Calvary Episcopal Church - Memphis, TN

Where does God live?

If Church is somehow still of use to lives like yours and like mine, surely it must be as a place where whatever we’re afraid of doesn’t send us away from each other or set us at odds, but breaks us open to the God-given humanity we all share.

The Jesus who turned over the tables of the money-changers in the temple is the same Jesus who healed and hugged lepers. His anger propels us to challenge injustices in ways that orient all of us toward loving and serving others, especially those we see as hardest to love.

What if David is a man after God’s own heart in that David’s heart, at least on one eventful day, was capable of change?

This is a sermon about learning from women who stood at the edge of before and after and who found God there. This is a sermon about history and about the future, because this is a sermon about the eve of something - who knows what?

Maybe faith, then, is less about believing a fact about God and more about entrusting God and the people around you with the truth about who you are, your joys, and your needs alike.

Maybe faith, then, is less about believing a fact about God and more about entrusting God and the people around you with the truth about who you are, your joys, and your needs alike.

If we believe, at the bottom of it all, that we are loved unconditionally by God, we can live like we have nothing to lose. We can pray and sing and question and argue like we have nothing to prove.

Perhaps the gospel writer is alluding in the double mention of 12 years that healing does not fully happen in an instant. Healing emerges as multiple layers are unpeeled over time. It happens within and through ongoing relationships.

What if the expansion of our compassion is so important to God that God would rather take the blame for our enemy’s anger than let our anger get the final say in who we believe our enemy to be?

Whether or not you’re a gardener or a farmer, the simple, radical suggestion of this story is that the kingdom is not wholly reliant upon your efforts. In fact, it’s okay if you want to take a nap. I wonder, though, if we can receive this as good news?

Paul sees the mission of Jesus as renewing the unseen foundation of humankind. Christ’s mission teaches us that the pathway to the eternal is not through temporary outward fame or success, but through an inner core of gratitude, humility and service. His mission is to draw us into the ultimate peace that comes from serving a being and a community greater than ourselves.

For all of Eli’s flaws, he is surely a model for any of us called to hold space for anyone else to doubt whatever settled certainty is keeping them from hearing the life God might be calling them to live.

Maybe we could use a reminder that, when we try to talk about God, we are oysters, looking at starfish, trying to imagine a ballerina.

In our lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, the strange signs of wind and fire point not to themselves but to the wild power of the Holy Spirit unleashed not to scatter but to gather, unleashed not to destroy but to re-create.

Jesus says that love is what makes space for the truth to emerge. Love and truth are twin pillars, we might even say, that hold things up so the walls we hide behind can finally come down. Only in truthfulness and love will we become one as Jesus and the God he still draws us to are one.

I don’t always know how to do this: how to love this broken place and these broken people and my own broken self. I’m wondering now if staying put is in and of itself an act of love.

What might it look like if all of the sustaining energy in your life and mine were to come directly from the life of Jesus? So much so that if we were to lose contact with his life, we’d wither? Just as crucially, what is the essential, life-giving energy of Jesus?

In reading or singing of the beautiful imagery of Psalm 23, we may be too quick to enter the realm of metaphor and not appreciate the real places being described. Just as young Joe and Charlie were blessed to grow up in and then fall in love with the Old Forest, we are blessed to have real places to go to in our city to lie down in green pastures, and reflect beside still waters.

Sometimes it’s the certainty that no real mystery remains in our lives, the certainty that we’ve already made enough sense of our world, that keeps us from seeing the strange, wonderful, grace-filled future that’s unfolding before us. And maybe this is why the grace of the resurrection makes its way all the way to us through stories like these.

Jesus wants us to live, not only like we are loved with a love even crucifixion can’t kill, but to live like starry-eyed lovers of this world ourselves, so that all that is best and most beautiful within it can come forth into the space that only love can make.

God promises to sprinkle clean water upon the people, and cleanse them from the idols they had served. As water rushes over a rock, it not only cleanses it, it smooths out its rough, jagged edges over time. The currents of the water slowly open up tiny crevices in the rock for new life to find safe spaces in which to be born.

We are now the ones sitting in the aftermath when nothing will happen for a little while. And we begin to tell the story all over again. This is the work of Good Friday, to be in the scraped-out, empty place and to stay there for a while, for as long as we can stand it.

Perhaps last suppers and hard times are when we especially need to love as though we’re simply obeying a clear and doable command. Perhaps these are the times when we just do the next loving thing we can think of, speak the kind word, wrap a towel around us and serve someone, even when we don’t feel very loving quite yet.

Whether today’s trail is a shortcut through the week or not, the scraps of fabric are blazes, trail markers, pieces of cloth snagged and caught like evidence left behind, signaling that the story went along this path, marking the twists and turns from joy to a supper to a garden, passing through a midnight courtyard to a hill named for a skull to a tomb.