions are also part and parcel of the Advent experience:

the excitement of anticipation and the tedium of waiting;
our longing for God’s deliverance and our anxiety about God’s judgment;
our unambiguous experience of the Good News of Jesus’s first coming on the one hand (the star! the manger! three gifts! more cute animals!) and on the other hand our confusion and dread at being asked to take as Good News the apocalyptic announcements of Christ’s impending return. Here there is mostly ominous symbolism and decidedly un-cute animals and other beasts.

Isaiah’s portrait of the promised messiah and messianic age captures this tension really well: “the Root of Jesse,” as the prophet calls this messiah, will tend to poor people and put an end to inequity, and will strike the earth with an iron rod, putting the wicked to death entirely. I’m not so sure I’m not among the wicked.

John the Baptist, in pointing to the coming of Christ and its implications for the weak and for the powerful, puts on the hairy mantle of that earlier prophetic tradition.

In the gospel story we heard at daybreak, what looks like a kind of riverside hippy renewal gathering quickly sours, at least for some. John calls out the hypocritical religious authorities who show up, calls them a brood of vipers, implies God is standing ready to chop them down at the roots. I’m not so sure I’m not among the vipers.

The spiritual challenge of Advent is learning to hold *all* the Good News of our experience of God’s good creation and message of love and redemption: abiding promise alongside temporary disappointment, boundless mercy alongside ample capacity for evil, a peaceable kingdom of safety and reciprocity just beyond the painful transformation we must pass through together in order to see and embody such a world.

How do we find our way to this holy even-handedness? I believe part of the picture is by reflecting faithfully and often on the ups and downs of our own experience and of our shared lives. We find wholeness and clarity through integrating our many pleasurable and painful experiences of life abundant:

Here is my story so far. Here’s where I’ve followed Jesus’s leading. Here’s where I’ve missed the mark. Here’s what I still can’t understand or accept, at least for now. I will with God’s help.

Through grace and Jesus’s presence with us, this honestly about the truth of our lives and of the world can help us heed our prophets’ calls.

O Root of Jesse, rallying your people around God’s banners and bringing leaders everywhere up short: Come without delay and deliver us. Amen.

Image credit: “Rambling Roots” by judy dean via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Renewal amid desolation (Joel 2)

October 29, 2019October 28, 2019 Kyle

A sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25C): Joel 2 :23-32; Psalm 65; 2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18; Luke 18:9-14.

The Book of the Prophet Joel begins with bugs. Lots and lots of bugs.

It can honestly feel a little amusing to read about swarms of locust in scripture. It turns out there are various locust roles or specialities, at least in the biblical imagination: cutting locusts, swarming locusts, etc.

My favorite is the “hopping locust,” which I always picture jumping along accompanied by a cartoon “boing boing boing.”

Things get funnier still when, if you are a non-native Spanish speaker, you encounter locusts in the scripture for the first time.

Because a third or fourth year Spanish student may well know the word for locust, langosta. But that’s because langosta is also the word for a creature more commonly found at a seafood purveyor or on fancy restaurant menus.

You can perhaps imagine the confusion that ensues when such students first read in Exodus about the eighth Plague of Egypt, the Plague of Lobsters. Oh to be so stricken…

Of course, in biblical times as in ours, plagues of locusts are no laughing matter. They are a natural, economic, and often humanitarian disaster. Indeed, the closing verses of Joel Chapter 1 hit a little close to home as they describe the plague and its apparent aftermath:

The seed shrivels under the clods,
   the storehouses are desolate;
the granaries are ruined
   because the grain has failed …
To you, O Lord, I cry.
For fire has devoured
   the pastures of the wilderness,
and flames have burned
   all the trees of the field.
Joel 1:17,19 (NRSV)

The historical backdrop for today’s lesson is desolation. And perhaps we can relate.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote in a funeral sermon that in the midst of housing crises and wage crises and rolling blackouts and ecological disasters we all need to be making more room to honestly grieve. It may well be that we are seeing entire ways of life passing away.

But that is not the whole story, and not our whole call.

Forces are at work changing our world not just for the worse but for the better, even now, even now.

This too was the case in Joel’s day. Scholars believe this book was written in the midst of the Judeans’ gradual return to their land, and to the city of Jerusalem, after their Babylonian captivity. Joel seems to be familiar with the rebuilding of the temple, and the restoration of the priestly traditions there.

It was not an easy time. There were labor shortages. There was opposition from neighboring communities. Long days, short nights, tight belts, sore backs.

Especially after the locusts showed up, I have no doubt that, like the Hebrews in the desert remembering their fleshpots in Egypt, some Judeans probably looked back with fond longing on the houses they’d built in Babylon, now furnished and lived in, and to the gardens they’d planted, now lush and fruitful.

