Servants of a Lesser God

Click here for audio.

Preached with St. Paul's, Carroll Street for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany.

I hear that some of you have been watching Downton Abbey. For a while, I was trying to avoid it, myself. I told my friends that I didn't need to watch another period drama about landed English aristocracy and their downstairs servants, but, in the end, I didn't account for one massive gravitational pull that would prove futile to resist, namely Dame Maggie Smith and her one-liners. At some point last semester I found myself watching the whole first season back-to-back when I should have been writing term papers instead. If you haven't seen it- it’s pretty easy to know what you've missed. It's the same old story, a wealthy family and their estate, questions of inheritance, upstairs-downstairs intrigue, and a whole far-off universe of strange customs and social prejudices from another age. But in the second season, their whole world gets turned upside down. War strikes, and in order to help the overtaxed local hospital, Downton Abbey becomes a convalescent home for injured soldiers. All the hundred tidy routines of daily life are rearranged as the great halls fill with cots and limping men, and part of what becomes so fascinating to watch is how the characters react to the massive change they face in the overhaul. There are tiny conversions that take place. There are old norms and expectations which must be released. By the end of last week’s episode, even Maggie Smith's character is advocating for one of the house's former footmen injured in the trenches. The appeal of the drama is in watching the tightly wound human soul come undone in the face of crisis, not for tragic ends, but as a hopeful rise to the occasion of finding so much great need gathered at their very doors.

In this morning's Gospel reading, a whole city gathers at the door of Simon Peter's house, because that is where the healing may be found. It is easy to imagine that their world was also turned upside down by the occasion. Just hours before, Simon's mother-in-law had been alone and sick in bed with fever, but at the simple touch of Jesus she is restored, and not only that but preparing her whole household to receive the masses which will follow. This house is not a convalescent home, but a trauma center. The wounded come from all across the city, and not only the injured only, but those with demons, too. A demon here is distinguished as being separate from mere illness, it is a condition that bewilders comprehension, a malady so severe it seems to possess a will of its own. In modern terms, we might think of the man screaming to himself on the subway platform, or a child who throws herself convulsing down the aisle of the grocery store. We might see conditions such as these now and know that with the right medications and the right social services and attention, these tortured human souls might be brought again into the realm of human wholeness in community. For Andrew, Simon, his mother-in-law and others of their time, there was no such comprehension or professional expertise, there were only the open doors of a house that was filling quickly with men, women and children such as these, banging on the countertops, knocking over tables, foaming, raving; all until they came into the presence of Jesus where suddenly, simply, they were whole again. In the time of Jesus, illness, possession, and sin were all closely bound, they were all symptoms of the broken world that longed for the reign of God to come, and in the presence of Jesus they were all put back together again.  This was the living presence of the kingdom of heaven, it healed the brokenhearted and bound up their wounds, and in it the demons found no place to speak. In the silence these souls became themselves again, children of the living God.

A demon, of course, is not always so easy to recognize. In the Greek, they are "daimonia", which simply means a kind of lesser god. Those souls who are under the power of these lesser gods are "daimonizomenous" or possessed by evil spirits, little devils, servants of the Evil One. Our scripture personifies evil with many names. "Diabolos" or one who separates and scatters, the Adversary, the Tempter, the Slanderer, all ways of describing activity that lures the creation out and away from the will of its Creator, activity that disfigures the image of God, that drags his Holy Word through the dirt, and renders all, at times, unrecognizable. The Evil One has a kingdom just as God does, and sadly it is likely to be the more familiar of the two. It is the Kingdom of this world we have made, the one where some go to bed hungry because others cannot find it in their heart to share, the world where many die because a few cannot bear to part with what they are sure they alone must possess. It is the easiest of any kingdom to serve, because it requires as little as our own complicity, and serves as grand an interest as our own self-preservation.  Just as the prophets and disciples are always speaking of their desire to be servants of God's Kingdom, the Evil One has servants, too: spirits of fear that seize our best intentions and whisper doubts about whether or not we really have enough, spirits of malice that breed suspicion of our neighbors, or spirits of pride that would exalt us above them: lesser gods of greed, worldly power and prestige, gluttony and hard-heartedness. If they do not throw us down the aisle of a grocery store or cause us to shout in public places, it may simply be because we have gotten used to them by now. It may simply be that we have let our minor maladies move in and make themselves at home in us, because the exorcising of some part of us that serves the evil kingdom would be too messy, and the convalescence take too long.

