Sermon: We're not labels!

Josephine Robertson

St Paul's Episcopal Church, Waco, TX

June 16

Proper 6C

Luke 7:36-8:3

Here we are again, around another table at another meal, with Jesus. The air is thick, but not with the sweet scent of nard we might expect. You can cut the tension in this room with a knife. And the shame.

Jesus has accepted the dinner invitation of a Pharisee, so we an be pretty sure this fellow wasn’t his best friend, not one of his closest disciples, maybe even an adversary. This is the sort of meal where the silences are awkward and long, where everyone is second guessing everything said, reading into body language, picking apart motives. There’s no trust in this room, and certainly no love.

And below it all, is the shame. Maybe we don’t have to imagine what it is like to lose your name, your identity, to be known only by a label. Maybe we know. “A sinner,” today could be many things: it could just as easily be “a miser,” “a bigot,” “an adulterer,” “a gossip,” “a drunk,” “a whore,” “a purger,” “a cow,” “abused,” “raped,” “a convict,” “a crazy person.” There is a label for each of us, we all hide at least one label deep down in our hearts and hope we’re the only ones who know about it. Most of us have had that moment when we ceased to be a person, when we found ourselves overcome by shame and guilt and self loathing and all that remained was that horrible label.

She becomes invisible, no one seems to have noticed the “thing,” the sinner who has snuck into this tense gathering, until she touches Jesus, until she crosses that barrier between the respectable and the shameful. And all her worst fears come true. Kneeling at Jesus’ feet, utterly vulnerable in her love and her outpouring suddenly the hostile eyes of the respectable men around that table are all fixed on her.

Why is she even there? Why open herself up to the hatred, the disgust, the loathing of people who must have made her life miserable on a daily basis, who didn’t even see her as human, who had made her a label? What could be so powerful, what could compel her into that place of shame and hostility. A place where she is invisible or reviled? One thing, and one thing only:

Forgiveness. Forgiveness that gave her an identity no shame could strip away, no human censure could erase. Forgiveness that came as an unexpected gift, a precious thing, a sparkling gem of freedom when she expected only kicks and harsh words. A gift, not a reward, not a wage. Unearned, unlooked for, unexpected and overwhelming. What freedom, what relief. No wonder she knelt and kissed Jesus’ feet, no wonder she washed them with her tears and her hair and anointed him with sweet costly oil.

We live in a culture of exchange. I give you money and you give me a service or a product. I give you my time and you compensate me with money. Humans have been that way for a long time. But God’s economy is pure gift. Costly gift, but gift that costs us nothing. We have no currency that can buy what God would give, no work we can do that would even equal the value of what we are offered. And God has circumvented that all anyway, for the moment we try to pay we realize we’ve had God’s love and forgiveness since before we were born. It was slipped into our hearts while we were still screaming from the shock of this cold bright world. Snuck into our lives by a God who won’t let us see the gift coming, who sneaks it into the house and slips it around our wrists and shouts: “Do you like it?”

We don’t find the stories surprising where someone asks Jesus for forgiveness or healing, where they fall on their faces at his feet and beg. Those stories are neat and easy to understand. They repented, and hence they were forgiven, the exchange neat and clear. And then Jesus sits down to eat at the table of his adversary and tears of joy and thankfulness from a woman he has never met cut straight through the tension.

Luke has made it so there is no way to misinterpret. The woman who kneels at Jesus’ feet did nothing to ask for, or earn her forgiveness. We don’t even know how she received it, how she realized that she was a person again and forever, no longer a label. All we know is that she was forgiven and that gift was so precious, that relief so sweet it flowed from her in exuberant love, love that overcame shame and fear. Love that no longer cared who saw, or what they thought or said.

“Do you see this woman?” Jesus asks Simon. “Do you see her?” Not a sinner, not shame, not an embarrassment, a woman. A woman who has shown great love, in front of you and everyone here. A woman who has been freed from her shame and her fear by forgiveness, whose heart has been made free to love. There is more shame in our world than there is water in the oceans. Shame that we hide deep in our own hearts, shame that we cast on others, shame that follows us like a shadow we can’t shake. Shame that keeps us from really seeing one another for what we are: beloved, forgiven, children of God.