How do you simultaneously grieve the loss of one way of life and build a new and sustaining one together? This is the spiritual question for our times, and not just for Christians, and not just for Americans.

Hope and trust are the twin pillars that support the gateway to this path, and they are the paving stones that will mark each footstep. Hope and trust in God, for those of us who have received these gifts, but also hope and trust in each other. These days that feels like an even bigger spiritual challenge.

Our hope and our trust require inspiration, and nurture.

The prophet Joel understood that, full of a word from the LORD, the God of Israel. The Apostle Peter understood that, drunk on the Spirit and quoting from Joel on a momentous day in the life of the early church, the Day of Pentecost.

You will know that I am with you, says the Lord.
And that I love you.
I will breathe my enlivening spirit onto and into and through you.
I will make you prophets.
I will make you dreamers.
I will make you visionaries.
Not only the powerful but also all you who are in bondage.
(Joel 2 :27–29, my paraphrase)

These familiar words from Joel 2 do not an easy prophecy make.

It’s hard to trust that we’re Beloved as we reckon with the consequences of how we have been treating each other, and our planet.

But Beloved we are. All of us. Still.

It’s hard to hope that we can make a difference for others when we are tempted to look out only for ourselves, to protect whatever nest egg we might have socked away.

But Powerful we are. Together, with and for each other.

God in Christ is healing and rejuvenating and forming us for mission in the midst of our confusion, in the midst of our anxiety, in the midst of our anger both righteous and resentful.

You will catch glimpses of this sacred presence: this morning, and this week, and in the weeks to come.

Tell each other about your glimpses. Ask each other about your glimpses.

There is more than desolation and despair in our fields and forests, and in our future. There is passion, and compassion, and resilience, and the joy of both resistance and celebration.

All who cry out will receive solace, and renewal, says the Lord.

Image credit: “Foggy Dreamscape” by Mike Behnken via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Interpreting Luke 16 with The Muppet Christmas Carol

September 29, 2019October 28, 2019 Kyle

A sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C (Proper 21: Jeremiah 32:1-3a; 6-15, Psalm 91:1-6, 14-16; 1 Timothy 6:6-19; Luke 16:19-31)

Of all the genius bits of casting in The Muppet Christmas Carol, my favorite comes in the very first scene.

“The Marleys were dead to begin with,” says Gonzo as Charles Dickens, though that’s not my pick.

I was too young to spot the change back in 1992. But I can imagine Dickens fans in the theater being both GRATEFUL for the direct reference to the first line of the book, and also CONFUSED about Marley suddenly becoming plural.

My friends, it had to be thus. Because Jacob Marley—and now also Robert Marley—simply had to be played by Statler and Waldorf.

If you’re not a Muppets fan and need the wikipedia summary for these two, this excerpt should do it:

Species: Muppet humans

Occupations: Hecklers, curmudgeons, comic relief

How else could the Muppets tackle A Christmas Carol and its bizarre premise and intense social commentary? How else could you make a kid-friendly movie of what seems to have been a Dickensian remix of today’s parable.

I mean, within moments of coming on screen, these two puppets are singing “You’re DOOMED, Scrooge. You’re doomed for all time. / Your future is a HORROR STORY written by your crimes.”

This is not usual Muppets territory. But because it’s Statler and Waldorf, we’re still chuckling at their last grandpa joke.

And we’re unsurprised and even charmed when “the chains the Marleys forged in life” turn out to be binding them to adorably animate little Muppet treasure chests. In fact, those boxes themselves float up to finish the song’s final verse.

The prospect of eternal torment was never so funny and so cute.
**
The Muppets succeed in SIDELINING a distracting detail in the premise of today’s gospel story, which some believe to be the inspiration for A Christmas Carol: Through humorous misdirection, they help us see past the somewhat grisley frame of this parable and look instead at the challenging picture inside it.

It’s easy to fixate on the detail of “the chasm” that separates the Rich Man from Lazarus in death, the great dividing line in this apparent afterlife.

But this is not a parable about if Hell exists, who might go there, or for how long. The imaginative setting is just the backdrop for the conversation Jesus wants his characters to have.

The striking detail of “the chasm” IS meant to catch our attention, but in order to point back to another detail: the Rich Man’s SECURITY GATE in life.

It’s as if Abraham is saying, “You isolated yourself then. So too are you isolated from us now.”

The Rich Man wanted to keep Lazarus at a safe distance: off his doorstep and out of his neighborhood. He didn’t want to have to see a poor and hungry man covered in sores as he took his own sumptuous feasts with wealthy friends in their fine clothes.