One of my favorite works of art in the Metropolitan Museum is a portrait of St. Anthony within a larger triptych that also contains St. Jerome and St. John the Baptist. In his part, Anthony is seated on a stone with his prayer book and rosary in hand, looking off to his right, while at his left side a little cadre of demons stand ready with a casual battery of weapons and menacing stares. St. Anthony was famed for having been in the company of hundreds of demons for much of his life. In the triptych, one of the demons has a pierced, bird-like nose, and is reaching up with a frail arm about to snatch St. Anthony's prayer book out from under him. If I were still a children's art teacher I know just what project I would pair with the painting: If you had to draw the part of you that doesn't want to do your homework, what would it look like? If you had to draw the part of you that wants to hit your older brother sometimes, how many eyes would he have? What kind of arms?

In our modern day, we have grown accustomed to approaching the problems of our inner life with a little more integration than this, our problems are inside us only, they are our own and not to be excused as the condition of some separate exterior willfulness that we have no dominion over. The wisdom of St. Anthony and other dessert fathers sees things differently. They personified these maladies as demons that live among and between us. In one sense, the first step of personification is simply giving a name to the will for evil that acts within us. We may find this kind of naming helpful in determining what it is exactly in ourselves that Christ comes to save us from. For the first dessert monastics to live in community, the naming was essential. They were learning how to live with one another in what were essentially convalescent homes for those souls who had acknowledged that they were on a long, arduous journey of healing in Christ. Living in a community with all their maladies spread messily on the table required that they find a way to speak about the work they did not want to do and the other brothers they wanted very much to hit. One dessert father, Evagrius Ponticus, wrote of it this way: "Charity" he said "has the role of showing itself to every image of God no matter how hard the demons ply their arts to defile them." The brothers charged themselves with the task of loving as God loves, the biggest part of which involved seeing as God sees: past the nasty bruises and behaviors which the demonic wrought within them right down the very image of God which lay hidden underneath.

This kind of charitable vision, this kind of unwarranted mercy, is precisely what brought a whole city to the doors of Simon Peter's home, and it is the only thing which will bring anyone crowding to our own doors now. It is the godly love of Jesus which his first followers found so clearly in his presence, and preserved so faithfully in their stories of his life among them on the earth. It is the presence which we have known in this place, in Word and Sacrament, in which everything that ails may fall away and leave us only as one in the body of the Lord.  "Everyone is searching for you," they said. We know that everyone is searching still. We are surrounded by a searching hunger for this kind of wholeness. Our streets are crowded with souls dispossessed of this kind of vision and community, with souls who may not even know what they are looking for. How will they know that they may find it here? How will they know that Jesus has set up shop within our worship for nothing less than the restoration of our brand new life together? How, unless we go forth from this place honest in the wounds which have been healed here, bearing marks of our continued convalescence in the Lord to one another and the world? Where are the cots? Where are the injured, the mad women and men raving for a chance to be whole in the gaze of the beloved once again? Let us bring them in to this house, and God may yet turn our own world upside down.

Sermon from the Feast of St. Andrew

Click here for audio.


Preached for the feast of St. Andrew with the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church.



"The word is very near to you."

