Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Lay Homily by Mark Lloyd Taylor
The Fourth Sunday After Pentecost – Proper 9B
July 6, 2003

Four years ago, I spent the end of June and the beginning of July at a research library in a small town in southeastern Minnesota with a dozen or so other scholars from the United States and Europe. I also sought out the little Episcopal Church in town – attending Eucharist on Sundays and Morning Prayer on Wednesdays throughout my three-week stay. It just so happened that in 1999 the 4th of July fell on a Sunday – my last Sunday in Minnesota. It was also the Sunday on which Pia and Tonny, scholars from Denmark, made good on their promise to go to church with me. These two visitors from a foreign country were surprised by the blending of Christian faith and worship with United States national identity they experienced; surprised that Independence Day counts as a major feast on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church; surprised that the collect and lessons for a Sunday Eucharist would be those appointed for the national holiday; surprised to see an American flag standing near the front of a Christian church. I tried to tell Pia and Tonny that the practices of this small church in a small town in the American heartland would not necessarily be typical of those across the Episcopal Church. But I also had to admit that this parish’s way of combining being Christian and being American was no more unique than the barbeque, concert of patriotic music, and fireworks display in the town’s public park that evening.

How are you, how are we, experiencing this Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, which happens to fall on the 6th of July, two days after Independence Day in 2003? What does it mean for us to gather as Christians and as Americans – or as Canadians or citizens of other nations – but especially as Americans? How does our gathering today in the name of God–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit relate to the speeches and citizenship oaths of the 4th of July? How does our gathering around the table of the Lord Jesus through the waters of baptism intersect our being citizens of the United States after September 11, 2001, during and after the wars on terrorism and against Iraq, the Patriot Act and Patriot Act II? I don’t know about you, but I hear in today’s lessons from Ezekiel and Mark reminders, even warnings, to us as American Christians.

Our Old Testament lesson begins in the middle of a longer story. God says to Ezekiel, “O mortal, stand up on your feet, and I will speak with you” (Ezekiel 2:1). Just before today’s reading picked up the story, Ezekiel had fallen on his face, awe-struck by the first of his many visionary experiences, a vision that inaugurated his prophetic work. What does Ezekiel see? What does Ezekiel not see? He has a vision of God, but one that reinforces the basic Hebrew conviction that God is and remains beyond human powers of vision and expression.

Ezekiel sees a dark storm cloud and then fire, with something like four living creatures of human form in its midst – each creature with four wings and four faces, the faces of a human being, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. Next he catches a vision of something like wheels within wheels beside each of the four creatures; then, over their heads, something like a crystal dome; and above the dome, well let me read it to you: “And above the dome over their heads there was something like a throne, in appearance like sapphire; and seated above the likeness of a throne was something that seemed like a human form. Upward from what appeared like the loins I saw something that looked like fire, and there was a splendor all around. Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendor all around. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD” (Ezekiel 1:26-28).

How indirect this vision! How elusive this God! Not a vision of God’s face, but the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. The God who appears to the prophet cannot be contained or controlled or possessed by human beings. This visible and yet invisible, present and yet absent God gives the prophet his commission: “Mortal, I am sending you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have transgressed against me to this very day. The descendents are impudent and stubborn” (2:3-4). But the one-line message Ezekiel is to deliver lacks any specific content: “I am sending you to them, and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God’” (4). No particular demands or promises, just the act and fact of God’s speaking. Nothing but the reminder that there is a God above and beyond the people of Israel and all their religious, political, and social institutions.

This lesson from Ezekiel reminds us Americans on this July 4th weekend of God’s voice and presence above and beyond our history, our government, our political system – however good or bad – and it recalls us to loyalty to God’s righteousness above and beyond all patriotic loyalty to our homeland. Ezekiel warns us against turning God into a nationalistic rabbit’s foot or idol. God is the God of all the nations – no one people can claim an exclusive, proprietary relationship to God.

Today’s gospel also begins with a pointer back to a previous set of stories. “Jesus left that place and came to his hometown” (Mark 6:1). Where had Jesus been before coming to Nazareth? Mark 5 tells us that Jesus had been crossing back and forth over the Sea of Galilee – between the familiar Hebrew west side of the lake and the foreign Gentile east side. On both sides, Jesus meets people in desperate need. On the Gentile side, beyond the bounds of his own country, Jesus meets the man possessed by a legion of demons who lives among the tombs in unrestrained and self-destructive madness. Jesus restores the man to himself. Then, back on the Jewish side of the lake, Jesus meets Jairus the synagogue ruler whose daughter is near death, and agrees to go help, only to be delayed by a bleeding woman, an unclean women, who touches Jesus, thereby polluting him even as she receives healing for herself. Amazingly, Jesus assures the woman that all is well and then proceeds to bring Jairus’ daughter back, the girl having died in the meantime.