Marginalized people from every generation and era have had to grapple with going not just ignored but sometimes literally unseen. Upstairs/downstairs, front-of-house/back-of-house, one side or the other of the tracks or the river—

In Jesus’s day, in Dickens’s day, and in ours, the rich and powerful concoct ways to separate themselves from the people who make it possible for them to be rich and powerful. And then to varying degrees they ignore, rationalize, or even forget that they have done so—at least until they run out of space on the picturesque side side of the tracks, or the Lazaruses run out of space or patience on the run down and polluted side.

Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley of Westminster Abbey, who preached there on the Sunday after Charles Dickens death, certainly believed that this social dynamic motivated both Dickens’s and Jesus’s stories: He said, “By [Dickens] that veil was rent asunder which parts the various classes of society. Through his genius the rich man … was made to see and feel the presence of Lazarus at his gate.”
**
I sometimes get frustrated that this parable is cited by fundamentalists in support of common discourses around Hell and our need to shape up, lest we get sent there.

But try as I might this week, I wasn’t able to think of a more appropriate way for Jesus to make his point about the cruel and calcified ways we literally separate one life from another. Where else but on the very threshold between life and death could so important a conversation take place?

So although the fire and brimstone folks are unlikely to take their moral theology from Dickens’ Christmas Carol—let alone The Great Gonzo’s—I’d simply want to point out one last thing: At least in my reading and viewing, it wasn’t fear that ultimately brought Scrooge around to the need to turn from his Marley-esque ways.

It was love, and laughter, and compassion. It was the obvious and abundant joy he witnessed in places he’d never bothered to look.

So if you think Dickens was at all on the right track in reimagining Jesus’s parable to give the Rich Man half a chance, here’s my Cliff’s Notes on the meaning of both.

Don’t fear the chasm that might separate us from each other in some unknown great beyond. Fear the chasms that separate us from each other’s love and friendship right here, right now.

A sermon for when the bells stop ringing (1619 Commemoration)

August 25, 2019February 25, 2022 Kyle 1 Comment

Today at 12 pm Pacific Time we will take part in a nationwide 1619 Commemoration sponsored by the National Park Service and endorsed by Presiding Bishop Curry.

We’re remembering that, 400 years ago today, the first enslaved Africans who were brought to “English North America” landed at Point Comfort in Hampton, VA.

We will participate by ringing our bell for one minute. The Park Service website gives this rationale in their invitation:

Bells are symbols of freedom.

They are rung for joy, sorrow, alarm, and celebration…universal concepts in each of our lives. This symbolic gesture will enable Americans from all walks of life … to capture the spirit of healing and reconciliation while honoring the significance of 400 years of African American history and culture.

As it often does, our lectionary has cooperated.

We just heard Luke’s tale of “a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years.” She was “bent over and … quite unable to stand up straight.”

And so Jesus does what Jesus does.

He liberates. He heals.

And he stands up to the authorities when they question his tactics:

You hypocrites! [he says.] Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?

The sabbath is for freedom, he says, and even one day more of bondage in the name of a selectively enforced rule of law is at odds with God’s liberating imperative.

Still, neither the press releases nor the scripture study, the bell ringing nor the singing of spirituals—not even the trust in “a spirit of healing and reconciliation”—in isolation, none of these actions will help or heal. None of them will make an immediate and concrete difference for the plight of black people in the U.S. None of them are enough to help us glimpse or realize the Dream of God.

One of my mentors has a ministry motto that she shares often. To church audiences around the country who invite her to speak, she issues this threefold challenge: “Show up. Listen. Tell the truth.”\

By agreeing to ring our bell at noon today, and to make some stylistic changes to our usual worship choices, I think we have met that first challenge, as well as we can meet it in this time and place. We’re here, together, and that is a start.

Step 2 is trickier, firstly because I’m certainly not suggesting that you listen to me.

I am a halting and unreliable anti-racist—too timid, too willfully ignorant, too addicted to the privileges of my status as a young, fairly-compensated, able-bodied, over-educated straight white male priest. My job is to do my best to get out of the way.

I invite you to listen to the voices of experts on race and social change, and of African Americans willing to tell their stories of life in this nation, despite owing no one such an account.

If, like me, you are a white person, listening and being changed is especially important, because white privilege insulates us from these important stories. It teaches us to avoid at all costs the discomfort of hearing, acknowledging, and engaging with experiences of racial inequity and oppression.

Right now we have what I see as an unparalleled opportunity to hear these stories from willing and wise storytellers. This is thanks to the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which I highly recommend.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, this package of extensively reported economic, social, and cultural analyses aims to [quote] “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.”