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

"If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." Andrew believed. Andrew confessed. Andrew was a man on a mission from the Lord, an intimate evangelist burning with the good news that God had come near. He worked several street corners in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, and one of those corners was right next to the bus stop that I waited at each afternoon when my teaching day was done. I watched Andrew, out of the corner of my eye, as he shifted from soul to soul, passing in-between the passers-by with bible tracks sticking up from his back-pocket and a wide-embracing grin that he would flash two seconds before asking the man or woman in his path, "Sir, ma'am, have you been saved?" Most of them had been, of course, being in the heart of the Christian South, and the polite Christians would tip their hat and smile and maybe even thank him before scooting anxiously along to the rest of their business. Some of the men and women that Andrew called after had no interest in being saved, especially if the saving had anything to with a man of Andrew's obviously diminished stature, and some of them were rude. But every once in a while, some troubled soul would cross Andrew's path, some soul for whom the saving likely seemed to be one of the best and last options on the shelf, and I would watch, from the corner of my eye, as someone new bowed her head with Andrew's hand upon her shoulder to welcome Jesus Christ into her heart. Every once in a while I would see there, in the periphery, a tear fall and a spark light up inside some human soul from the embers Andrew tended in his own, the smoldering drive he carried to get out of bed each morning and go out fishing souls for Jesus. I bristled every time I saw it happen. I'd mutter something under my breath about cheap grace or having been saved 2,000 years ago and stick my nose in a book so he wouldn't make the mistake of trying to save me next, but secretly, I was burning too. I envied him his clarity, his urgency and verve. I wanted desperately to be as certain of my faith as he seemed to be, and to give it all away with such abandon.

"Follow me, and I will make you fish for people," Jesus says. The tiny church I belonged to at the time fished in subtler ways than Andrew employed. We fancied ourselves above confronting strangers on the street and posted hip fliers about the newest weeknight bible study instead. We hosted a gallery and a potluck and a preschool. We wrote editorials in the local paper and dressed up in funny clothes to march the sidewalks once a year chanting funny things pretending it was normal, waiting to see who might notice. We cast our nets off to the side of our tiny operation and waited for the passers-by to be caught up in the midst of a holy curiosity. And every once in a while, it happened. Every once in a while some troubled soul came across our open door to find communion waiting there, and we watched from the corner of our pews as he stumbled through the kneeling and responses and the hymns enough times to start looking much like we did in the same. Every once in a while we saw there in our periphery a spark light up in some human soul that resembled what we'd tended in our own. We thanked God secretly in our hearts that we were ever there at all to catch him, and our ranks would increase a single member more. In the end, we were about as good at fishing souls as Andrew was. One soul won over at a time, one for every once in a while. If either Andrew or our little church had been fishing for our livelihood, we would have each starved to death a long, long time ago.

Evangelism does not happen in an empty room, as much as we seem determined at times to clear one out in our habits and routines. God does not write her holy Word upon a blank and static slate, but upon the particularities of the human flesh and blood which she knit together in the womb. Evangelism without particularity, a message told without the peculiarities and flaws of its tellers, is as good as dead upon the water it would seek to reach beneath. It was a lack of context that made me bristle at the great effort Andrew made. He used the same words that I did to talk about faith, but neither of us was very certain what the other one was actually saying. We, of course, run no less risk of being just as static and empty and blank in the invitations we extend for our God. We keep the sacraments that God has found us with and feeds us in, but we struggle at times not to keep the lives that God enters there as a specially-coded secret to ourselves. It is easy for us to become so used to the worship which we offer that we cease to notice whether God is doing anything else besides. The teeming crowds still swarm to Jesus, they are still caught up in his healing when it comes, they still gather every time his wisdom is cast wide across the world, but they often do so now somewhere else without us.

