Good Samaritan sculpture - no savior complex

From savior complex to neighbor complex

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.

Way of Love promo screenshot

Introducing ‘The Way of Love with Bishop Michael Curry’

Kyle 2 Comments

Way of Love album art

At this point I’m almost not sure what to say to you about the great privilege of developing, co-producing, and editing The Way of Love with Bishop Michael Curry. It’s a very strange experience for something to be at least semi-secret for such a long time and then suddenly come on the scene with hundreds of Facebook shares and thousands of downloads.

I can certainly say that I’ve never worked on a media project this big before. And that that is both thrilling and terrifying.

More than a year ago, the Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers reached out to me about the possibility of a podcast featuring Bishop Curry. It’s a really natural fit—he’s just as compelling a conversationalist as a preacher, in my opinion. This would be a teaching podcast, a Christian formation podcast.

And then the Way of Love happened (the vision, not the show, obviously). And then the Royal Wedding Sermon happened. And then General Convention happened. I think that was the order.

So 2018 was a pretty busy and exciting year for The Episcopal Church. And all of this added both urgency and a clarity about how to approach the show.

Of course, 2018 was also a busy and exciting year for the Saylor-Olivers. I am monumentally grateful that things aligned such that I was hired to produce the show just as we were arriving in San Francisco. I can’t imagine how different the emotional dynamic of the move would have been if I hadn’t had this big, satisfying project to sink my teeth into. (Plus there’s the fact that SF is just stupid expensive.)

This video trailer and this audio one both do a pretty good job of capturing what the show is actually about. Our goal is to make more concrete and more accessible the various practices that make up the Way of Love:

  • Turn
  • Learn
  • Pray
  • Worship
  • Bless
  • Go
  • Rest

The Season 1 pilot, What is the Way of Love? went live on Sunday (Pentecost, of course). It will be followed on subsequent Tuesdays by one episode per week, focused on each of the seven Way of Love practices in turn. Season 2 is already in development.

For those of you who support my media making on Patreon, I want to be 100% transparent that I am being paid by The Episcopal Church on contract to produce this show. If you appreciate what The Way of Love has to offer, I hope you’ll make a gift to the 2019 Annual Appeal—I have.

That said, the track record of projects I have created through the support of many readers, subscribers, and especially patrons was part of why I got the call to make this show, and the flexibility I have during this season of dissertating and doing mostly contract work was also essential.

So however you support my work (which you do if you’re reading this)—thank you. I couldn’t have said yes to this adventure without you.

I hope to hear from some of you with feedback about the show. And I hope you’ll rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and/or share with a friend.

Onward!

Pentecost sermon candle

Speech, understanding, action: A Pentecost sermon

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

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)

You're all done - peace as presence

Peace as presence in the spiritual life

Kyle

Like all of us, I am an idolator—both in ways I am aware of, and doubtless in even more I have yet to get my head around.

The object of what would seem to be my highest devotion is both a material condition and a state of mind. Like the root of much individual and structural brokenness and sin, desiring it is not a bad thing intrinsically. Quite the opposite—the whole point of my dogged pursuit and disordered vigilance is supposedly to be more available, more aware, more responsive, more creative. “Mind like water,” repeateth me and my zealous co-religionists like a mantra. “Mind like water.”

I’m talking, of course, about email. Or rather the absence of it.

My idol-in-chief is Inbox Zero, that fleeting state of grace when I have no messages left to reply to, no outstanding work or favor or pleasantry that isn’t otherwise enshrined in a to-do list or calendar block.

As a suggestion, or perhaps its own twisted substitute reward, when an inbox is empty the Gmail mobile app displays a cartoon woman peacefully reading a book in the park. This efficient emailer—both righteous and free—is sprawled out in prone position in the grass, hair in a bun, high tops playfully pointed skyward. The sun is shining down on her, on the park, and even on the physically and symbolically distant cityscape beyond.

She is the person I aspire to be. She has managed her time and relationships well. Peace, of mind and of body, is her reward. Or so I effectively tell myself day after day, message after message, as I pursue the unobtainable: small friendly letters below the cartoon that say “You’re all done!”

**

It’s unlikely that I am the first preacher to tell you that most of us have some messed up ideas about peace, though perhaps I’m the first to use email as the introductory metaphor.

And we are right to remind each other, first and foremost, perhaps with some key assists from the scriptures, that peace is not an absence.

It’s certainly not an absence of conflict. Jesus tells us he came not to bring this kind of peace, but indeed to bring a sword. “You can’t ignore conflict,” he says, “and I came to stir it up, even between you and your loved ones, if you’re making that idea of peace an object of your worship, a barrier to justice and right relationship.”

Even more importantly, peace is not an absence of risk or vulnerability. Indeed, some commentators on this passage we heard from John’s gospel detect a sly political resistance from Jesus here: “I do not give you peace as the world gives it.” This comment may refer to the Pax Romana imposed among his people and beyond, “peace through strength,” peace through domination and intimidation, supposed superiority. I am at peace because I have subdued my enemies.

In a funny way, my relationship with my inbox is partly characteristic of a desire for this distorted experience of peace. If there are no messages in my inbox, it’s representative of there being no demands on my time that I haven’t already consented to, no thorny strategic quandaries I might choose the wrong approach to tackling, no new worst-case scenarios to anticipate.

Caesar though I am not, an empty inbox still makes me feel like I’m in control of my own destiny—at least until that next pull request to Google’s mail servers.

**

Peace is not an absence but a presence. Peace is noticing our anxieties, our vulnerabilities, and our conflicts—and trusting that there in the midst them is the God who has promised to be with us always.

Peace as presence is the presence of mind that helps us put our day-to-day concerns in their proper perspective. Or when we cannot do so on our own, it draws us out of ourselves to seek support and insight from others, including people who love us and know us well.

Peace as presence is accepting that we can be incomplete and still be whole, never fully arriving, but at home with God nonetheless. Jesus gives the disciples his peace toward the end of his earthly ministry, but it is only the beginning of theirs. The peace of Christ is how they will learn to live with the mistakes they continue to make, to love the vocation they have been called to and yet will deny them the control that false peace promises.

Peace as presence is the moment just after a long, slow, calming, healing breath—even when our next breath may have an altogether different character. Peace is both that fleeting and that available. But because its true source is God, and not our circumstances or our ourselves, by grace it can find a home in us.

Lamb of God

The multivalent Lamb of God

Kyle

A sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C:

Acts 9:36-43; Psalm 23; Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30

**

In January of 2011, I spent two weeks in Rome on a study trip, pondering the paradoxes of the Eternal City.

My most fond and vivid and absurd memory of the trip took place on January 21 just outside the city walls. On the Feast of St. Agnes we attended a kind of unhinged liturgy at the minor basilica that bears the martyr’s name.

When we arrived our professor ducked into the church to scout things out. He exited smiling and bewildered: “You’re not gonna believe what you see in there,” he said.

What we saw, was a pair of aging nuns smiling and cooing at the guests of honor presumably in their charge: Two tiny lambs, in a basket, on, like, a pillar, surrounded by flowers, red ribbons around their necks. It didn’t take us long to realize they had definitely been drugged—the lambs, that is. They were awake, but struggling to keep their little eyes open.

Fans of Latin puns, apparently, Roman Christians choose the feast of St. Agnes to set aside these two adorable agnus—OK, agni—whose wool is then sheared and woven into a special stole-like vestment worn only by the pope and his most senior cardinals around the world.

This isn’t the only absurd bit of lamb related symbolism in the history of Christian art and ritual. Far from it. I dare you to Google “Ghent altarpiece” sometime and tell me that self-serious lamb standing on the altar bleeding into a chalice isn’t just bonkers.

Or perhaps you’ve seen stained glass windows depicting the Lamb of God carrying a banner with a red cross. Except, of course, lambs don’t have hands, and so it sort of hooks the staff under its raised and bent foreleg. “OK, fair enough while standing still,” I always think. “But then how does it lead it’s army or procession or—wait, what is this banner even for again?”

**

It wouldn’t be the Fourth Sunday of Easter without at least a little bit of this kind of confusion: Are we the sheep? Is Jesus the sheep? I thought he was the shepherd? Except for that time when he says he’s the … gate?

Behold the lamb (it’s Jesus). Feed my lambs (says Jesus). And on and on we could we could go.

In my view, any time the scriptures start resorting to mixed metaphors—which is often—there’s probably a mystery to explore that just won’t be contained by tidy, systematic thinking.

In the case of this morning’s gloriously bizarre scene from the Revelation to John, the mystery is the very contradictions at the heart of salvation: life AND death, strength AND weakness, victory AND defeat, glory AND humility:

They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb

for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life and wipe away every tear from their eyes.

Jesus is the Good Shepherd precisely because he knows what it is like to be the sheep silent before its shearers. The Lamb of God at the center of the throne is worthy of glory and praise precisely because he did not grasp at glory and praise. Christ tramples down death by death in order to bestow new life.