Contrary to some of the pushback I read this week, the point of this reframing is not to raise and settle some non-existent argument about when America officially became a separate nation-state.

The point is that this land had slavery for 250 of the last 400 years, not just 90 out of 250. We’ve had slavery or Jim Crow for almost 350 of the last 400.

And for fully 400 years we’ve had slavery, official and de facto Jim Crow, or their variously “legal” modern descendants, which affect many marginalized groups but hit black people hardest:

a vast and devastatingly unequal prison-industrial complex;
shockingly unaccountable police brutality;
unequal political power and representation;
unequal access to quality education and healthcare;
unequal unemployment rates, wages and salaries, and advancement opportunities;
predatory lending and other means of targeted financial exploitation; and
urban neglect followed by rapid displacement through gentrification.

This nation has never dealt honestly with these realities.

Today we remember Jesus’s controversial healing of a woman in bondage, on the sabbath, a day set aside to recognize the end of generations of slavery in Egypt.

We also pray on this our Christian sabbath for the healing of an entire people in bondage, on a day set aside to recognize the beginning of generations of slavery in America.

We can picture a woman standing upright in the synagogue. We can imagine the Hebrews singing songs of gratitude on the far side of the Red Sea.

It is harder to form a fully comprehensible mental picture of what liberation will look like in this country.

But we have an abundance of evidence—stories, photos, films, statistics—that we are far from the promised land. The work was not fully accomplished in the mid 1860s, nor in the mid 1960s, nor in the years that have past since.

As I took stock of the signs of white supremacy manifesting in our national discourse this week, and in our city, and in my own consciousness, I came to a new appreciation of how Jesus describes the woman he heals: “a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound.”

Systemic racism is truly demonic: slippery, seductive, opportunistic, invisible to those unwilling to see it.

Jesus doesn’t sugarcoat his diagnosis, and he doesn’t sugarcoat his rebuke of the people who disapprove of his liberating work.

He tells the truth. He is the Truth.

If it’s really the case that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, I believe it is the very force of truth that in every moment is straining to bend and displace the arrow-straight status quo.

By itself, ringing our bell today will not bend the arc. Thoughts and prayers won’t get the job done.

But if anything we receive or offer in this place helps us tell the truth more often, to more people, to greater effect, with more courage and more conviction, then we will glimpse the promise of the Dream of God becoming a waking reality for all of God’s children.

We have what it takes. God is giving us what we need. I’m amazed and inspired by the financial commitments The Episcopal Church as a whole and individual congregations and dioceses are making to the work of racial healing and reconciliation. We’re showing up, listening, telling the truth.

The educational and liturgical resources, the study groups and pilgrimages, the local partnerships and coalition building, increasingly good faith conversations about the need for reparations—these efforts are mostly in their infancy, but they are growing. The “[S]pirit of healing & reconciliation” moves.

Whatever the catalyst, I urge us all not just to examine our own roles in systemic racism, especially anti-black racism, but to dig deep and explore our motivation for ending it.

For some of us that will involve grappling with our own demons and inner conflict. I am deadly serious when I say that Jesus can help us, is longing to help us, to lift us up together to our full dignity and full integrity.

Whoever we are, we can learn to help God realize the liberation of those in bondage.

So in the months and years to come, at Trinity+St. Peter’s, around the city of San Francisco, across the Diocese of California, along the entirety of the Golden State, and throughout a nation that believes in spite of itself that all persons are created equal: as we will at noon Pacific time today, let us continue to choose to let freedom ring.

The rich man’s folly—and ours

August 4, 2019August 25, 2019 Kyle

A sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C (Proper 13: Hosea 11:1-11; Psalm 107:1-9, 43; Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21)

As some of you know, my day job is as an educational media producer and researcher. My main interest has always been in how people make meaning of and with various kinds of objects and experiences.

Take, for example, a vacation photo of a remote mountain path, or a t-shirt some industrious aunt made for a family reunion. Perhaps you can imagine the hiking photo repurposed for a social media post about some big life decision. Perhaps you can imagine the t-shirt repurposed as a cleaning rag, so that whenever you dust your bookshelf you find yourself thinking of that time your 12-year-old cousin went mad with power during an epic game of Monopoly.

I never get tired of hearing people trace these webs of meaning.

Stories from scripture can have this kind of power for meaning making. In particular, I think Jesus knew that parables would be a rich source of reflection and what we would call remixing for his immediate audience and for generations to come.

Stories invite us to bring our own experience to bear on the speaker’s ideas and accounts.

Jesus taps into a lot of gut and heart and soul stuff when he says a simple phrase like “a rich man” or “ample goods” or “eat, drink, be merry.”