"Follow me, and I will make you fish for people," Jesus says to a group of men who fish for a living. It makes sense for him to ask Andrew and Peter and James and John to fish for people because fishing was their daily bread, Jesus was speaking to them in the particularity of their vocation, their life and food. It might even make sense for Jesus to ask Brad Jones or John Kellogg to fish for people, because he probably knows that they'd jump at the chance to fish anywhere, even all the way to Central Park in the middle of someone else's wedding. But the Lord Jesus knows that the last fish I caught was a meager little thing on a dock in Punta Gorda, Florida with my grandpa at the age of five. I turned my nose up at the smell and the only fishing I've done since then has been on internet dating sites. I was never a fisherman. I was a preschool teacher. I was a professional cut and paster, I played with dress-up and sock puppets for a living. I spent my days breaking up fights and cleaning puke off other people's children and I spent my nights going to the gym and out to bars with my friends. I sometimes wish I was still there. Not only because I actually thought I knew what I was doing then, but because somewhere between the macaroni art and the Tuesday night spin class and the poor choices and the wealth of friendship the Lord Jesus Christ rushed my heart at full force and claimed the whole thing as his own. "Follow me," he said, "and I will make you cut and paste and bike and drink and break up fights and clean up puke for God! Follow me," he says now, "and I will infuse your whole life with my grace, I will make all things holy, I will take the tasks which are most familiar to you and use them for breaking out a kingdom of peace and justice for all God's children on the earth. Not upon a clean and blank and static slate but on the very flesh and blood already made by God, the very things already close to our touch and taste and sight and heart, the very life you're living even now, transformed."

"Immediately they left their nets and followed him." I have heard more than one mention from this pulpit about the lives we left behind, and I have teared up on more than one occasion at the thought of sacrifices made for the sake of coming here to follow some kind of call: friends lost, security forfeited, bridges burned. But I am interested, this evening, less in the things which you had to leave behind to follow Jesus, and more in the parts of you made and claimed by God that you refuse to let go of. In the Gospel stories, Saint Andrew is always bringing folk along to meet the Lord that found him, he brings his brother Simon Peter along, he brings Greeks along, he brings a boy along to Jesus carrying a meager catch of two fish and some loaves, and when we pray in thanksgiving for his life and witness we ask that we too might bring those near to us into his gracious presence. But we do not stop there. We bring whole lives touched by God to the evangelistic task before us. It can be so easy, in this of all places, to forget ourselves. It can be so easy to wipe our slate clean in the name of formation, in the effort to be made again within the shape of our tradition, easy to forget the whole lives that God has redeemed for her holy work, easy to pretend that we are anything other than whole histories of hurt and joy transfigured in the Lord each time we eat his flesh and serve his need in the world. And if we forget the life that God has saved in us, if we pretend to be something we are not, we risk nothing less than rendering the invitation we extend on God's behalf as static as we become at times behind these iron gates.

This is not to be your fate.

I know this for a fact, because I know you, and because you have taken me along to see Jesus more times than I have time to name. You are a trumpeter, a diva, a producer, and a therapist for God. You are a discerning financier, a centering chaplain, and a raucous hostess for the kingdom of heaven. An optometrist’s assistant for the vision of faith, a sous-chef of holy food and drink, a fisherfolk of people for the Lord. Your lives are teeming with God's bounteous catch, and that abundance may break and broaden the doors of any church you try to enter with it, because Jesus will not stop using your whole life to spread the good news of his saving presence. You are a man, a woman, a child on a mission from the Lord, evangelists every one, burning with the good news that God has come near, and comes even closer still. You will go forth from this place burning with Jesus in your heart and at your side in everything you do, and together you will set this world on fire.

Sermon from 3rd Advent

Click here for audio

Preached for the 3rd Sunday of Advent with St. Paul's Episcopal Church.

Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice.

"Rejoice always," St. Paul reminds us in the scriptures, "pray without ceasing, and in all things give thanks"; today we remember to rejoice. We mark the midway point in our Advent journey towards the Nativity of our Lord by remembering in the midst of our spiritual preparation, that it is God's joy we prepare ourselves for. If you took the distance traveled between Memory and Hope during Advent, and strung it like a violin, Joy would be the bow for God to pull across it. If Memory were to fashion its Hope into a bell, Joy would be the tongue to make it sing. And it is true that God's victory is great enough to ring that bell until the end of time. Always is, of course, a lot of the time; and there is an irony in marking a time specifically, to remember that we should be rejoicing, all the time. But such is the case when midway on our journey of faith our lives are also often marked by sorrow. We have a tradition in scripture and our lives of worship of singing songs of praise even when they seem to be unmerited by outward circumstances. Rejoice, always, the scripture says, and today we remember to rejoice.