**

The possibility that suffering can be redemptive; the promise that the last will be first and the meek shall inherit the earth; the audacious confidence that love can cast out fear—

—these are convictions both paradoxical and foolhardy, practically offensive to hold and to proclaim in the face of empire and of capitalism run amok, of terrorism and white supremacy and police brutality, of campaigns and everyday practice in this nation and in this city that seem more intent on containing violence and poverty and homelessness and drug abuse than actually eliminating them.

And yet you may know, or you may be, or you may long to be, one of those followers of the Risen Christ, or one of those kindred spirits from diverse faiths or no faith, who hold and proclaim these foolish convictions anyway.

“Who are these, robed in white?” the elder asks John. They are our spiritual forebearers, who saw the seeming impossibility of hope and yet dared to trust that heaven’s bounty is in fact already breaking through the earthly veil.

It’s fine if we’re not there with them right now. Most days I’m not, if I’m honest.

And still we pray that this season of the resurrection may be a time when we learn, or learn anew, to join our voices and our deeds to that great multitude clothed in the garments of salvation.

Image: “Lamb of God” by Fr. Lawrence Lew, O.P. via Flickr (CC BY ND NC 2.0)

Life of Mary Magdalene - Find your Mary moment

Find your ‘Mary moment’

Kyle

A sermon for Easter Sunday, Year C:

Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:19-26; John 20:1-18

**

I had some friends in and after college who went to work on political campaigns full-time. It took them weeks to recover from the post-election funk when their candidates lost.

And who can blame them? They put so much of themselves into a cause, into uniting the community around a person they’d come to believe in.

They canvassed. They phone banked. They subsisted entirely on pizza, turkey sandwiches, and whatever was left in the headquarters’ vending machine.

Long days. Late nights. A marathon of sprints. And then finally the polls opened, the people spoke, the votes were counted—and they found out it had all been for naught.

Now imagine what it might have felt like for one of them to be awoken the next morning, post-election hangover just setting in, to find out that a best friend or sibling had died unexpectedly.

That’s gotta be something like the level of distress and trauma experienced by the disciples in the aftermath of the crucifixion. A grassroots religious project and a life-changing intimate fellowship both utterly destroyed by the brutality of an occupier state.

**

One of the great mysteries of the scriptures is why the disciples never recognize the resurrected Christ when he appears to them. Without wanting to rule out any of the more intriguing theories, I kinda think it was pure shock and exhaustion. Like those campaign workers and worse, they were a mess.

Consider Mary Magdalene. She’s just discovered an empty tomb, run across town to get Peter and John, and then had to put up with their cryptic responses to what she still very sensibly thinks is seriously distressing news.

She came to care for Jesus’s body. But someone has apparently stolen it, and she’s alone, and in the dark, and she can’t do the job she’s come to do, and so she’s probably playing back the scenes of the past few days again, and ooph I know I would crying. And I know none of this would help me with clear vision or critical faculties.

Of all the post-resurrection mistaken identity encounters, this one just has to be the most reasonable. And with Jesus now on the scene, asking her whom she is looking for, notice what cuts through her quite understandable haze of grief and frustration.

“Mary!”

He speaks her name.

And just like that, she is a new creation, like the garden blooming around her. Just like that she becomes the apostle to the apostles.

Not only does she recognize him, she addresses him first and immediately not by his name; and not as Lord or “my Lord and my God,” as Thomas will later exclaim, but as teacher, or perhaps in the Aramaic “my teacher.”

Jesus is the teacher. Mary is the disciple. He calls her by name. And then he sends her off as the first witness of the Resurrected Christ, to tell the other disciples, “I have seen the Lord!”

This brings John’s Gospel full circle, a sly reference to Andrew and Peter’s call to be disciples all the way back in chapter 1. Jesus asks whom they are looking for. They too recognize him as “teacher,” first responding and then passing on his invitation to “come and see.”

**

We’re standing in this church because they did. And especially because she did. They and countless others. Again and again and again and again and again the chain of witness has gone unbroken.

Come and see the one who has changed our lives. Come and meet the community that welcomed me with open arms. Come and learn how loving and serving God and neighbor leads to life in abundance.

“We disciples are witnesses,” says Peter to the gathered friends and family of Cornelius, a Roman army officer. This is in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, the account of that first generation of witness and the many strange places God led the disciples to share it. In this case, God had heard Cornelius’s prayers and sent a vision that he should invite Peter to come and lead his household into a deeper faith. They would become the first Gentile Christians.