I recently had a conversation with a community organizer who works on police accountability and racial wealth disparities in the Bayview. She said something like, “You know, our economic system has taught us to divide our time between working for our livelihood and trying to relax enough to be able to get back to working for our livelihood. If we have a partner, or children, or parents who need our help, we might carve out some space for working and/or relaxing with them.

“But life is about so much more than this,” she said passionately, “and the dimension I’m trying to help people recover is their connection and responsibility to their community.”

I’ve been playing back that conversation in my head for weeks now, and the experience returned to me unbidden as I spent time with this particular parable of the rich man.

I think we do a pretty good job of reminding each other of our interdependence, of how much we need each other and our wider communities, of how much our neighbors and our world need the radical message of love and grace with which Jesus has entrusted us. We received yet another heartbreaking reminder of that need yesterday.

And yet I know all too well what my calendar looks like from week to week. Devoid of, say, the chance to break bread with some of you or the other disciples in my life, or the chance to pitch in at an event my organizer friend is leading, or the tragic necessity for prayer and lament when innocent people are gunned down—without these prompts, as often as not I revert to precisely the kind of thinking the rich man exemplifies.

I may not be building warehouses or renting storage units, but I am nevertheless primarily occupied with my stuff: my possessions and paycheck, my research, my list of responsibilities, my carefully guarded hours to eat, drink, be merry. Even my attention to spiritual or emotional growth, when I have such attention, can be a form of idolatry, a way of focusing overmuch on the created rather than the creator. Of focusing on me.

Where does the rich man go wrong? Where do I? Where do we? And how can we live differently—in ways that grow community and rejoice in human dignity?

What I’m about to say is gonna sound like just “one weird trick,” but it’s actually a window into a deep and life-giving would-be reality:

This week, pay attention to the pronouns you use when you speak. As you’re writing emails or chatting with friends or making plans with a significant other, listen for the pronouns we hear an absurd number of times in this parable: I and my.

For example: How often am I talking about “my ideas” that are really our, or her, or their ideas?

Of course, this exercise in turning from selfishness toward relationships can go the other way too. When am I verbally collectivizing our action in situations where perhaps I am actually shirking my responsibility.

Or when does my “us” also exclude, creating a “them” I can avoid, or blame, or worse.

If the rich man had this particular filter running on his internal monologue, he might have paused to ponder some new possibilities. A larger barn to store crops would make a love-spreading difference if it belonged to the rich man and his workers. “Relax, eat, drink, be merry” is good news bearing good fruit, for a time and for a community. But when he says it only to himself and for many years, that fruit withers on the vine.

In so many ways, too many of God’s children are withering on the vine.

If we allow her, the Holy Spirit will teach us to ask who’s missing from a particular photograph, who is object rather than subject in a particular narrative.

When we slow down and pay attention, perhaps even just to the words we use, the meaning we make from these new perspectives will sometimes surprise us. Sometimes what we discover will tempt us toward shame or disengagement. In one way or another, we will all fall into the rich man’s selfish predicament.

But thanks be to God, Jesus also assures us that, if we let it, what we learn when we turn back outward can transform and deliver us instead.

Good Samaritan sculpture - no savior complex

From savior complex to neighbor complex

July 14, 2019August 6, 2019 Kyle

A sermon for the fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C (Proper 10: Amos 7:7-17; Psalm 82; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37)

“Go and do likewise” was the informal slogan of a wonderful organization with whom I served a January term field placement my first year of seminary.

Samaritan Ministry of Greater Washington started in the basement of a DC church committed to innovative worship, deep relationship, and responsive, mutual presence in their neighborhood.

As such, the organization and its programs evolved into a space where people who are homeless or otherwise marginalized can be seen and welcomed—as opposed to being ignored or chased away. Participants receive support and access to resources as they choose and pursue their *own* goals for improving their lives—as opposed to having goals chosen or work done *for them* by people with the power to set requirements and to claim to know what’s best.

My hosts knew I was unlikely to stay involved after I’d worked my last shift and written my final reflection paper. I handled tasks commensurate with that level of commitment, mostly working the phones during a campaign to mobilize the organization’s supporters for an upcoming auction gala fundraiser.

The most memorable experience of my time there was actually writing the little bits of copy that would be read by the announcer to describe each donated auction item.

“Render unto a friend or loved one this collection of bronze and silver coinage from fourth century Rome.” That kind of thing. I’m pretty sure there were some puns on the different emperors’ names, and like the secrets of the emperors themselves, these puns are thankfully lost to history.

At first I thought it was strange to be a priest-in-training basically doing Price Is Right shtick when he was supposed to be “helping people.”

It turns out the main point of these placements was for us to realize for ourselves that the various roles my classmates and I were preparing for were not significantly different from the discipleship we knew: seldom glamorous, mostly about showing up, utterly unheroic.

With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect even the folks who worked directly with clients at this organization would describe their work in the same way.

“Go and do likewise.” Those deceptively simple words at the end of the parable of the Good Samaritan feel like the most challenging Jesus ever spoke. Some commentators believe the sky-high moral standard is part of the point.

They argue this parable is an opportunity for Jesus to aud[ay]ciously point out that a nondescript member of a reviled social group could be a more faithful follower of the laws of Moses than a priest, a temple official, or the very lawyer who initiated this whole smarty-pants discourse in the first place.

This interpretation suggests that the parable is an indictment of “othering,” the temptation and the act of treating a person as fundamentally different from us, whoever “we” are: as alien, separate, unclean, unworthy; as “illegal,” “thug,” “crazy,” “junky.”

I think this interpretation is true *and* that this essential message applies to the other important character in the story, the man on the side of the road. In fact, the Samaritan’s behavior only seems superhuman if we accept the premise of the chasm between the helper and helped.

If we take to heart the idea that the Samaritan truly sees the other traveler as a neighbor—not a stranger—some of the moral awe we feel goes away, right?

Imagine coming upon an important neighbor in your life on the road, half-dead. Of course you’d offer Good-Samaritan-level assistance, and then some. You wouldn’t even think about it. And you’d probably call some other neighbors to help as well, just as the Samaritan does.

It seems to me that “Go and do likewise” here becomes Good News if we take it not as an order to change the world one heroic individual act at a time, but as an invitation to change ourselves.

Think of the many ways you’ve helped or been helped by neighbors in your life, the favors and mercies, sure, but also the easy afternoons spent shooting the breeze about nothing in particular, perhaps with a cold beverage around a grill.

You’ve probably never tried to fix or save your neighbor. And to the extent that you’ve helped them, it’s probably been as much about your willing and companionable presence as any particular skill or largesse.

Can we learn to come to every new encounter in our lives with this kind of non-defensive, interested, community-minded stance? Can we replace our savior complex with a neighbor complex?

Of course, asking people’s names, talking about the weather, and sharing the proverbial cup of sugar will not save or fix any neighbor. Neither, by themselves, will these kinds of actions make a dent in the urgent, systemic moral crises of our day: 10,000 neighbors homeless in San Francisco, immigrants abused at the border and terrified in their homes, carbon being dumped into the atmosphere at a once-again accelerating rate.

But I truly believe, and I think Jesus does too, that as we learn to see and treat all people as if they were our neighbors—and allow them to see us that way too—world-changing action becomes not just possible, but natural and immediate. It becomes the collective work of a global spiritual neighborhood.

Speech, understanding, action: A Pentecost sermon

June 9, 2019June 10, 2019 Kyle

A sermon for Pentecost, Year C (Genesis 11:1-9; Psalm 104:25-35, 37; Acts 2:1-21; John 14:8-17, (25-27))

Isn’t it interesting that the tower doesn’t get destroyed? That’s the detail I kept coming back to as I studied the scriptures this week for our great feast of the Holy Spirit.

The mythic and apparently unified human family has newly settled on this plain in the land of Shinar. They are accomplishing a great feat of engineering, ingenuity, and single-mindedness. God takes notice:

Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

It’s tempting to read this story as a simple morality tale. That’s what some of us might have learned in Vacation Bible School as kids. That’s basically what I was taught.

But if that was the writers’ and ultimately God’s intention for this story, I think they needed to include more fire and brimstone. I kinda can’t believe those words are coming out of my mouth, to be honest, but life in the Spirit teaches us to expect the unexpected.

Of course, as a Christian community we have rightly been formed to be wary of the pursuit of purely prideful accomplishment and any ethic of self-sufficiency.

Do I think God wishes her children had chosen a project other than to “make a name for themselves”? Absolutely. Is a really tall building basically a metaphor for a common and misguided and probably characteristically male response to feeling like one has something to prove? You bet.

And yet, there is no formal admonishment here. No statement that “the people did evil in the sight of the Lord.”

I submit to you that the action God takes, “confusing their language,” is an act of what Roman Catholic educator John Gresham calls the “divine pedagogy,” the way in which God teaches us. Not “Why I oughta go down there and teach them a lesson!” but rather “My children need me to show them the way.”

There’s a second reflexive temptation to interpreting these Pentecost readings, and it is like unto the first. As my colleague Ian Lasch pointed out this week, we certainly shouldn’t view these paired readings according to the idea that a problem pops up in the Old Testament and God fixes it through Christ—or here, the Spirit whom Christ send—in the New Testament.

Genesis: Punishment – languages confused, people divided. Acts: Deliverance – languages understood, people united.

That’s not how Christians are supposed to read scripture, though we can easily fall into this habit. We believe it’s all one God, one multifaceted collection of scriptures, one unfolding love story between Creator and creation.

When we take these passages together, we get a rich commentary on human endeavor, human community, and humanity’s need for an energizing Spirit of love and, yes, of power.

We’re not meant to be monolithic, monolingual automata, producing and piling bricks in a monument that may have been a marvel but could probably never truly be marvelous in the rich sense of that word.

Many languages, geographic dispersal—in a word: diversity—these are not a punishment from which God suddenly relents but the catalyst and spiritual treasury through which God accomplishes her ongoing work: creating, sustaining, and redeeming the world as we know it.

Difference is the challenge but also the joy of human community: differences of culture and personality, differences of perspectives and priorities. You don’t have to be an industrial engineer or corporate diversity consultant to know and trust that a team or community full of different kinds of people is going to be more creative, more effective, and a hell of a lot more interesting to be a part of.

And notice that on the Day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit’s gift of languages is not just experienced as one more tool of proclamation for the apostle’s mission. It is a tool, but that tool proves meaningful because all those immigrants living in Jerusalem experience the Pentecost miracle not first or primarily as a message—good news though that message may be—but as an experience of grace. This experience is generous, unexpected, gut-level, joy-producing. It is inclusion and embrace, a moment’s perfect communion, unity not uniformity.

Once again, God’s people recognize God’s presence in a voice calling out to them in a specific and personal way. From their unfamiliar, probably frightening, possibly hostile environment, they hear a sound that feels like home.

The Divine Pedagogue, the Source of all wisdom and truth, the Wellspring of life, the Advocate, the Comforter, the Holy Spirit: she is teaching us still, leading us still, sustaining us still.

The Spirit of God is still accomplishing miracles of understanding, inspiring creativity that will nurture our souls and hopefully save us and our planet from our own selfishness and runaway consumerism.

And she has chosen you. The Holy Spirit has chosen you.

I don’t care if it’s your first or third or four hundredth time here. God has chosen you to be a part of the unfolding work of life and redemption in which we live and move and have our being.

You each have diverse qualifications, of course, and different ways to contribute. Your work will be both ordinary and extraordinary, and you will know when you encounter the invitation.

On this Feast of Pentecost, I invite you to pay special attention to moments when the people around you will need your speech, moments when they will need your understanding, and moments when they will need your action.

And in particular, I invite you to be attentive to these moments here in the Trinity+St. Peter’s community. This is an exciting time for us.

It’s a season of discernment, so we will need your voices and your listening ears. Where should we be heading? What should we be working on? Who should we be partnering with? May the Spirit show us the way, and may we recognize when we’re being called to speak up when we hear a word.

I submit to you as well that this is a season of action. There is much to do as we prepare to call a new priest, continue to do the work of repairing our building, and continue our mission and ministry: being the church for this neighborhood, for each other, and for the God who acts for the wellbeing of all.

I don’t think it’s inappropriate for me to say that some of our leaders are tired. Smaller churches can wear people out far too easily if we don’t all do our best to support one another. That’s not a reason to despair, nor is it a reason to be a martyr.

But listen for if God is calling you to take on something new or something different, something that will help bear the Spirit’s witness in the world and to we who gather here each week.

“Look at these people of Trinity+St. Peter’s,” I can imagine God saying. “Nothing they propose to do will be impossible for them.”

You know this better than I. May it continue to be so, by the power of the Spirit.

Paul and Silas experience the consolation of faith

Seeing and experiencing the consolation of faith

June 5, 2019July 14, 2019 Kyle 2 Comments

There’s a now-defunct Biblical art initiative that I dearly wish had not gone offline a few years ago. Old and New was [quote] “a collaborative design project … providing a platform for contemporary graphic artists to exhibit works themed on Biblical stories and passages.”

I especially appreciated this explicit value of the project: privilege honesty over propriety.

Don’t show us what you think we want to see, what the conventions of faith communities have identified as orthodox and edifying. Show us what we need to see, what our everyday, real-life concerns might look like, might feel like, in conversation with the living word of God.

One of my favorite images from the Old and New Project was a piece envisioning this scene of Paul and Silas in prison. The two are seated next to each other, wearing bright complementary colors, five o’clock shadows visible on both their soulful faces. They’re looking heavenward, and musical notes seem to dangle from an unseen height as if lowered on strings. It’s beautiful, peaceful, whimsical.

And I have no doubt that such a conception of this scene was authentic and faithful for the artist. Nevertheless, five or so years after I’d first fallen in love with this simple image, when I returned to it this week it seemed off somehow.

For a time, this interpretation felt to me more proper than honest, an idealized portrayal of one idyllic moment in a passage otherwise full of brutality.

For instance, the picture doesn’t show the slave girl with the spirit of divination, who gets a raw deal here. The writer of Acts tells us that Paul was simply annoyed with the way she was following him and Silas. She, or rather the evil spirit in her, kept declaring nothing but the truth about the pair of missionaries: “These men are slaves of the Most High God and proclaim to you a way of salvation.” You’d think they’d be happy for the free advertising.

I don’t know how to feel about Paul’s liberating initiative here. Not only does he seem to have a somewhat mixed motive for casting out the demon, notice also that the woman is now out of whatever good graces she dwelled in while she was so profitable to her owners as a fortune teller.

It’s not hard to imagine that her day-to-day life would have gotten substantially worse after this incident. And we have no other choice but to imagine, because the thread of the story turns away from her entirely as her owners go off to press a case against Paul and Silas.

In these later scenes, as well, there is brutality and dehumanization. We see a state punishing inconvenient, albeit thinly accused, troublemakers, as states have so often done and continue to do.

And the threat of such violence is never far even from those who help prop up these structures of power. The terrified jailor was willing to immediately take his own life when he awoke to conclude that forces beyond his control had apparently released his captives.

It’s wonderful that he chooses to be baptized after his brush with death. Here again, though, I cannot help but wonder how his story ends. Presumably his superiors were none too happy about a busted up jailhouse that was still short at least two prisoners and one employee.

Like the enslaved woman who lost most of her value to her owners, the jailer might not have had a happy ending, though in this case at least he presumably had the consolation of his newfound faith.

The consolation of faith. It’s easy to dismiss the idea, as I did at first when I returned to the earnest image of Paul and Silas singing in jail.

In that moment, my interpretive loyalties rested squarely with those of New Testament scholar Jennifer Kaalund, who calls us to “remember the enslaved girl as clearly as we remember Paul and Silas,” to remember the jailor’s brush with brutality in addition to his baptism.

Let’s read this text more honestly, I thought, through the lens of oppressed and manipulated peoples then and now. I still think that.

And yet I’ve come to believe such a reading only accentuates the need for us to recognize and celebrate the consolation of faith, to notice and to the practice the presence of our liberating savior, made manifest whenever two or three huddle together in Jesus’s name.

Although the author of Acts may ignore the fate of these narrative role-players, we know that God cares for each and every hair on their heads, remaining faithfully present to those on the margins when the temporary spotlight turns away.

I had a pretty challenging week. I was serving as chaplain to a gathering of church leaders in Minneapolis, a group struggling to make sense of how we will transform and sustain theological education.

My main task was to lead worship, worship I’d helped plan in a style with which I’m not especially experienced, worship I suspected some in the room would find challenging or frustrating.

My primary collaborator had to leave halfway through the event to help lead music at a gathering across town, which meant I also had to try to fill her shoes as a paperless song leader. She is charismatic and joyous, playful with her body and tuneful with her voice; hers are not Kyle-shaped shoes, and I was all too aware of both my shortcomings and my anxiety about them.

Some of you may know this Taizé song: “Nada te turbe, nada te espante, quien a Dios tiene, nada le falta. Nada te turbe, nada te espante: solo Dios basta.” Nothing can trouble, nothing can frighten, those who seek God will never be wanting. Only God fills us.

As I stood in a claustrophobic basement conference room practicing this song between sessions, it occurred to me that my lack of faith in these very words—“nothing can trouble, nothing can frighten,” I wish—my fear in that moment was precisely why I needed these words, why I needed to be singing them.

And something like my situation was probably true for many of the folks I’d be leading in song later that afternoon.

Paul and Silas singing in their jail cell is the spiritual center of this thoroughly troubling text. And so idealized is exactly what an image of their witness should be.

They may well have been scared in their shackles, in the dark—what better reason to join their voices in song? Practices of faith are the ideal we pursue, the pattern into which we grow. Fear may give way to consolation, doubt give way to faith, as it did for me as I sang this week.

Alice Potter’s beautiful image is, I think, meant more as a hope-filled promise about how God shows up for us than a pious artistic recitation that implies it’s not OK for Christians not to be OK.

It’s a witness to the way that those bound by fear and by forces still more demonic will receive God’s consolation when they raise their voices in trust or in despair. We all need these confident and honest visions of faith, as we are led on the difficult journey toward the fulness of freedom.

Image credit: Alice Potter via Old & New Project (used here under fair use – criticism)

Category: Sermons