I cannot hear St. Paul’s reminder to rejoice always and give thanks in all things without thinking of the women I used to teach preschool with. In those days, my colleagues were mostly middle-aged women from Pentecostal and non-denominational traditions; and they spent more time rejoicing in the Lord than anyone else I had ever met. These women gave thanks for everything. They could be in the midst of the greatest personal trials, families swamped with medical bills, cuts in hours and pay, burdened by the labor of continuing ed most of them were taking, and yet their mouths were always praising God- always speaking joyfully of the gifts God had bestowed upon them, and always expectant of the greater joys which their greater labors promised them. Their hope in a God who would restore all things and make all things new in his coming again was manifest in constant thanksgiving for the minor joys which bore the signs of joy to come. I never quite got the hang of this. Joyful was typically the last thing I felt in the middle of the school day. I just didn’t have time for it. From the first family to arrive in the classroom the day was a mad rush all the way through projects and story times and playgrounds right up until lunch and nap time at the edge of which some twenty five sets of feet moved in different directions with half-eaten plates of spaghetti for the trash with twenty-five cranky faces teetering on the verge of an afternoon meltdown, twenty-five sets of arms hauling cots twice their size to twenty-five different corners of the classroom. It felt, every time, as if the whole day might fall apart right there. Yet within minutes of this chaos, the lights of the classroom would be off, and nearly all twenty-five pairs of eyes would be shut in much needed rest; my teaching assistant would take out a magazine at the table to read, and I would take my lunch-break. Most days this involved walking to my car in the parking lot, closing the door, and putting my forehead on the steering wheel. But on the days when I had enough energy to pull the prayer book down from the dashboard, I would open it to the noonday office and read the words of the psalm we hear this morning. "Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed* will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves."

We find this psalm in the set of prayers designated for the middle of the day as a holdover from the Rule of St. Benedict. Benedict had his monks recite the entire psalter through once a week, and during the middle of the day he assigned the Psalms of Ascent, psalms from the middle of the end of the psalter, pilgrim psalms. Their made them among the easiest psalms to memorize and the easiest to recite during the middle of the work day, where the brothers might be in the midst of some field of their labor. Their density, the potency of their language and vision, made these psalms perfect for conveying whole themes of the faith in a swift moment of time, a function itself a holdover from their original use as psalms for the pilgrims journey on the way to the Jerusalem temple. Psalm 126 reminds the faithful of the rejoicing they may expect at the end of all their labors. I, for one, was much more prone to anxiety. But my colleagues in teaching reminded me by their daily witness that fear was not to rule the day for us. Our experience was rooted in the victory of God, and our hope was in its ultimate fulfillment. For them, the minor joys of any ordinary work day were strung together in the fuller goodness of God, a fragrant garland for the righteous where nothing was ordinary, no good thing was present without the touch of God.

"When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion* then were we like those who dream, Then was our mouth filled with laughter* and our tongue with shouts of joy." The psalmist remembers the joy of Israel's past mid-way through a journey where the fruits of such a victory have yet to ripen again. The Lord had indeed begun to restore Jerusalem from destruction, the captives had been returned from their exile and the Temple rebuilt. It is easy to imagine the rush of excitement which the signs of such a restoration brought on, the vivid hope of a return to the glory of former days. Yet something was still missing. Jerusalem was far from being the center of the known world, indeed her restoration was dependent on the tenuous support of a much more powerful nation; and the Presence of the Lord had yet to dwell in the Temple as it had in the days of old. Fortune had been restored to Zion, yet this fortune was like a first gentle rain over what long had been the desert of exile. Israel still longed for the rushing river which they had known of God's favor in the past. Fortune had been restored, and yet the psalmist also prays, "Restore our fortunes Oh Lord, like the watercourses of the south."

This psalm stands in-between the memory of promise and the hope of fulfillment, yet it is not a lament for what has not yet come; it is a song of joy for what is. This is a psalm about ranan. Ranan is a primitive Hebrew root word for a ringing shout and cry. Ranan is about movement, the shaking of the voice and the trembling of the body. Ranan might refer to being overcome by something, or a great torrent in the sea, or even the tremulous sound made by pole or mast when a great wind passes by. Placed in the human voice and body, it is an inarticulate outcry. Sometimes this crying can be a wail of entreaty or supplication. But it just as easily means a proclamation of joy and praise. In this psalm we read it as rejoicing, rejoicing that fills the mouth over with laughter, rejoicing that shakes the body to its core, rejoicing so evident that everyone who sees it stops to marvel at the blessing of the Lord poured out. What is more, this psalm connects the rejoicing associated with God's people in Zion with the rejoicing of God's people in their daily life. The psalm begins in the Temple and ends on the farm because for God's people, there are no ordinary joys, all are a gift from the Lord of Hosts; and the joy of a harvest reaped from the years long labor is both a source of blessing for the present, and a token of the joy to come.

We sing these hymns of joy today in the midst of our own labor with God. We reach back in the collective memory of our church and sacraments to the rejoicing of our earliest days when we first knew that the Lord had come into the world of our flesh to claim it as his own. We are a people who were formed by rejoicing at the greatness of the Lord's activity among us. A follower of Jesus was identifiable by their rejoicing in things once cast down being made new. We remember the rejoicing of his mother Mary when she first conceived by God's Holy Spirit, the rejoicing which she shook her sister Elizabeth by the shoulders with, the rejoicing with which she praised God for his favor of the poor and and lowly and hungry of the world. And we remember the promise of Christ for a return of God's victory in creation made anew again by the fullness of his presence.

For God's people, midway on the journey of faith, there are no ordinary joys; because we gather in the worship of our soul's truest delight, the font of every blessing, the one store of all good gifts and all true rejoicing. All good things come from God, from the smallest joys to bloom among the ashes of our daily lives to our greatest victories, from the quiet joy of walks beneath the bare winter branches of our streets, to the raucous laughter of our closest friends, to the long-awaited harvests of our life's labor. Some joys catch us by surprise and some are eagerly anticipated, but all seem just past the reach of our manipulation, all are gifts, and all will be gathered by our Lord as a garland of righteousness for God's rejoicing people. The occasions we find for joy are the reality of God seeping through into our Earthly life, currents springing up from the places in our lives where the veil is thinnest between this world and the life eternal. We do well to stoop down close to them when they come, and take a full measure of their blessing, that our bodies may tremble and our voices sing with joy at the nearness of the Lord.

Christ Occupies the Throne

Preached with St. Mary's House for Christ the King Sunday.

Then they also will answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

It would be easier if the dead stayed dead. It would be easier if the hungry ceased to eat and simply perished with their need. It would be easier if the naked disappeared in their shame, easier if the prison walls were high enough and thick enough to hide the loneliness and the abandonment which they contain. The wounds which we inflict upon one another are bloody ones, hard-to-look-at messy wounds that we are used to making for the sake of getting through the day, managing life as best as we've received it: another stranger passed on the way to where we need to be, another dollar cut from funding for our schools, another plastic grocery bag blowing in the wind. It would be easier if the wounded ones would simply die already, and easier still if they would stay buried in their graves right beside our faded memory of the wrong that we have done and all the wrong that has been done on our behalf. It would be easier if the dead stayed dead. Because it is very hard indeed to believe that the dead shall rise again, very hard to face the wound of our wrong-doing laid open fresh before us, and very hard to imagine that the one who has received the wounds of all into his own flesh upon the cross will be throned in glory as a judge above us. Hard because it speaks, deeply, of a reckoning that few of us would be prepared to face.