Every one of us. The bumbling waiter who got our order wrong on Friday, the surly checkout girl, the homeless man who scared the tar out of us last week, the neighbor who refuses to play by the neighborhood rules. The coworker who is so wrong about politics. The woman we were told to avoid, because she’s “no better than she should be.” The man with the pinched face and worried eyes who everyone knows is a “looser.” The person inside you that you desperately try to hide… Forgiven, and loved. Right now. From the moment we were born.

What do you need to be free? To realize that all the chains of shame and fear are ghosts and fantoms, that there is nothing hidden in your heart. That forgiveness has already happened, long before you even knew you needed it. Can we let our hearts unclench? Can we finally look and see the woman, see her face, see her beauty and her fear, her scars and her hurt and her healing; see her and not who we think she is? Can we look at our husband, our wife, our children, our friends, our parents, our neighbors, our friends, our acquaintances, our adversaries, our enemies: and see them?

What happens if we do? What happens if we let go the labels and the assumptions and renounce the shame? We have been forgiven, set free to love God, and one another. Not to agree with one another, not to be the same as each other, maybe not even to like one another all the time. But to see each other, and to be moved by love.

Our lives are filled with private shame, and public fear. Darkness that is pierced by forgiveness, totally overcome by it. Friends I invite you to live in that forgiveness, in the assurance that God has covered you with the mantle of forgiveness, blotted out the dark of each of our sins with the light of God’s love. It has already happened! But our eyes are shut tight, for fear, too tight to really believe we’re already free. We’ve done nothing, nothing to deserve release, yet God has turned the key. Nothing to deserve love: but God loved us before our Grandparents were dreams. 

And that makes us free to love one another, and to actually love ourselves. Free to be the diverse place we are, full of people who might never have chosen one another in that outside world: that world where labels are everything and those who are labeled differently cannot even talk anymore. We have been made free through the mercy and love of God, through God’s economy of gift. The only question that remains is what will we do with our gift?

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Sermon: Wisdom Calls (Trinity Sunday)

Josephine Robertson
St Paul's Episcopal Church, Waco
May 26 2013
Trinity Sunday – Year C
Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31


There is trouble in the world. Trouble so great and so deep and so broad there never seems to be an end to it. The hurt, the sorrow, the loss, the violence, and the fear roll on and on in waves and we do not understand.

It seems we barely get a chance for breath, these days. There was Newtown, and Boston, and then West, and now Moore Oklahoma and next week it will be somewhere else and someone else. We no longer know where we are safe, or what is the greatest danger, when to duck; or who we should listen to.

There are voices arguing, clamoring, yelling, constantly. Voices that claim to know the answers, to why, to what we should do, even to the mind of God. Too often those voices cause more wounds to those already hurting. We’ve all heard those voices on national television, or heard them where we work, or shop, or gather to relax. The words change a little but the message is the same: “It is too bad that people died, but God is angry, God hates their sin. They had it coming. God is punishing this sinful world.”

Even I, who know better sometimes find the phrase “there but for the grace of God go I,” on my lips or mind: as if that other is somehow where they are without God's grace or love.

And yet. And yet. Does not Wisdom call, and Understanding raise her voice? In the clamor of the marketplace; in the roar of the crowd that argues and shouts. She is calling, crying out. She must be heard, that still small voice, that whispering dove, that tongue of flame that speaks directly to the deepest place of our heart. That speaks to the place where hope and love reside; where our need resides. She speaks to the depths of us, down below the fear, and the hopelessness. Down the well of our souls, through the God-shaped keyhole in our hearts.

Her whisper is easy to ignore while the crowds cry and the prophets of fear and security scream. But she calls all the same and her cry will unlock our hearts. Against the babble she cries, know this: God did not cause the tornado in Moore, or the explosion in West, or the bombings all over the world, or earthquakes, or floods, or famine. God does not single out towns, or nations, or people for punishment. God did not make the winds as weapon, or the earth as anvil. She knows, for She was there. Wisdom, in Hebrew: Ruach, Word, Spirit. She was there, the architect, who plotted the courses of planets and stars. Who let go amino acids exploding into life, with the same joy we release a child taking her first steps.

Listen to Wisdom, calling; Wisdom who knows the heart of God, for She dwelt there from before time and forever. Listen to her crying: The LORD was not in that tornado, or the explosion, or the bombing. But God was there, buried in the rubble with terrified children. In the homes and apartments and nursing home in West, God has always been there, in the wreckage, with all those who suffer.

Listen, oh people, she cries. Listen and know your God. For God rejoices in this world, God delights in the human race. Our God is the mother hen, who gathers who scattered chicks under her wings. Our God became one of us, suffered as we do, struggled as we do, mourned as we do, died as we do: for the love of each and every one of us, to end the hatred; to make of death a laughing stock. And our God blows quietly through this world, Spirit, living in the hearts of each of us and calling us to the one great work of Christ.

In the year I have spent with you all I have learned one important thing about the people who are St. Paul’s. You love. Fiercely and loyally and wildly, despite how much it means you are sometimes hurt. You love each other, you love this city that so many outsiders have written off, you love those of us who you find on your doorstep for a season. It is not an easy thing to do, to love. God learned that the hard way, and the voices of the market would drown out Wisdom, and love. They would divide us by ideology, they would distract us with a thousand worries, a thousand things we must know and do and be and say. They would wall us away with fear. And still, beneath the dull roar of the crowd Wisdom keeps calling to her children.

To us all, adopted sons and daughters of the Father, brothers and sisters of Christ, children of the Holy Spirit. Wisdom cries out in the quiet of our hearts, she teaches with the vulnerable moments of our lives. And we have learned her lessons around this altar, and around this baptismal font, and most of all: around one another’s hospital beds and over finger sandwiches and friend chicken at way too many funerals.

If you are here today and you are hurting from one too many tragedy, welcome home to Wisdom’s table. If you are numb from one too many tragedy and afraid of what it means not to feel, welcome home to Christ’s arms. If you are overwhelmed and pulled in to many directions: welcome home to the Peace of the Father.

Today is technically Trinity Sunday and across the world preachers are trying their best to define the Trinity, to explain the unexplainable. I don’t have any easy explanations. Academic arguments and definitions mean very little in the middle of a blasted landscape, surrounded by destroyed lives, and hurt and pain. It doesn’t matter if God is like a clover or water vapor. And I don’t know about you, but in the face of tragedy, when my heart is heavy, it doesn’t matter to me how it all works.

What matters are the things Wisdom is crying in our lives: God delights in us. Yes, us. You and I, no matter how broken or flawed. This divine woman, calling for our attention reveals the heart of God. God the artist, laying the foundations of the world. God the playful, filling it with a myriad of delights, from star fruit to platypus! God the constant, always faithful despite rejection and betrayal. God the vulnerable, become like us that we might become like God. God who did not create as a singularity, but with a partner. God for whom the work of overflowing love is worth it because relationship is the only thing that really matters.

Wisdom is calling us into her dance of delight and rejoicing. She invites us to dance with her, to rest in the knowledge that divinity lives in our own hearts, and delights in us, that the dance of our lives has a holy partner. The God who did not create alone? Invites us to join that creating. Invites our lives to be transformed. We are all creators, the poets and the painters, yes. But also the parents whose creative work is never done. Those who feed our bodies and delight our souls. Those who draw us closer to God, and create holy space. Those who paint with flowers, who make who new worlds with electricity and data so complicated God laughs with delight. Those who create potential in our lives as they teach and shape. The list could go on and on, because each of us has been given a gift for creation, made in the image of our creator. Each and every one of us.

There is trouble in the world. But the voices of fear and disaster, the voices of anger and hatred lie. To them that trouble has won, it is too great to fight, the only thing we can do, they say is join up. Chose the lesser evil, game the system, make our deal with the devil and survive. Oh those voices in the marketplace: they lie. But Wisdom is still calling: and her words are for all people. The LORD, the Holy One, who counted out the atoms in every star, who knows the name of every sparrow, who made us. That One, that incomprehensible One, that Unmovable One, is our Father, our Brother, our Mother, our friend.

The master worker who made us made us all like our heavenly parent: creators. Every one of us. There is great, deep trouble in the world. And we, adopted by God, daughters and sons are invited to join the dance. We have been invited: God’s hand is held out; Wisdom cries in the street. Come, children, come and join the dance. Come and remake this world in our Lord’s heart. Dance with Us, she cries; delight with Us. Listen to the holy nonsense of Wisdom and live. Amen.

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Pulling Weeds

Something we all learn soon or later, hopefully sooner, is that words have immense power. We shouldn't have to learn this; after all we're brought up on stories like the creation narrative; where God makes everything that is by speaking it into being! We read about the ultimate expression of God and call him "the Word." The list could go on and on, but somehow we still miss the boat.

The words we use in our everyday lives shape the way we think and react, they built our world. I have shared in sermons before the surprising power of words. How the words of another can change our reality in ways that third parties can see and experience. Words matter.

So how can we be so careless with them? Or perhaps a better question is: why do we remain so blind to the places where our words can be destructive?

Words shape reality, when God says that God will create humankind (male and female) in God's own image this is part of that image. Just as God's words create and sustain reality, our words change the world around us, they change the people around us.

Let me tell a story on myself as an example. In seminary, in my first preaching class I preached a sermon that got very good feedback, but someone told me they couldn't jive who they knew me to be with my language for God. "You kept calling God "he," but I haven't experienced you as someone who thinks God is male." Their feedback startled me. I haven't thought God was male in a very long time. Even as a child God was never an old man with a beard for me. God was loving like my parents, and safe like my parents, and comforting like my parents. Sometimes God was like my Dad and God was like my Mom.

I sat down and read through all my old sermons, and every pronoun for God (and there were a lot of them) in every sermon was male. He, he, he, he, he. That simple perusal of my old sermons led to some real soul searching. What did my language say about the ideas about God that had formed and shaped me? What did my language say to those who heard me preach?

My first reaction was simple: we're not Greek, we don't have a non-gendered personal pronoun that would work. So he is default, I'm not saying God is a male, I'm just using what I have. We've always done it that way, and everyone knows what I mean... But I couldn't avoid the fact that if the gender of the pronoun didn't matter always picking male made male normal, normative, regular... And that meant that female became abnormal, unusual, strange. And for many, to hear feminine language for God is strange, abnormal, even heretical.

The language in my preaching has changed, intentionally. But we still have so far to go. In the church we have been fighting a war against patriarchy and sexism for long years. And we have come far. My own diocese has a woman bishop serving as sufragan. (Though the number of women serving as diocesan bishops is telling of how far we still have to go.)

I didn't see the Ram Truck ad during the Super Bowl, but days later I heard a sermon/state of the diocese address use the same text. "God made a farmer," by Paul Harvey. I love Paul, I grew up listening to his raspy voice, smiling at his ironic humor.

But as this address unfolded I began to squirm. You see, God's farmer was obviously a man, every pronoun was male. The photos that accompanied the moving tribute? With one exception: all the adults were male. And it didn't end there, with a historic piece from another time. As the preacher's own words began the pronouns kept dropping "he, he, he." So overwhelming I was totally lost to whatever the message of the sermon was about. By the time the last words were spoken I had not heard a single feminine pronoun for God, or for the people of God. Not one. And I was no longer listening for the sermon, I was listening, hoping, for a single feminine pronoun. (There were many, many uses of male pronouns for God, the sermon was in no way even gender neutral.) That use of language did change reality.

It changed my understanding of this part of the church, and the theology here. It changed how I experience my relationship with the preacher, my bishop. As a female person I found myself, my whole gender, entirely excluded from a conversation that I know was meant to include all of us.

Our words mean something, more than that, they create meaning; they create and shape and modify reality. The roots of prejudice, power, and privilege go deep. They are so ensnared within the fabric of our being that often the threads of them become nearly invisible. Hidden beneath "we've always done/said that," "everyone knows what I mean," "it just sounds better that way." You could probably supply a handful more excuses from your own experience. The reality is, when we begin to dig around those tough roots it makes us uncomfortable. It raises questions we'd rather not answer, forces us to look into cupboards we'd rather leave safely closed.

But in those dark unexamined places the weeds of our culture flourish, my Grandmother used to call weed pulling "slaying dragons." There are dragons to slay in our midst, indeed. Entrenched beasts clothed in respectability and tradition. But not less dangerous to our future for their grooming.

We in the church have a responsibility, to be different. Our fight isn't about "political correctness" or hurting one another's feelings. We are followers of the Word made flesh. We are followers of a God who creates and sustains everything that is with words. Our words are our theology, and our words shape the world around us. It is well past time to slay some dragons.

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Theophany through my lens

A meditation on sea, sky, and mountain.

For full album from our spring vacation to the Pacific Northwest, follow link.

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Connection & Relationship

The sun is bright and hot, the breeze moving softly. Shadow is warmed up, an athlete feeling good and stretching into his strength. He tests me like he does every ride, to find out where his limits are, just how much I'll demand. It isn't disobedience, it is a question. And for once I answer clearly, and we come to an understanding. I have begun to be able to hear those questions again, through my legs and seat and back and hands; I am beginning to remember how to answer them.

Minutes later we are both soaked with sweat, both our minds so focused the mental work will be exhausting before long. We're past the sort of riding most people aim for: the get on, steer, and stop and go on command. Now I ask him for a rhythmic  steady, cadence; to listen to my body as we trace complicated patterns in the sand; to push with his big quarter horse rear and to gather that power just "here" in my hands. My legs control where we go, my hips guide his, and my hands say "put your head just here."

It is a dance, a ballet that takes every ounce of my concentration, to listen with every fiber of my being, to be even a fraction as sensitive as this huge animal is by instinct. To feel and anticipate and correct even before the mistake has been made. Here a shoulder popping out that will send us off course, there a loss of impulsion, there an evasion that will lose the connection between the bit and my hands that is our finest form of communication.

There are moments, brief now but there, when it all comes together. When I can feel with the delicacy of a baby bird fluttering against my hands all 1,100 pounds of equine; light and responsive. The reins become more than leather, they become a conversation; this is what we call connection. And it is perhaps the closest any human will ever come to a Vulcan mind meld.

There is a difference between riding a horse, and being a rider. Given a well behaved, old, or just fairly polite and well trained horse; just about anyone can get on ride around a bit. The horse will even (if he's a patient sort) put up with the sort of steering, woah, and kicks that we learn from the movies.

But there is something more, something that takes years of effort to find: a relationship. In the golden evening light, as we walk quietly around the pond in the mare's pasture to cool out, I think back to those rare golden moments of connection. Like all things they take effort, and skill, and at first they are frustratingly rare and fleeting. But like the rest of learning to become part of a horse-human partnership they will grow more common as we learn together, and learn to trust one another.

There is much to be learned about our relationships with God, and one another in those quivering reins.  Because despite what the cowboy movies show, a good rider does not dominate her horse. Instead she learns communication, she builds a relationship of trust. And because her horse learns he can trust her to be fair, and to lead with their mutual welfare in mind: he will do as he is asked. But he will question, and sometimes argue, and offer an opinion.

And if she is arbitrary, and unfair, if she does not listen, things won't go well. The connection Shadow and I are working on is about mutuality. Done right the reins become like two elastics, connecting the bit in Shadow's mouth to my hands. He rests lightly in my hands, able to feel the slightest que, and I stay soft and elastic, following the natural movements of his body so the bit is never harsh or jarring.

Our own relationships, at their best are like equestrian connection. If either party chases the other, the connection vanishes, if either jerks away the connection goes (and someone ends up soar and defensive). The give and take must stay soft and yielding and mutual. Without the mutuality, there is no connection; communication breaks down, frustration mounts, and the team becomes individuals each chasing their own ends.

And yet connection cannot be forced either. I cannot make Shadow flex softly. I could drag his head around forcefully all I wanted, but it would not make connection. I can only ask, I can give him the opportunity, he must give, and I must give. Both giving, softening, listening, suddenly we meet in the middle, and become that smooth effortless looking team.

Paul even mentions the connection, but I think by non-riders the quote is often misinterpreted:

"If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies." James 3:3

The bit actually only controls the horse's head and neck, our body turns their body. But the bit is important, it is our point of connection the place where two parties meet and delicately dance together. It is our prayer and our worship, all the things that maintain that gentle difficult relationship with the divine. It is the long conversations with our beloved that go into the wee hours of the night before we can fall asleep with our hearts at ease. It is the arguments we refuse to allow to become shouting matches, and the days we spend learning who the other person really is. And it is hard to do right, but infinitely worth it, always.

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