Each of these three people, the demon possessed man, the bleeding woman, and the dying girl, lay outside the boundaries of what Jesus’ society would have considered valuable or important. By healing them, Jesus demonstrates the universal and inclusive love of God, a love that extends far beyond human boundaries of clean and unclean, male and female, adult and child, Jew and Gentile, my people and those other people.

It is just after performing these acts of divine generosity that Jesus comes back to his hometown, to his homeland, comes back among his own people. He is not welcomed with joy as the messiah, the one anointed to bring good news to all God’s people, to all people. Hearing Jesus, the good citizens of Nazareth grumble: “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us? And they took offense at him” (Mark 6:2-3). The good citizens of Nazareth are scandalized; they find Jesus beyond the boundaries of propriety. In Luke’s version of the story, they are so angry that they try to throw Jesus off the brink of the hill on which Nazareth is built. Jesus’ compassion meets such violent opposition, such a rigid stance of us versus them, in Nazareth that the healing power of God itself is almost completely quenched. “’Prophets are not without honor,’ Jesus remarks, “except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their house.’ And he could not do any deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief” (4-6).

How painfully applicable to the United States in 2003 on this Independence Day weekend. The God embodied in Jesus is one who reaches out to the least desirable people, the least appropriate, according to our chauvinistic schemas. The gospel warns us not to greet the messianic ones among us who reach out beyond the boundaries with violence. We are warned not to quench the prophetic spirit, even when it comes too close for comfort, even when it scandalizes us. Today’s gospel invites us to join with Jesus in casting out demons, in restoring those who live among the dead, in assuring those stigmatized as unclean that their faith in God’s love has made them well.

A single sentence in the second century Christian document called the Letter to Diognetus captures for me the paradoxical stance of the Christian toward society and government. This statement was made at a time when Christians were a tiny, non-conformist minority within the Roman Empire. But it still seems relevant for us all-too-often complacent Christians living privileged lives in the global economic, political, and military empire that is the United States. The author of the Letter is defending Christians against the charge that they live separated off from the rest of the world in withdrawn communities. The point is that Christians can and must be fully present in human society and yet are always guided by a gospel that differs from all other social norms. Here’s the sentence – I almost wish it could be made into a bumper sticker, an alternative to other patriotic slogans.

Christians can and should be at home, can and should be active participants in any society, under any form of government. The Christian calling is not different in post-Gulf War USA than it is in post-Gulf War Iraq; it was the same in the United States of the 1970s and El Salvador of the 1970s, the Soviet Union of the 1950s, Nazi Germany of the 1930s, the United Kingdom of the 1890s, and so on: to love God with one’s whole self and to love one’s neighbor as one’s self. But the sentence goes on: the Christian will never be fully at home in any society or under any form of government, because each and every human government and society falls short of God’s kingdom, the reign of God’s justice and peace.

So, we are challenged to make the United States truly our homeland; to live more deeply than the flags and the fireworks and the rhetoric; to embrace and renew our founding documents and institutions. We are challenged to be active citizens, taking responsibility for our heritage and our political system. But then we are also challenged to let go of the United States, to let go of our homeland, as if it were God’s sole dwelling place on earth, and see it as a foreign country, acknowledging the distance between our country’s actions and attitudes and the gospel – especially the recent erosion of basic constitutional rights and our increasingly aggressive and arrogant relationship to the rest of the world. We are challenged to claim an ultimate citizenship in God’s kingdom – not as Americans, but as human beings. If we were to do so, then we might begin to see Iraq and Iran and Liberia and France and all the countries of the world as our adopted homelands, places where fellow children of God, our brothers and sisters, live.

The 1982 Episcopal Hymnal in front of you concludes with a small collection of national hymns. I recall that several were sung at that 4th of July Eucharist in Minnesota four years ago. I would like to leave you with a different national hymn, one that cannot be found in our hymnal, but has made it into the New Century Hymnbook of the United Church of Christ. The words were written back in the 1930s between the two world wars, but still ring true today. They also put into poetic form the truth of the Letter to Diognetus that every foreign country is a homeland to the Christian, and every homeland a foreign country. The hymn celebrates and expresses gratitude for our particular place on the earth, our country, and our particular national heritage, even as it confesses with Ezekiel and Jesus the universal and inclusive scope of God’s justice and love. I offer you its two stanzas as a prayer for us in the United States on this 4th of July weekend, during and after the wars on terrorism and against Iraq, the Patriot Act and Patriot Act II, almost two years after September 11, 2001: