The writing in the letter to the Hebrews can seem overwrought, but the author’s tone makes sense when we understand his intention.  The author, as far as we can tell from the little information the letter gives us, is writing to a group of second generation Christians.  They love Jesus, but they are running out of energy to be Christians.  They have expected Jesus to come back for years and he has never showed up.  The novelty of this new religion is wearing off and the reality of day to day living has set in.  To top it all off, the authorities are beginning to crack down on Christianity and they are frightened.  The author of the Hebrews is exhorting them to hold on, to keep the faith!  He is their coach and their cheerleader.

The Letter to the Hebrews develops all sorts of theological ideas, but the eleventh chapter of Hebrews is all about faith.  This faith is robust!  This faith has legs!  This faith has teeth!  This is the faith of Gideon, Samson, Rahab—heroes of the faith.  The metaphor the author uses is that of a race.  Like a race, faith takes training and an enormous amount of effort.

Now, you all know that our wonderful rector is an accomplished runner.  He runs several times a week and has run several marathons at respectable paces.  Well you may not know that your assistant rector was a runner, too.  More specifically, she was a runner from the fall of 2005 until the spring of 2006.  My brief endeavor as a runner came about because of my next door neighbor and close friend, also named Sarah.  Sarah was the kind of person who did whatever she set her mind to.  Sarah was going to train for the Charlottesville 10 mile race and somehow she talked me into training, too.

Let me tell you, training for a race is no fun.  We ran several times a week, in increasingly large distances.  On Saturdays we woke up when the sun did and met trainers in downtown Charlottesville.  They would yell things like, “Now, run at your fastest pace!  Now, slow down and run at a comfortable pace!  Now, back at the fast pace again!”  The problem was, I only had one pace.  Eleven and half miles a minute.  That was my fast speed and that was my slow speed.  If I did not know Sarah was waiting for me those Saturday mornings, there was no way I would  have gotten out of bed for that torture!

We ran a 10K a few months into our training to get used to a race environment.  Sarah took pity on me and ran at my pace.  We were really slow.  We were so slow that eventually we were the last two runners.  We were so slow that they started pulling up the cones marking the outline of the course before we got to them.  We were so slow that eventually the police car trailing the race pulled alongside of us and said, “Ladies, you can run in the middle of the street if you’d like.  We’ll follow you.”

Humiliating.

But we did not quit.  Thanks to Sarah’s constant encouragement and occasional bullying, I kept training.  I did not get any faster.  My form did not get any more elegant.  My knees and shoulders did not get any less sore. But on April the 1^st, 2006, I ran that ten mile race.  The crowds lined up on sidewalks cheered us on and helped me to go that much further. With Sarah’s coaching and the crowd’s encouragement, I hobbled to the finish line.

The metaphor of a race for our faith is apt.  Faith takes a lot of work.  Faith takes encouragement.  Faith takes discipline.  But like training for a race, we are not alone.

In the race metaphor, Jesus is our coach.  Jesus has run the race ahead of us, knows what to expect, and runs by our side telling us when to speed up or slow down.  Jesus encourages us when we are frustrated and gives us a boost when we are ready to give up.   Hebrews says that Jesus is the pioneer and perfector of our faith.  He shows us how to follow God—even if it leads to a cross.  Jesus shows us what it means to be faithful, what it means to have an intimate relationship with God.  When we lose our way, we can read the Bible and be reminded of Jesus’ faithfulness, which will help us to be faithful.  And when we can’t live up to the kind of faith we want to have, Jesus’ grace covers us, helping us to cross the finish line.

The crowd that cheers on the racers is the cloud of witnesses.  The cloud of witnesses are the Saints that surround us—David, Samuel, the Prophets—and the millions of ordinary people of faith who have and who are running the race before and with us.  When we read a biography of Augustine, or Dr. King’s letters, or read the notes in the bibles of our own faithful grandmothers, we are encouraged that people have been living in our complicated world for millennia and have been able to follow God no matter what the circumstances.

We in the church are part of this cloud of witnesses, too.  We are each other’s cheerleaders.  When one of us cannot pray, we pray for her.  When one of us needs to talk through a theological issue, we listen.  When someone is discouraged in his study of the bible, we encourage him.  We need each other to live lives faithful to God.

Where the race metaphor breaks down is that in a physical race, the goal is to win, to beat everyone else, to be first.  The wonderful thing about God, is that even if we are the very last person in the race of faith, hobbling along after everyone else, we still get to cross the finish line and get welcomed into the Kingdom of God.  Faith looks a lot more like a race in the Special Olympics, where participants have no problem stopping to help a runner who has fallen, or linking arms so runners can cross the finish line together.  Faith is a race, but it is not a competition.

Our culture treats religion and spirituality as if they are private, personal, individual activities.  But in the Bible, faith is always a community activity.  God appears to individuals, but only in their roles as representatives of their communities.  One cannot truly be Christian if one is not in Christian community of some kind.  But our community is not limited to the people with whom we attend church.  We are in community with Christians all over the world, and with those who have gone before us.  Every Sunday in the Eucharistic prayer we say, “Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven.”  That company of heaven is all the believers that have gone before us, who have already run the race and have achieved their prize.  When we gather to receive communion, they gather with us.

And it is this image that helped those early Christians hold on.  Those early Christians held on to the faith, they finished the race, even when threatened with imprisonment and death.  And now they are part of that cloud of witnesses that urges us to hold on, to have faith, no matter how difficult that may seem.

Amen.

I am one of two sisters.  My parents, wary of the tensions that can rise between sisters, treated us extremely fairly.  If one of us got a Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas, we both got a Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas.  When I was ten, I received a portable stereo.  When my sister was ten, she received a portable stereo.  When I graduated from college, they generously gave me a silver Honda Civic.  When my sister graduated from college they gave her a silver Honda Civic.  You get the idea!

Their experiment was a success.  My sister and I have an extremely close, loving, supportive, non-competitive relationship.  But, even in this story of an extremely loving, healthy family, I still felt jealousy.  How you ask?  How could I feel jealous when my sister received the exact same presents that I did?  Well, you see, Marianne is my younger sister.  When I received that stereo, it only had a tape player, because my father thought CDs were just a fad.  My sister, four years younger, got the CD player.  And while our Honda Civics looked identical, my younger sister’s Honda Civic had automatic windows and cruise control.  While I was not caught up in a violent fit of jealousy, I could feel little pinpricks of covetousness for what my sister had.  (In the end, of course, things all work out.  Last year when we moved to New Jersey, I bought my sister’s 8 year old Honda Civic and now I have automatic windows and cruise control and she has the New York subway system!)

Competition between siblings is as old as the relationship between Cain and Abel.  There is something about that first peer relationship that makes us just a little crazy.  Especially if money is involved.

Our passage from the Gospel of Luke today is almost comic.  Right before this brother interrupts Jesus, Jesus has been speaking to the crowd about really lofty, opaque, theological ideas.  He has just said,

And everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.

I picture Jesus saying those words in a booming voice and then looking around at the crowd meaningfully, hoping to see some nods of recognition.  Instead he gets a guy saying, “Hey—make my brother share the family inheritence!”

In retrospect, Jesus’ response is incredibly kind.  I would have been tempted to say, “Are you even listening to me, you jerk?”

Jesus, like a wise mother, does not take sides in the argument.  He does not ask to hear the details.  He does not ask the man to read the text of the will.  He does not cluck his tongue in sympathy.

Instead, Jesus tells a parable about a perfectly nice farmer who had a very good harvest and wanted to build more barns to store the harvest in, so he could just relax and enjoy the rest of his life.

That basically sums up our lives, doesn’t it?  We open retirement accounts and emergency savings accounts and 529s to save for our children’s education.  We become priests in the Episcopal Church and think about that nice pension we’re going to get starting in 2035.  Oh, well, maybe that part is just me.  I’ll be honest with you, I already know what retirement community I want to join.  Westminster-Canterbury rests in the hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  You can start out in a free standing home, then move to an apartment, then to assisted living and end up in the Alzheimer’s unit, if you need to.  They have an art studio, a pool, a gym, a beauty parlor and a pretty tasty cafeteria.  I have it all figured out.  I’ll convince my best friends to move there and we’ll end our lives sitting on porches, telling stories, and playing bridge. My grandchildren, who will adore me and write me letters weekly, will visit three or four times a year.  And then one day, when I feel that I’ve lived a good long life, I will die peacefully in my sleep.  It’s going to be great!

Unfortunately for me, and the farmer, life isn’t that simple.  The farmer is not portrayed as a villain and yet in the parable God yells at him!  God says, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”  God reminds the farmer that all our frantic preparation is really for naught.

I can save all the money I want to, but that won’t stop me from dying in a tragic car accident, or getting MS, or having my husband leave me out of the blue, or suddenly having to take care of a sick parent, or giving birth to a disabled child, or having my grandchildren ignore me for the last twenty years of my life.

Money is fantastic for some things.  It can give us a roof over our head, and good food for every meal.  It can buy us clothes that make us feel good about ourselves and vacations that help us discover the world.  Money can pay for surgery, and special schools and therapy.

But ultimately, money can’t protect us.  Money can’t protect us from illness, broken relationships, disappointments, natural disasters.  Money can’t protect us from being held accountable by God.  And money can’t protect us from death.

No matter how much we acquire, we all end up in the same place.  And in that place, the currency we need is not money.  The currency we need in that place, when we stand in the presence of God, is love.  Love for God and love for our neighbor.

I have seen more than one family fall apart after the death of a rich relative.  There is something about an inheritance that brings out the worst in people.  That part of us that longs for the love and approval of the person who dies and the part of us that experiences greed, crash together in the worst of ways.  The brother that asks Jesus to adjudicate his dispute is missing his father, is feeling slighted, and just wants some justice.

But Jesus knows that is not what the brother needs.  The brother will not suddenly receive his father’s love and approval if the money becomes his.  He will not finally feel equal to his brother.  He will not be satisfied.  What the brother really needs to work on is his own heart and internal life.  The brother needs to get re-centered and focused on God.

Warren Buffet has famously informed his family that his vast fortune will be going to charity, not to them and I’m sure many of them were furious when they heard that news.  But in the end, I think Mr. Buffet is doing them a huge favor.  Without the money they will be forced to look into their own hearts.  They will be forced to figure out what their gifts and talents are.  They will be forced to work and be disciplined.  They will be forced to rely on others.  All these things are what help create a moral life, a life of love and respect for others.

The brother in our story today did not get the answer from Jesus for which he had hoped, but he got the answer he needed.

In the same way, when we ask God why we are unemployed, or why our best friend makes so much more than we do, or why our parent cut us out of their will, we are probably not that likely to get a direct answer from God.  However, if we ask God questions about the God’s currency, I’m guessing we’ll hear a reply pretty soon.  If we ask God how we can better love him.  If we ask God, how we can serve the poor better. If we ask God how we can show our families that we would do anything for them.  If we ask God where he wants us to serve him in this world.  If we start asking these kinds of questions, we’ll be amazed at the answers we receive and the life they bring us.

Amen.

Have you heard the story about Capt. Matt Clauer that has been circulating this week?  Capt. Clauer was serving in Iraq last year when he got a frantic phone call from his wife, Mary.  Together, they owned a $300,000 house, for which they had completely paid.  Mary was calling because she had just learned that their Homeowner’s Association had foreclosed on the house, because Mary had neglected to pay the HOA dues two months in a row, worth a total of $800. By the time he returned from Iraq, the house had been sold at auction for $3,500 and resold again for $135,000.  Mary and Matt are still living in the home, and fighting in the court of law to reclaim it.

If they were here today, they probably would have a thing or two they would like to say about neighbors.   I wonder how many of their Texas neighbors, members of the HOA board, are sitting in churches today, listening to the story of the Good Samaritan.   I wonder if the Clauers are in church this morning, hearing this story and wondering how in the heck they are supposed to love neighbors like theirs.

I wonder if any of you, thinking about your neighbors, are wondering how you’re supposed to love them?

That’s the thing about neighbors—they are just around all the time. In Charlottesville, I had a neighbor who always raced at least ten miles over the speed limit through the neighborhood AND who let his dogs poop wherever they wanted without cleaning it up.  He drove me crazy because there was no way I could get away from him.

And neighbors are problem enough, but what about friends and family?  They are really hard to shake off.

I wonder, if in the story, we hear today, whether the priest or the Levite knew the poor unfortunate soul lying in the ditch.  I wonder if they passed by and said, “Oh Frank.  Always getting into trouble.” and walked on by.  I wonder the intimacy, the neighborliness they might have had with our victim actually prevented them from helping.

As lovely as it was for the Samaritan to help this guy, helping a stranger is sometimes easier than helping someone close to you.  If an out of work alcoholic comes by the church needing a little help, we can graciously point him in the direction of several places that can be useful to him.  If I had an out of work alcoholic relative approach me, I’d probably feel a lot less gracious toward them.

When the person in our lives who is in trouble is close to us, we know that there is danger in our lives being disrupted.  If we enter into another person’s crisis, we run the risk of getting entangled in their lives, creating a web of obligations and favors from which we may not be able to extricate ourselves.

And yet, Jesus calls us to be that kind of neighbor.  He calls us to act like the Samaritan, even when we’re not breezing through a strange town.  Even when the person in the ditch lives next door and you well know you might need to pull him out of the ditch a second, or third time.

The Samaritan does set a good example for us in terms of boundaries to help us with these challenges.  The Samaritan does not take the victim home with him.  The Samaritan takes him to an inn, does what first aid he can, makes sure the innkeeper will check on him, and then leaves town.

The Samaritan does not appoint himself the victim’s social worker for life.  He sees an acute crisis and responds.  And then he goes back to Samaria.

Knowing how to respond to a neighbor, friend, or relative in crisis is really difficult.  But knowing what our role is can be helpful.  First of all, it is important to remember that we are not God.  Now, I know that can be difficult to remember, but just absorb it for a minute.  You are not God. Your role is not that of omniscient being who has the power to solve everything.  All we can do is our loving best.

If the crisis happens to our spouse, child or parent, our role may be to function as that person’s advocate, making sure they get to the doctor, to court, or to rehab when they are scheduled to do so.  If the person in crisis is a friend, our role may be that of listener—giving our friend a safe place to express all her fears.  If the person in crisis is a neighbor, our role may be that of practical help—mowing the lawn, bringing over a meal.  Our response will change depending on who is in trouble and what their circumstances are.  Sometimes our response will be pointing our neighbor in the direction of people who can be more helpful than we can.

Whatever our role is, the Good Samaritan challenges us to live out our faith. He challenges us to pay attention to the world around us.  He challenges us to respond to another’s pain, when it would be just as easy to walk on by.  He challenges us to live the way Jesus taught us to live: We shall love the Lord our God with all our hearts, and with all our souls, and with all our strengths, and with all our minds; and our neighbors as ourselves.

Amen.

The word freedom means many different things to many different people in our culture.  Lately there has been a lot of conversation about Stewart Brand’s 1984 speech in which he declared that “information wants to be free”.  (In the same paragraph he said that information also wants to be expensive, but that part of the quote has disappeared in our public discourse.)  People are ruminating on whether that sentence means that information is inexpensive, whether information wants to roam without limitations, whether it wants to be politically free.  For twenty-five years we’ve been debating what Brand meant and that is just one use of the word free!  Freedom also has powerful political connotations.  We are the land of the free, we let freedom ring, when we’re mad at France we call our fried potatoes freedom fries.

For us, freedom means we don’t have a King, that we rule ourselves.  But it also means we can do whatever we want and we resent when government interferes with our bodies, our guns, our money.  Freedom evokes summer vacations and the backseats of cars and long stretches of highway.  And sometimes our use of the word freedom makes no sense at all. This week Fox and Friends, a morning cable news show, was doing a Fourth of July food special and they had representatives from the restaurant Hooters there and the news anchor said, “Nothings spells freedom like a Hooters meal.”

In today’s world, and in the ancient world, the word freedom meant many different things to different people.  The apostle Paul knew he had to be careful when he used the word in his letter to the Galatians.

Paul and the Galatians go way back.  Paul started the churches in Galatia and knows them well.  He writes this letter to them out of frustration.  He has heard that since he’s left, some teachers have come to the churches and instructed their members that they must be circumcised and follow more of the Jewish law in order to be Christians.

The letter to the Galatians is argument against circumcision and the need for Christians to follow the Jewish law.  Paul is arguing that following Christ means one no longer has to follow every detail of the Jewish law, because Christ fulfilled the law himself.  However, you can imagine the reaction if one of our modern politician’s platform was to abolish our laws entirely.

We would be upset!  As much as we may talk about freedom in our country, if suddenly murder or theft or brutality was legal, we would be seriously unhappy.  We know that laws are necessary to reign in our wild, jealous, angry, selfish impulses.

In the same way, Paul is predicting his audience’s objections.  Paul knows that the Galatians are afraid if they abolish the law, that people will just run wild!  If there is no law, what is to stop people from adultery and murder and generally bad behavior?

When you are free, it means you used to be bound to something.  In our country’s case, that was English rule.  In the Galatians case, it means the Jewish law.  But Paul explains that in the freedom from Jewish law, they are now bound to something else—each other.  Paul says, “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.”

The thing that will keep the Galatians in check is their love for one another.  When a person acts out of love for the other, he or she will refrain from doing harmful things.  Paul reminds the Galatians that the law can be summed up as “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

In this new freedom, Paul calls them to live in that spirit of love, rather than gratifying everything their bodies might want.   Paul does not want them to be slaves to the Jewish law any more, but he also doesn’t want them to be slaves to their bodies either.  Following the spirit is the third option.

So, what does it mean for us to be free.  Are we slaves to each other in love, or are we yoked to something else?

Somewhere in the last week I read or heard a story about a woman from a Middle Eastern culture who came to the west for the first time and was shopping.  Now we in the West might look at a woman in a head scarf or hijab and feel real pity for the oppression she is under.  We might long to show her the freedom women in the west experience.  This particular Middle Eastern woman was not used to shopping by sizes.  In her home country, she had a relationship with a dressmaker who would make things just for her.  So, she had no idea what size she was.  The shop she was in was pretty fancy and when she asked the shopkeeper for help, the shopkeeper sneered that they did not have sizes that would fit her.  She said that women should be a size six or smaller and if they were not, the store did not carry their size.  At that moment, the woman from the Middle East had an insight.  Western women were just as oppressed as Middle Eastern women—just by a different power.  Western women were oppressed by the cultural pressures to be thin and attractive.  Never before had this woman worried about her shape or her weight.  She had always been at home in her body, but in an instant she saw herself as unworthy and ugly.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that story.  I don’t consider myself enslaved by our culture’s idea of beauty, but I spend well over a thousand dollars every year on haircuts, make up, whitening toothpaste, pedicures, new clothes.  And every morning I spent at least twenty minutes putting on make up, blow drying my hair, straightening it, making sure I’m wearing earrings and clothes that match.  I think sometimes we can be so entrenched in our culture, that we don’t even realize we’re at some level enslaved by it.  I’m certainly not going to experiment with freedom by not grooming myself any more.

We are all bound to things that are not God.  We may be bound to dysfunctional families, our work, expectations that others have for us, expectations that we have for ourselves.  We may be bound to more ominous things: abusive relationships, drugs, alcohol, adulterous sex, power, money.  Trying to extricate ourselves from all these binding things so we can live in the freedom of Christ can be tricky.

Thankfully, Paul gives us markers to look for to see if we’re living into our freedom by following the Spirit.  These markers are a gift from God that are given out of God’s grace. They are the fruits of the Spirit’s work in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Everyone knows someone they think of as a saint.  Some person who is just so kind, it’s almost hard to believe.  Well that person often can be described as having several—if not all—of the characteristics described above.  We are all eligible to receive those gifts—and it starts with choosing the freedom Christ offers us from whatever it is we are bound to.  Christ has the power to unshackle us from whatever we are enslaved to, but then, of course, we are bound to him and bound to one another.

And that may be too threatening for some people.  Being bound to Christ and to other Christians can be challenging.  Real, deep relationships take enormous effort.  Learning to love your neighbor as yourself is no picnic.  Especially when your neighbor is a big pain in the neck.  But that kind of intimacy and conflict and reconciliation are the kind of experiences that start shaping us as people of patience and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control.

The messy, human, holy relationships of Christians loving God and loving each other is freedom, even if that freedom feels more like a hot church on a Sunday morning than something more ecstatic and fitting the word “freedom”.  But freedom is as much an internal shift as a set of external circumstances.  A single, unattached, independently wealthy man who rides his motorcycle along the shore of northern California, may not experience nearly the freedom of a little old lady in a nursing home who has said her morning prayers faithfully for 80 years and knows with all certainty that she belongs to God.

For true freedom comes when are bound—bound to God, bound to love, bound to one another.

Amen.

I spent the summer I turned 21 in India, as a short term summer missionary with a group called Youth with a Mission. I had many interesting experiences, but the most disturbing was when our group was meeting some religious leaders in a slum in Bho Pal.  An older man pointed out a young girl—I would guess she was about eight years old—and told us that she was possessed by a demon and they were going to do an exorcism later that day.

Now at the time, I was coming out of a conservative American religious tradition that used the language of demons and angels periodically, but no one I knew had ever claimed to know someone who was possessed.

I was too young and inexperienced to say much of anything or to ask any questions, so I stood there, dumbfounded.

When I became an Episcopalian, I expected the language of demonic possession to fade into the background of our religious discourse.  And mostly, of course, it has.  But every few years, someone will come by a church of a friend, convinced they are possessed and ask for an exorcism.  Even I have been asked to bless a home the owners were convinced had some evil presence in it.

So, I frankly, don’t know what to think about demon possession.  I would like to think that it is outdated imagery based on a pre-scientific understanding of mental illness and epilepsy.  We all know how frightening it can be when a loved one disappears right in front of us, because suddenly they are overcome with symptoms of depression or schizophrenia or addiction.  We know how frightening it is when WE disappear to ourselves for the same reasons.  The experience of mental illness can certainly feel like one has been overcome by an outside malevolent power. But maybe there is another, more spiritual category in which we can be overcome.  We may never know for sure.  What we do know for sure is that Jesus demonstrated his power over the unknown by healing the man from Gerasene.

Whatever our understanding of what was plaguing the man from Gerasene, his story is a poignant one.  His choices were to live in community, but be shackled; or live freely, but alone.  The man keeps breaking through his shackles and is forced out of community, so wanders alone through the tombs.

When Jesus heals him, in an instant the man from Gerasene is brought from brokenness to wholeness; from solitude into community.

The eighth and ninth chapters of Luke show Jesus demonstrating his power over and over again.  He calms a storm, he heals the man from Gerasene, he heals a woman who has been bleeding for years, and he brings a young girl back to life.  Jesus could have continued doing tricks with the weather to show his power.  He could have caused tornadoes to come and whisk the Pharisees away when they bothered him.  He could have made double rainbows appear every time he made a speaking appearance.  Instead, Jesus uses his power over and over again to heal people.  He reaches out to people that are ill in ways that estrange them from their communities—the man from Gerasene who could not be in community because of his strange behavior, the woman who had a uterine condition that was considered unclean, the young girl who had already passed beyond all community into death.  He reaches out to those who are beyond community and heals them, bringing them back in the fold.

Jesus shows us God’s character through these healings.  When we are in relationship with God, God is at work in us moving us from brokenness to wholeness, from isolation into community.  Whether we have miscarriages that we feel like we cannot talk about publicly, or cancers in places we’d rather not name, mental illnesses that leave us not feeling ourselves, God moves toward us, never away from us.

Our illnesses do not separate us from God, even if we feel like they separate us from our families and friends.

Last week, I received a really nice letter from a woman who had come to one of our Wednesday healing services.  She was a visitor to the congregation going through chemotherapy.  We said healing prayers for her and in the letter, she said for her the service was an experience of both spiritual and physical healing and that she has recently been given a clean bill of health from her doctor.

Now, I have to admit, I was totally shocked by her letter!  I am so used to the church’s ritual of healing prayer, that I can forget that healing prayer can have real power.  But quietly, every Sunday, our prayer team prays in the Lady Chapel for those who need healing, and every Wednesday we pray and have Eucharist together.

The power in healing prayer is not the priest’s power or the congregation’s power, the power of healing prayer is the same power that Jesus demonstrated when he reached out to the man from Gerasene.  The power of healing prayer is that same power that reaches out to us when we are feeling our most vulnerable and afraid and alone.  Through healing prayer, God reaches out to us and begins to make us whole again, begins to draw us out of solitude, into community.

Even if healing prayer does not instantly heal our illnesses, the act of praying when we are ill or afraid or alone reminds us that God’s power is stronger even than the power of illness and death.  In children’s worship we occasionally sing the song,

God is bigger than the boogeyman.
He is bigger than Godzilla or the monsters on TV.
God is bigger than the boogeyman,
and he’s watching out for you and me.

The song is meant to comfort children who are afraid of what might be lurking under the bed or in the closet, but we grownups have our own set of fears that keep us up at night, and we, too need to be reminded that God is on our side and that he has great power.

Princeton can be a town of great isolation and great loneliness.  And I know in many of your lives you are going through difficult times.  I see God at work in Trinity moving people out of isolation and fear into community and love and I encourage you to reach out to one another and to be part of the healing work that God is doing in this place.

For Jesus is not done with his healing, he is still at work right here, right now, in our lives, exorcising the demons of our fear, loneliness, disease, anxiety, depression—all those things that weigh on our hearts and souls.

Thanks be to God.

We are not quite there in our society yet, but there is a lot of money made every year on products trying to make life a little less painful.  We make luxury cars with surround sound satellite radio so commuting is comfortable.  We make diet pills and elaborate exercise machines so we can lose weight without making too many sacrifices.  We make lightweight electronic books, so we don’t have to schlep around ten pounds of novels when we’re on vacation.

We are incredibly lucky to live in a society where we can protect ourselves from an enormous amount of suffering—we have running water and indoor toilets; our doctors are trained in hygiene and anesthesia; our police, fire brigades and EMTS protect us without bribes.

And yet, even with all of our advances we can never protect ourselves fully from suffering.  Our hearts will still be broken.  Our loved ones will still die, some years before they should. Our bodies will still betray us.  Suffering is a fundamental part of what it means to be human.

Now, if I were marketing a religion, I would make sure that part of the package would be a promise of relief from suffering.  I would tell my followers that if they just followed my God, they would receive an easy life, filled with pleasure.  Paul, however (and that’s St. Paul, not our rector), does not seem to be working with a PR consultant.

In the letter to the Romans, Paul acknowledges what all of us know.  Suffering is part of life and a part of faith.  None of us can escape suffering, no matter how much we try to pad our life with luxuries.  Paul captures this beautifully in the 8^th chapter of Romans, writing:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

This image of all of us, along with all of Creation, leaning forward, groaning, waiting for God really captures the human experience.  When something awful happens:  a child’s death, long term unemployment, hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil about to destroy miles of coastline, there is nothing we can do, but groan our prayers and hope for redemption.

But, Paul’s view of suffering is not entirely negative.

Whenever my sister and I grumbled about doing something that annoyed us, my father would tell us, “You’ll build character!”  At first Paul’s stair step argument in Romans 5 can feel a little bit like a parent telling us to grin and bear our suffering.

Paul writes that we can boast in our suffering and that our suffering will lead to endurance, which will lead to character, which will end in hope.

We all know that suffering does not necessarily produce that outcome.  We all know people for whom suffering has done nothing but embitter them.  So, when we read this text, we may read it cautiously.  We may hold it at arms’ length and think to ourselves, “Oh yeah, Paul?  Prove it.”

We are helped when we understand the context in which Paul is writing.  Paul has been telling the Romans how no one is righteous.  No one can keep the law.  No one can earn righteousness before God.  Paul goes on to explain that through Jesus ‘ willing sacrifice, we are granted righteousness before God.  That righteousness is given to us as pure gift.

In our passage today, Paul is explaining what that gift gives us.  The gift reconciles us to God, giving us peace with our Creator.  We use this passage on Trinity Sunday, because Paul goes on to say that the Holy Spirit pours God’s love in our hearts.  So, the Father sends the Son, who sacrifices himself so we can be at peace with God.  He in turn sends the Holy Spirit, who fills us with God’s love.

So, transformation of suffering into hope is part of this gift, too.  Paul is probably talking about eschatalogical suffering here—suffering having to do with the end of times—since Paul thought Jesus’ return was immanent.  But really, we are all moving toward the Kingdom of God, and we all experience suffering on the way, so I think it is fair to say that our suffering can be included in this conversation.

What’s important to note here is that this transformation of suffering into hope is not something that the sufferer does.  Paul’s whole point is that that God’s gift to us is pure gift—and is not something we can earn.  We can place ourselves before God and pray that our suffering might be transformed into endurance, character and hope.  But we should never use this passage as a weapon against ourselves or anyone else who might be stuck in grief or pain or suffering of any kind.  This passage should never be used to nag or berate.  Instead, this passage offers us a beacon of hope.

Paul’s words offer us hope that our tears and pain may deepen and broaden our compassion, rather than harden our hearts.  His words offer us hope that our crises may make us into more mature, thoughtful people.  His words offer us hope that we might yet be transformed into people of hope—people who so in touch with God’s presence, that our hearts feel deep peace.

We don’t need to be like the characters in Wall-E, completely protected from pain.

Paul’s words give us courage to face the world honestly.  They give us courage to step out of our padded luxury cars, put down our laptops, turn off our televisions.  Paul’s words give us courage to face our broken hearts and bodies head on, knowing that God can transform our suffering into something that betters us.

In my last parish, I had a friend who was in her 80s.  She had a series of health scares, including an episode of congestive heart failure that was completely terrifying to her.  She called me in the midst of all of her struggles and asked if I could come see her.  When I went to visit her, I expected to hear about her pain, her fears, maybe her loneliness.  Instead, she told me, “Sarah, I want to talk with you, because my pain has made me think about all the people in pain around the world.  I want to use this as an opportunity to pray for those people.”

That moment has been one of the most profound of my entire life, because she exemplified what Paul is talking about in his letter to the Romans.  God gave her the grace to experience her suffering as a broadening, deepening experience.  Instead of feeling sorry for herself, she found a way to reach out to the world and care for them through her prayers.  The love of God flowed through her and out to those for whom she prayed.

And whether we are people who feel that kind of hope, or not, Paul is right when he says that God’s hope will not disappoint us.  Because the gift of Jesus’ sacrifice, the gift of God’s love poured out by the Holy Spirit, is our gift, even in our deepest suffering.  Even at our terrified, grief stricken, self-absorbed worst.  Even when we feel not one iota of character or endurance or hope, God’s love pours out for us.  And that love will not disappoint us.

Amen.

Yes, the Peter we read about today in our passage from Acts, is the same impetuous disciple who denied Jesus three times after his death.  In The Acts of the Apostles, we get to see Peter—and the other Apostles—grow up.  Peter begins functioning as the head of the church.

At this time, the church consisted primarily of disciples who found Jesus through the Jewish tradition. In fact, later in the 11^th chapter of Acts, the author states the group was not referred to as Christians until a year after the events we read about today.

So, part of being an early follower of Jesus, was living a holy Jewish life.  That meant living faithfully to the Jewish law, including its dietary restrictions and becoming circumcised in order to become part of the community.

Peter has a vision that flies in the face of Peter’s understanding of holiness.  The vision is so shocking that we hear it twice in Acts—the first time when Peter is actually experiencing the vision and then this time when he is recounting his vision to the crowd in Judea.

To us, the vision is not that shocking.  Four footed animals, beast of prey, reptiles, birds—what’s so horrible about a day at the zoo?  But the animals Peter saw were all animals Jewish people were forbidden to eat.  We don’t have those kind of cultural restrictions on food or much else, really, so it can be hard to relate to Peter’s deep feelings of disgust.  But God is telling him in this vision to take up all these horrible, forbidden foods and eat them.  When Peter protests and says “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.”  God says to him, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

Peter is receiving a life changing, world changing message, but he does not understand its full meaning quite yet.

When Peter wakes up from his vision, he gets a visitor, a Gentile named Cornelius.  Cornelius was an Italian Centurion who was a very godly person.  He gave money to charity regularly, he prayed every day, but he was still a Gentile.  Cornelius was instructed in a dream to go meet Peter.  When Cornelius showed up at his door, Peter suddenly fully understood his dream.

While God might be changing some dietary rules, what God really intends to communicate to Peter is that he is changing the rules about who is welcomed into God’s family.  No longer does someone have to be Jewish or become Jewish.  God’s chosen people are no longer members of one particular family, but the whole of humanity.

This is wonderful news, of course, but not to everyone.  The text helpfully points out that the circumcised believers in Judea criticized Jesus and questioned him about why he was spending time with uncircumcised people.  Their complaints echo the Pharisees complaints about Jesus, don’t they?  (If I were a man and had to get circumcised to join a religious tradition, I might be a little irritated with God’s new policy, too!)  When Peter explains God’s new vision for humanity, the circumcised Judeans are stunned into silence.  Even they cannot deny the weight of this good news.

God has been true to his vision—and God’s people now span over every continent, every race, and thousands of different languages.

And in the United States, which has embraced this same kind of pluralism, opening the doors to the stranger has been part of our religious tradition.  We have not always done this well.  Many a church still has the balcony where slaves sat when they were not allowed to sit next to their white masters.  Some churches still resist outsiders, especially if they are of other ethnicities.  But over all, Christians in this country, whether liberal or conservative, tend to believe that Jesus came for all people and that anyone who loves Jesus can become part of the family.

And this core belief is now putting religious leaders in Arizona in a moral bind.  In the immigration law recently passed in Arizona, there are two clauses that have the potential to affect churches.  The first is making it illegal to knowingly transport an illegal immigrant in a car.  The second is making it illegal to knowingly harbor an illegal immigrant.  Neither of these laws is directed at churches, specifically, but religious leaders are wondering if Christians could be prosecuted for driving a youth group that contained an illegal immigrant or whether feeding an illegal immigrant in a soup kitchen violates the law.

In the Unites States we are not often asked to choose between our faith and our country, because we are blessed to live in a country where laws generally support the principles of our faith.

However, when it comes to illegal immigration, Christians are forced to make a choice.  The United States has the right to make and enforce laws about who can and cannot come into this country.  Christians, however, come from a long tradition in which we are obligated to welcome and love the stranger, even if this comes in conflict with the law.

Catholic and Episcopal bishops in Arizona have made it clear that they will continue with soup kitchens and homeless shelters and youth group trips, without checking anyone’s papers.  They are making a choice to follow the Gospel, even if their government is not or cannot.

And we may think we are safely removed from the situation in Arizona, but did you know there are holding pens for detained immigrants right here in New Jersey?  My sister lives in New York and she is part of a ministry based out of Riverside Church that travels to Elizabeth, New Jersey on Saturday mornings to visit with non-criminal immigrants who have come to the United States seeking asylum from various countries.  Individuals are held in warehouses converted into detention centers with no access to the outdoors for months and occasionally years at a time until their cases are heard and decided.  And the warehouse in Elizabeth is only one of many throughout the United States.

Occasionally, my sister receives a jubilant phone call from someone who has been given permission to live in the United States, but more often people disappear and she does not know whether they have been deported or transferred to another facility.

These immigrants are not the ones that make the news.  These are immigrants from Somalia, Tibet, Columbia, Guinea, Senegal, India, Uzbekistan, Guatemala, Sri Lanka.  They are fleeing danger and oppression and seeking freedom in our country.  Instead they are caged.  The people of the Riverside Church have made a commitment to live out the full meaning of Peter’s vision—of seeking out the other, of offering love and humanity to people who have been denied both.

We may think of illegal immigrants as the lowest of the low in this country, but in God’s eyes they are his beloved children.  And if they are his children, that makes them our brothers and sisters.  And I know that to the good people of Trinity Church, I am preaching to the choir.  One of your greatest strengths as a church is the way you welcome the other.  But any of us, especially me, can be lulled into thinking that these kinds of laws and practices don’t have anything to do with our lives.

But God offers us the same challenge he offered Peter and asks us whether we can call profane a people he has made clean.  He asks us if we can accept a reality in which the church includes even those our culture sees as unclean.  He asks us to love our neighbor.

Amen.

Of course, no matter how hard I wish for the outcome to change, West Side Story always ends the same way, with Maria’s heartbreaking speech as she holds the gun that killed her lover and with the Jets and the Sharks finally joining together carry away Tony’s body.

I experience a lot of the same feelings around Good Friday.  Maybe this time the Pharisees will listen to Jesus.  Maybe this time, Judas won’t betray him.  Maybe this time Pilate will actually take a stand and follow his instincts instead of caving to the desires of the crowd.

But both these stories always have the same ending.  Tony always dies because Laurents and Bernstein were following the plot of Romeo and Juliet.  And in a Shakespearean tragedy, things always end badly.

Our Good Friday story, though, is more than a story.  The Good Friday story was not written by an author to manipulate our emotions.  Jesus does not die because literary convention demands it.

Jesus’ death can seem inevitable, something that was always fated from the moment he started claiming to be God’s son.  All the circumstances line up that way.  He angers those in power, they create rhetoric around him, a friend betrays him, and then he ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Jesus can be seen as a victim, someone like Tony in West Side Story, who died unnecessarily, pathetically.

The only problem with this theory, is that the Jesus portrayed in The Gospel of John is anything but pathetic. Jesus knows that death is his destiny, and he walks toward it full of confidence that his death and resurrection are what is needed for humanity.  In John 16 he tells his disciples, “Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but he world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn into joy.”  Jesus gives his disciples a long final speech that sums up what is happening and gives them encouragement and hope for the future.  Immediately before his betrayal, Jesus prays a long prayer to God.  And this is not the cry for help in the garden of Gethsemane found in the synoptic gospels, this is a prayer full of confidence.  He prays that he may be glorified, but also prays for his disciples, that they might be sanctified and gain eternal life because of his actions.

Even though these disciples will betray and deny Jesus, they are at the front of his mind, and seem to be his primary concern.  Even on the cross, Jesus seems in control, making sure his mother is taken care of before he takes his final breath.

Jesus was not the victim of fate.  Jesus was in charge of his destiny.  Jesus actively made the choice to sacrifice himself for us.

He chose to die so that we could be redeemed by God.  He chose to die so we could be free to be in relationship with his Father.  He chose to die so we could receive the Holy Spirit, our Advocate and Comforter.

Before he died, Jesus left us instructions.  In chapter 14 of The Gospel of John, Jesus is telling his disciples about the coming of the Holy Spirit and he says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  So, if we want to honor his death we choose to take seriously those commandments to love God and our neighbors.  Because when Jesus redeems us for our sins, he doesn’t just send us on our way.  Once Jesus redeems us for our sins, we belong to him.

And when we belong to Jesus, we are expected to act a certain way.  And in our culture, which is so quick to judge and pit people against each other, there is no more radical act, no better way, for us to show our commitment to Christ than by loving God and loving our neighbor.  We can give each other the benefit of the doubt, we can engage in thoughtful conversation rather than screaming argument, we can reach out to the unloved, we can cross bridges of culture and understanding.  We can show to the world that we serve one who loves all of humanity—people of all colors, cultures and political perspectives—by loving one another.

We have those instructions from Christ, but even following Christ’s clear instructions cannot make us fully grasp Good Friday.  Christ’s sacrifice, given freely, is astonishing.  Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf leaves us in stunned silence.  There is a reason we keep silent vigil between Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.  Any other response is inadequate.

Amen.

We are reading through the Gospel of Luke this year, and the Palm Sunday reading is a little different from the readings in Mark and Matthew. There are no palms, actually.  No hosannas, either.  And the crowd that cheers Jesus on is not the crowd of locals that will soon shout “Crucify!”, but a large group of Jesus’ own disciples.

These disciples have been with Jesus along his journey, they have heard him speak of Jerusalem and of his own death over and over again, and yet they are still caught up in the moment, caught up in the memory of all the wonderful things they have seen Jesus do.  Together, they praise God in one voice, shouting

“Blessed is the king
who comes in the name of the Lord!
Peace in heaven,
and glory in the highest heaven!”

The disciples love Jesus, and are glad that God sent Jesus to them, but you get the sense here that they are still wrapped up in the idea of Jesus as an earthly king who is going to rise up against the Romans and bring the Jewish people back to political power.

Jesus does not rebuke them, or try to finesse their expectations.  He knows that even if they have the details wrong, their impulse to praise God is a good impulse.

The disciples are going to go through a huge emotional and spiritual journey.  They are going to experience the death of their friend and king and have to reframe their entire experience with Jesus.  They are going to have to grieve the loss of what they thought would be, and experience the wonder of the risen Jesus on their own terms.

And, to me, at least, there is something really beautiful about Jesus allowing them to have their joy and their hope, even if the joy and hope is misdirected.  In fact, Jesus tells the Pharisees that if his followers did not praise him stones would cry out in their place.

Praising God, as Martha Stewart might say, is a good thing.  Jesus trusts himself enough, and trusts his Father enough, to know that Jesus’ death and resurrection will speak for themselves.  Jesus does not have to persuade or convince his disciples with words.  The very act of his resurrection will be enough to make them understand that Jesus’ kingship was never about earthly power, but about changing spiritual reality. For now, it is enough that his followers praise him and his Father.  Their praise does not have to express a perfectly formed and correct theological thought.

We, too, get wrapped up in hoping Jesus will do things for us in this world.  I’ve known people who swore God provided them parking spaces.  We all know sports teams, actors, and musicians who credit their award winning performances to God.  (My husband swears some of those shots Butler made Thursday night in the NCAA tournament had to be helped by the Holy Spirit.) People certainly said their prayers one way or the other during the last election and during last week’s Health Care Reform vote.  Those prayers may have been meaningful or superficial; they may reflect gratitude for something God has no interest in whatsoever! But the impulse to praise God, the impulse to give God credit for our successes is a good one.

When we praise God, we point to something true about God.  We point to God as creator, provider, caretaker, redeemer, savior.  And the more we praise God, the more we will come to realize that our praise of God can come independent of our personal circumstances.  The reality of God’s faithfulness is the reality of the resurrection.  God offers us new life whether we are getting parking spots or not, whether our sports team wins or not, whether our political party is in power or not.  Jesus’ death and resurrection apply to our lives no matter how rich or how poor we are, no matter how happy or sad we are. The good news of Jesus’ resurrection is so important to our souls that it transcends any other circumstances in our lives.

So, this Holy Week, we invite you to join us as we follow Jesus’ story in Jerusalem.  We invite you to experience the last supper, Jesus’ death, and Jesus’ glorious resurrection.  And we trust that whatever is going on in your life, the good news of God’s resurrection will make you want to praise God, too.

The author of the Gospel of Luke does a wonderful job of portraying the way the Pharisees and scribes followed Jesus around, unable to tear their eyes away from what they thought was a theological train wreck.  They have spent years of their lives following every rule, gaining knowledge of every bit of law and scripture, and gaining power step by logical step.  And then Jesus, a carpenter, strolls on the scene and immediately starts captivating his followers with his powerful words about God’s love.  I picture the Pharisees and scribes a little bit like principal Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I picture them so unsettled that they get a little obsessed, a little unhinged, but they just cannot stop themselves from following Jesus around and getting even more agitated.

What the Pharisees and scribes REALLY can’t stand, what just drives them batty, is who Jesus invites over for dinner.  They cannot reconcile why a man who claims to speak for God would hang out with tax collectors and “sinners”.

Jesus takes pity, or a jab, at the Pharisees and scribes and he explains his behavior using three parables:  the parable of the lost sheep, the parable of the lost coin, and the parable of the Prodigal Son.

In the parable of the Prodigal Son, a young man approaches his father and asks for his share of the inheritance.  And while this is a greedy question, it is also an incredibly hurtful question.  The young man is implying that his father is worth more to him dead than alive.  The young man is rejecting the relationship with his own family so he can go party in the big city.  And although the father must have been devastated by this betrayal, the father complies with the son’s wishes, and gives him his share of the estate.

Like many a young man before or since, the prodigal son blows through his money, much sooner than he expects and is soon reduced to working on a farm, envying the slop the pigs enjoy.

He soon comes to his senses and decides to go home, eat crow, and hope his father takes him back.

We all know what happens next of course. Before the young man can get a word out of his mouth, his father is running out of the house, throwing his arms around his son and welcoming him back into the fold.  The prodigal son makes his repentant speech, but his words are just icing on the cake for the man’s father.

And just this story alone would be lovely.  The image of a heavenly father welcoming us rebellious children back home with open arms speaks deeply to us about how much God loves us, even when we make mistakes.

But Jesus’ parable has a wrinkle.  And the wrinkle is the older brother.  The older brother who has always been faithful to his father.  The older brother who took on more work when his good-for-nothing sibling took off to the big city.  The older brother who did not have any extra money, who never got to go to the big city, who never went to a party.

When this older brother comes home from the fields, smells the celebratory fatted calf cooking, and realizes his brother is safely home, he is furious.  He complains to his father that he has never had so much as a celebratory goat cooked for him despite his years of faithful service and now his dissolute brother gets an entire fatted calf?  He’s so mad he even accuses his brother of using his father’s to sleep with prostitutes, a claim that is made nowhere else in the text.  Older brother is NOT HAPPY.

The father pleads with the older brother, reassures him that all the father’s property will still go to him, and invites him to join the celebration.

We never find out what the older brother decides to do.  Jesus leaves the Pharisees and scribes hanging, leaves us hanging.

Instead of mocking or rejecting the Pharisees and scribes, Jesus is offering them the same invitation the father offers the older son.  You are still welcome here.  Jesus may be hanging out with tax collectors and sinners, but the Pharisees and scribes are still welcomed at the table.   Jesus’ may be changing the game, and showing how God includes those on the margins, but that does not mean that God is shoving out the establishment.  The question is whether the establishment wants to join the party!

There is never a scene in the Gospels where the Pharisees and scribes look at one another and say, “Let’s take a risk!  Let’s join this Jesus and see where he leads us!”  Until the very end, they resist his invitation of a new way of being in relationship with God.  They are so tied to the rules and regulations and the old way of doing things, that they cannot join the party, even though they have an open invitation.

Whether we like it or not, those of us in the Episcopal Church, for the most part ARE the establishment.  We have money and power and hundreds of years of liturgical tradition to which we cling.  There is great value in all that tradition, but the danger remains that we will cling to the past and refuse an invitation to new life that Jesus puts in front of us.

Paul and I have been to several conferences and meetings of Episcopalians lately and we’ve noticed a disturbing trend.  More than once we have heard people make speeches during which they lament the demise of the Episcopal Church.  These particular priests were a generation older than we are, and my understanding is that they were lamenting the Episcopal church of the 1950s, when the church was rich both in numbers and in finances.

I have to tell you, I think these speakers have completely missed the mark.

I may be biased, but I fell in love with the Episcopal Church in 1999, when it was already “declining” according to some perspectives.  The Episcopal Church of the 1950s was probably great.  I bet members wore really snappy hats and that children had more time to be involved in church life and that people tithed a bigger percentage of their income.  But from my perspective, the Episcopal Church of this decade is much more exciting, much more like one of Jesus’ dinner parties, than the church of yore.

I love the Episcopal Church.  I love the traditions, the fancy words, the music, the liturgy.  But what I love most about the church is its welcome.  In this new, modern Episcopal church people of different races are allowed to worship together, gay members do not have to hide their sexuality, and as a youngish woman, I get the honor of being your priest!  None of that would have been possible sixty years ago.  I love the Episcopal church because we’re allowed to ask theological questions that would have made the hairs on the back of the Pharisees necks stand up!  I love the Episcopal Church because we’re allowed to read about the Gnostic gospels or world religions without someone offering to pray for our souls.  I love the Episcopal Church because to us, worshiping God is more than just having a bunch of “correct” answers.  We are invited to enter into mystery, together.

So, when I hear people lament the end of the Episcopal Church I want to tell them they are missing the party!  We may not be as powerful politically or financially as we once were, but who cares?  Being a Christian is not about power, it’s about being a disciple of Jesus Christ.  And I can think of no better place to be a disciple of Jesus than at the party the Episcopal Church is throwing right now.

And I hope we are inviting everyone to that party, the outcasts and the establishment; the Prodigal sons and their judgmental older brothers; those who are mourning what our church once was and those who are just discovering us.

Amen.