Occupy Wall Street looks at times like an open wound that seems impossible to heal. Little wonder then that so many have found it to be so irritating. On the city-wide day of action that took place this past Thursday the irritation was palpable on the sidewalks of New York as demonstrators spread out to several local subway stations with placards and chants in tow. At the 23rd Street Metro stop angry New Yorkers butted past and into sign-holders with the same clear message of distaste and distain that had already taken firm hold in Lower Manhattan. What exactly are you doing here? What do you hope to accomplish? And most importantly, why are you in my way? For a movement that claims to advocate for 99% of the population, they inspire no small bit of ire from the majority of people who see their work, and I suspect that this is primarily because that work confesses a wound in our society that most of us have little idea how to start bandaging. We do not like to be confronted with our wounds. We would rather not see the scars that war has left upon our veterans and rather not hear the growl of our neighbor's empty stomach. We admire and lift up people who can "hold their own", who can hide their pain and pull up their bootstraps and move on. The occupiers are something of the opposite of this. They say: "Look at what you have done. Look at the need and the pain you have ignored. Come here so we can make peace with one another and begin to do something new."

The new thing being done in Zuccoti park over the past two months can not be buried with the raid which cleared the park out in the dead of night this past Tuesday. Its spirit, so easily identifiable wherever it springs up, had already spread to cities across the globe, and experienced something of its own resurrection in New York itself on Thursday, and it is amazing to behold. It is street theatre, it is visionary, it speaks truth to power. It feeds many with stacks of donated and shared take-out food, cultivates conversation between the unlikeliest of characters, it seeks consensus and to let unheard voices rise. It dreams big, vulnerable, crazy dreams. It dances and sings and meditates and holds inter-faith prayer services and silent vigils by candle-light. It fist-bumps with understanding cops, it suffers through rain and cold, it travels in tents. It seeks to occupy a space of privilege, and then ensure that all are welcome there. The new thing done in Zuccoti park is in many ways a very old thing, a very biblical thing, and its expansive, embracing, messy nature may be precisely what makes it so hard to get a firm hold on. Yet to dismiss it as incoherent, or misplaced, or lazy or even partisan is in one sense, simply to isolate oneself from the miraculous work of healing which this open wound conducts beneath its surface.

Jesus occupies a throne of glory in this morning's Gospel. Jesus comes to occupy a place of power that his followers had only hoped to see in their own lifetime, a Messiah whose authority is at last, clearly demarcated by angels in attendance and all the nations of the world prostrate before him. But when he comes to occupy that place of power he brings with him the very company whose association so undermined his authority while he walked among them on the Earth. The wounded ones, the troubled ones, the ones who could not help themselves. I was hungry, this King of Glory says, I was thirsty, I was naked, I was alone. I was on a cross and you abandoned me so you would not have to see the gruesome image of wounds you were afraid to face because you could not bandage them. It may be that one fundamental difference which remains between the Church and occupiers is that we believe culpability goes far beyond the 1% and extends to all of us but one. The one God, the Presence to which all our life and all our memory is present, before whom all remains open for as much as we ourselves have tried to hide it deep inside us, is the one source of our forgiveness, and yet remains as close to us as the hunger and the thirst and the nakedness and isolation nearest by. Come now, this King of Glory says, and look at what you have done. Come now and look at the need and the pain you have ignored. And when you are ready to step out of the punishment you have inflicted on yourself with this denial, come to me so that my mercy may pour over you and we can begin with something new.

The kings of this world have rarely coveted such offers of mercy and renewal as these, and it should not surprise us to see the harbingers of any new peace blinded by pepper spray, shoved to the pavement, and nipped at the heels by motorbikes of the police. This past week has seen a coordinated effort across many U.S. cities to shut down demonstrations of non-violent civil disobedience with undue force, and for any citizen it is more than a cause for alarm. For any Christian, it is a call to go and look for Jesus, because our faith teaches us that where there is a cross of hunger and thirst for righteousness his labor of reconciliation in the world will not be far behind. The parks can be cleaned out, but the wounds of injustice, and disparity, and greed which this nation has inflicted and endured with little question for so long cannot stay buried in the ground. They persist in rising to the light for the healing of the world. A small part of the world, it seems, is already waking up to a brand new way of living. And, in the midst of this revival, the task before us Christians is as clear as it was two thousand years ago. Go forth, and be with Jesus. Visit the imprisoned and the lonely and the poor. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Heal the sick. Raise the dead up from their graves.