“My friends and I are witnesses,” says Peter, “to the life and death and resurrection of God’s chosen messenger, God’s very Son, who came among us for the work of healing and liberation and who guides our ministry still. Today, that ministry has brought me to your household. Today, you too will become witnesses to power of the Holy Spirit at work in the world. Today you have received this grace as gift; tomorrow, you will share it freely with all who need it.”

**

God’s grace is free gift, offered to all, and today of all days we rejoice and give thanks for its abundance. God’s grace is a free gift, but like our forebears in faith, tomorrow we have work to do.

To be a Christian is to join the current generation of witnesses to the loving, liberating, life-giving work of God. That work has been revealed to us, embodied for us, in Jesus Christ our friend and our savior, and embodied as well in the work of the church, Christ’s imperfect but still desperately needed presence in the world today.

You don’t need much to be a disciple, to be a witness. The call is easy: you’ve heard it. You’re here.

The testimony, the content of our witness, the stuff of our faith, most of us find that a bit more challenging, especially if we’re aware of the baggage so many people carry about God or church. And especially if we carry that baggage ourselves.

Here’s a place you can begin to claim your witness: Find your Mary moment. When has God called you by name?

I don’t mean, “When did you hear Jesus’s literal voice in the early-morning darkness?” Not necessarily. You don’t need to have seen visions of angels.

But your Mary moment might have been an unexpected experience of relief or presence or hope during a particularly desperate hour. Perhaps it came in the aftermath of some campaign or project or period in your life when things had gone off the rails.

Perhaps your Mary moment was an experience or pure joy and exuberance, perhaps an opportunity to serve or be in relationship in a new way. Finding meaningful work. Meeting a future spouse. Meeting your child for the first time, or seeing them again after a long absence. A transcendent encounter with art or music or nature or an old friend or a total stranger.

Perhaps your Mary moment was much more mundane. We can meet the Risen Christ in quite ordinary experiences. Where there is love, where there is freedom, where there is change for the better—God cannot be far away, though we often overlook this, or forget to remember.

Let this joyful Eastertide be for us a time of remembering, and sharing, and being curious. A time of giving thanks. A time for letting God’s healing waters flow over us once again.

We disciples have work to do: for each other, for our neighbors, for our environment, for the world.

Nothing less than Good News recognized and claimed, nothing less than the joy of witness, will empower us to do that work.

We will know the resurrection when we hear Christ call our names.

Image: “Mary Telling the Apostles of the Resurrection” by James McNellis via Flickr (CC BY NC ND 2.0)

Christus Rex for Good Friday sermon

A sermon for Good Friday

Kyle

A sermon for Good Friday:

Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10:16-25; John 18:1-19:42

My teacher and later colleague Tony Lewis once talked to our class about the “holy incomprehensibility” of the liturgy.

He didn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t understand the words of these ancient prayers. I think he meant that the density of them is part of the point.

The Wisdom of Sirach says of God “We could say more but we could never say enough,” and sometimes it feels like the people who wrote the collects decided to try anyway. Many of our prayers sort of burst over with meaning, the ever-flowing-stream of them contributing to the sense of mystery and majesty.

Here’s one of the so-called Solemn Collects that we’ll pray later in the service:

Gracious God, the comfort of all who sorrow, the strength of all who suffer: Let the cry of those in misery and need come to you, that they may find your mercy present with them in all their afflictions; and give us, we pray, the strength to serve them for the sake of him who suffered for us, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Probably not the most grammatically complex collect, but not one I’d want to read cold.

Or here’s the one that kicks off the season of Lent on Ash Wednesday:

Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent: Create and make [really?!] in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of you, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

It’s easy enough for our ears to get calibrated to subclauses on subclauses, and, in this season, to a thoroughly Lenten focus on our wretched tendency to separate ourselves from God and one another.

And so it shocks me anew each year when the dramatic and often overwhelming Good Friday liturgy begins with these simple words:

Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross

It’s uncharacteristically simple, and the “ask” is easy to miss: Behold us. Behold your family.

That may be because the bigger ask, the more urgent and weighty petition, comes at the end of the Good Friday service:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death.

This is the day when we bear witness to the lengths Jesus was willing to go to in order to disclose God’s love to us, the day when he fulfilled the prophecy that matters most: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

See us, we pray. And then regardless of what you have seen, draw us near—in the very arms of your saving embrace.

For all the dangers of John’s Gospel and especially its Passion—and especially today we cannot ignore the danger of turning Jewish people then or now into the very kinds of scapegoats that the Jewish and Gentile leaders made Jesus out to be—for all the dangers of John’s Gospel, its great and abiding gift is to show us this: that God in Christ feely chose to walk this path.

He carried his own Cross along the way to Golgotha, John tells us.

His defense before the authorities was nothing but transparency: “I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple … I have said nothing in secret.”

Jesus chooses to stand in solidarity: to take on the human condition, to consort with all sorts and conditions, and then on Good Friday to stand—arms outstretched, voice clear and strong, below the words that Pilot has written both in mockery and as a show of what he believes to be true power—he chooses to stand there reigning from the Cross: “born for this, he meets his passion / this the Savior freely willed.”

He is precisely not “a lamb to the slaughter” as we commonly use that expression, a victim sweetly unaware. I think of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Christ figure Aragorn, riding out in regal dignity to the final fight he knows he will win by losing.

The more Jesus is mistreated, the more his testimony proves true. The more Jesus is mistreated, the wider the circle of redemption is drawn drawn.

  • He accepts betrayal from his inner circle.
  • He accepts indifference from his most zealous follower.
  • He accepts brutality at the hands of law enforcement.
  • He accepts manipulation by the leaders of an occupied people trying to consolidate their tenuous authority.
  • He accepts murder at the hands of an empire too besotted by its own power to remember its genesis and genius was power of the people, not power over them.

As he accepts the mistreatment, he embraces the perpetrators—not, I think, as an example for us to follow, in this case, but as a part of his royal decree of solidarity. He forgives our cruelty and our moral inattention, even as he calmly attends to our suffering and brokenness. The love of God in Christ can bear all things.

And then at the last, in words whose very grammar in the Greek communicate the sense of “once for all,” the King decides his work is complete. “It is finished,” he says simply, and bows his head.

And so we bow ours as well, in awe and in gratitude, learning on this day and throughout our days to accept the holy, incomprehensible gift:

Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle;
of the mighty conflict sing;
tell the triumph of the victim,
to his cross thy tribute bring.
Jesus Christ, the world’s Redeemer
from that cross now reigns as King.

Preached Good Friday, 2019, at Trinity+St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco.

Image: “christus rex” by Megan via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Branches for Palm Sunday

Salvation all the while: Palm Sunday according to Luke

Kyle

Since late January I’ve been preaching weekly as a long-term supply priest at Trinity+St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco. It’s been mostly from the aisle with no notes, but you can watch/listen here. For Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter, at least, I’ve returned to manuscripts …

A sermon for Palm Sunday, Year C:

Luke 19:28-40; Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 22:14-23:56

**

Scene: Jesus sends his disciples to fetch a donkey he knows will be tied up near near the entrance of the city. Although he does not seek the kind of glory he knows the crowds will shower upon him, he is mindful of how the stories of scripture shape his community’s imagination. He expects they will miss the prophet’s point about the necessary humility of anyone who would claim to be the Messiah. He honors their expectations anyway.

Scene: A pair of teachers with long beards and fine robes sidle up beside our Lord’s humble beast of burden. One of the men is pointing straight in Jesus’s face, barely keeping his anger in check; the other keeps looking anxiously over his shoulder, watching the teenagers who have no cloaks pulling down frond after frond and running ahead to toss them in the road. The teachers tell Jesus to get his people under control. He tells them “you don’t know the half of it,”: all creation is longing for the promised redemption.

Scene: Jesus and his friends share a meal, balancing his desire to enjoy a final night with them and the need to prepare them for all that is to follow. “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” Already he is giving them all that he has and all that he is. They get into an argument about who is the greatest. He sighs, smiles, begins again.

Scene: Simon Peter sees clearly enough the severity of the situation unfolding before them, and he boldly declares his commitment to the cause. His loving teacher knows the disciple doesn’t see within himself quite so cleary. Still, he trusts his friend to do what is right when he comes to himself, and he offers a preemptive word of encouragement and de facto forgiveness.

Scene: Jesus raises his voice for the first time all evening when he realizes his disciples have taken all that sword talk too literally. He reflexively heals the bystander his friends have maimed—and as he does so, he realizes it’s the last time power will go forth from him in quite this way.

Scenes: Though his hands are now bound, still in his final hours Jesus witnesses with his words. While he refuses to claim the kingship the rulers and their handlers have in mind as they interrogate and mock him, he is regal in his compassion to the last: “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me”; “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”; “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Scenes: A good and righteous Jewish man who shares a name with another who proved similarly trustworthy, Joseph of Arimathea receives and lays to rest the body. The women who were Jesus’ companions, and who were not so easily scared off as his male disciples, bear their own witness to the body and make their preparations according to the custom of their people. And then like Joseph, like Jesus himself, “On the sabbath they rested according to the commandment.”

**

The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ: According to Luke, it was remarkable, but not exceptional. He had listened in Galilee, so he listens in Jerusalem. He had taught in Galilee, so he teaches in Jerusalem. He had eaten and encouraged and healed and prayed and loved and forgiven and even occasionally rested, and so he continues to eat and encourage and heal and pray and love and forgive and even—when the time comes—offer up his spirit in a kind of ultimate Sabbath rest.

Jesus died exactly how he lived. He used his every human and divine faculty to express and embody and enact the love of God, a love that knows no beginning and no end.

Our various responses to this wondrous love will necessarily be partial, imperfect, halting. And yet respond we must, with the practices Jesus taught us, with listening, teaching, shared meals, words of encouragement, healing touch, and all the rest. Whatever we can do to show God’s love to our neighbor. Whatever we can do to emulate God’s forgiveness. Whatever we can do to overcome alienation from ourselves, from our families, from our neighborhoods, from our fellow citizens of the world, from the very earth itself.

Whenever you hear the Gospel, any gospel, any story of our Lord, remember that Jesus lived and died for us to show us the Way of Love, which is our help and our salvation. Don’t feel as if you need master that Way; it has already been mastered.

But when you hear the Gospel, any gospel, listen for that still, small voice of Christ whispering those words of challenge, encouragement, and power: go and do likewise.

Jesus probably won’t ask you to die for him. He will most certainly ask you to live for him.

Photo by Raquel Pedrotti on Unsplash

Lauren & Veronica recording

Introducing Faith-Adjacent

Kyle

(Inbox-friendly link to episode.)

This is the pilot episode of Faith-Adjacent, a podcast about my ongoing dissertation research at Teachers College, Columbia University. I prepared it both to launch the eventual series itself and to share at the Ethnography and Education Forum February 22-23 at the University of Pennsylvania. For more context, read the brief narrative at the end of these show notes.

You can see slides from a more traditional academic presentation of this research at prayr.cc/space-heard. The photo Lauren talks about is in slide 5.

Learn more about digital storytelling at storycenter.org. Learn more about me and subscribe to my Learning, Faith, & Media Newsletter at kyleoliver.net.

References and further reading:

Ackermann E. K. (2007) Experiences of artifacts: People’s appropriations / objects’ “affordances”. In: Glasersfeld E. (Ed.) Key works in radical constructivism* (pp. 249–259). Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

Hess, M. E. (2012). Mirror neurons, the development of empathy, and digital story telling. Religious Education, 107, 401–414.

Lambert, J. (2012). Digital storytelling: Capturing lives, creating community*. New York, NY: Routledge.

* Full disclosure: Affiliate link.

As many of you know, I’m in the process of framing and proposing my dissertation.

I study with educational ethnographer Lalitha Vasudevan and am living into an ethnography practice based on a framework she and her colleagues call “research pedagogies.” Basically the idea is to take a participatory and multimodal stance to “embedded” research.

I hang out. I ask a lot of questions. I teach and facilitate media production. I care (always “about” and sometimes “for”) the people I meet.

Last summer I conducted a pilot study in a faith-adjacent setting, a sort of test drive for the approach I’m hoping to take. I wrote a really long paper about it and presented data and analysis at the Religious Education Association annual conference.

But even good academic papers can be excruciating, and they often require jumping through theoretical hoops that kind of systematically deter practitioners from reading them.

Moreover, my research is all about making meaning in the midst of making media. I spent the better part of a week transcribing hours of audio recordings from the pilot, plus I have the media my participants created themselves.

This seemed like a good opportunity to try something different.

So a couple weeks back, I presented at the Ethnography in Education Forum in Philadelphia a short pilot episode of a podcast I’m calling Faith-Adjacent. It’s a show about media, meaning, and what we used to call religious education (and currently call faith formation, and will probably be calling something else as church and society continue their inevitable march of change).

I’ve got at least some sense of where I’m heading with this, but I don’t want it to just be “the podcast version of my pilot study write-up” (and soon of the dissertation itself). So I welcome your feedback on this short piece of media, which is already pretty high on the list of things I’m proud to have made.

Please let me know what you think!