This is my sermon from February 26, 2023, the 1st Sunday of Lent in Year A. We are using A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church by Wilda C. Gafney. The lectionary was Genesis 2:7-9, 15-17, 21-25, 3:1-7, Psalm 51; Revelation 22:1-5, 16-17; and Matthew 3:1-6).

So, I’m pretty sure I’ve told you this story before, but I ask you indulgence as I tell it again:

When our daughter, Kathleen, was about 10, she and Ron went to the mall near our house to buy me a gift for my birthday, or maybe it was Mother’s Day.  They ended up at a jewelry store looking at necklaces. Katie wanted to buy me a cross but apparently was getting quite frustrated.  As they both told me later – as did the sales person, who was someone I was acquainted with from the usual parents’ circles –she couldn’t find what she liked. All of the crosses in the jewelry stores in our heavily Roman Catholic area were crucifixes.  Jesus was hanging on the cross. And Katie couldn’t understand why, even as she knew that wasn’t what she wanted.  Finally, she vented her frustration, in what was at that time a pretty uncharacteristic public display of annoyance. 

What she said was, “We’re Episcopalian.  We don’t believe Jesus got stuck on the cross.”

I love Lent.

And I do my best to accept the invitation to a holy Lent that is extended on Ash Wednesday service.  I work really hard to change the rhythm of my spiritual life, my spiritual practices so I can go deeper and broader in some, and I can explore some new or have fun, such as with Lent Madness, with the once-a-year, seasonal practices.  All of that is about how to explore deeper, more life-giving relationship with God.

I love Lent, which is why I was thrown for a loop when I had this thought the other day.

There is a problem with Lent. 

I’d go so far as to say it’s likely a problem with Christianity as we understand it and try to live it.  We get stuck.  We seem to forget that that this is a season about the promise fulfilled.  We act as if there is nothing we could possibly do to make things right – as if this broken world, our messed up lives, our broken and battered hearts are what it’s about, is all that there is.

But what if we stepped aside, what if we stepped outside ourselves and our lives for just a minute? What if we turned around, if we turned back to the garden, to see the promise fulfilled, to see that manifestation of the promise from God that was so frightening, that so threatened the snake that it had to lure Adam and Eve away? 

What if we turned to God and believed in God the way that God believes in us?

Can you imagine what would happen?

No more hunger.

No more fear.

No more pain.

A world in which it was safe for all people to live as God created them.

A world in which we didn’t have to rail against racial violence or systemic injustice and oppression, in which all manner of gender identity and expression was normative, in which guns did not outnumber people, in which we didn’t feel the need to use labels like “female priest” or “Black doctor” or “Asian professor,” because we would really, truly love our neighbors – and we would act like it – no matter if they looked like us or loved like us or believed like us.

A world in which political and economic boundaries would be meaningless because we’d all truly be in it together, so there’d be no attempt to justify war or the forced deportation of infants and children from their families to another country.

A world in which there’d be fresh food and clean water and a healthy planet because we’d value people and creation over profit and power,

the well-being of God’s beloved over our very human and broken understandings of success.

A world in which letting go and letting God would be easier and more compelling than grasping at the empty straws of our brokenness and our rebelliousness, easier and more compelling that holding on so tightly to everything we mistakenly think will bring us peace, will make us happy

This is Lent, the season of preparation for Easter – and not Easter as a one-and-done.

This is Lent, the season in which we seek to better understand what it means to be and live as Easter people.

This is Lent, the season in which we prepare to walk by the empty cross and through the empty tomb to see Jesus and to know differently and more fully what that means for us and for the world.

The problem Katie named in all of her 10-year-old frustrated glory relates to us directly to today.  We get so hung up on a moment in time that moving forward becomes harder than it needs to be. We get so hung up on what seems to us an impossible truth of God’s promise to the world, of the frightening reality that we are created in God’s image to live an Eden-like existence. We get so hung up on our fears that we can’t achieve that, that we cannot let go of our failures, our brokenness, our sinfulness.  We can’t see what lies beyond, and we fail to see the truth, we fail to live the truth, that we were created as part of the promise.

John the Baptist isn’t running around the Galilean countryside in uncomfortable clothes, eating something other than delicious food to hold us in place, with no way out.  He is proclaiming the sometimes harder truth, that we get to choose more, we get to choose better, we get to choose love, and we get to choose love now, not in some distant heavenly place. 

“Repent, for the realm of heaven has come near.” 

Heaven is near enough that we just have to turn around, to turn back to face God and the perfect existence from which we came.  Amen

This is my sermon from October 23, 2022, the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost in Year C. The link for the lectionary is here.

When I was in college, many moons ago, I took a political science course about game theory. To say I struggled with this course is an understatement. I could never quite buy into the “there are absolute winners and there are absolute losers” part of the theory. The idea of a zero sum game, in which when one person wins another must lose the exact same amount never sat well with me. Though I didn’t couch it in theological terms at the time, I realized later that I just didn’t believe that in God’s economy, in God’s vision for the world, that this could be true.

I also realized later that some of my struggle was because I am not a black and white thinker. I love the shades of gray. The gray spaces have always seemed to me to be the fertile places, the places where there is possibility, where there is hope.

In our current political climate, where it seems rudimentary standards of civility have been tossed aside, very many people, including people of faith, proclaim an understanding of what is right that seems so very, very wrong. People who deeply desire to be a part of this amazingly wonderful and sometimes crazy feeling Jesus Movement say things, do things, advocate for things that are totally inconsistent with the way Jesus lived. It makes me wonder how there can be such vastly different understandings of what it means to be Christian, of what defines a Christian value or moral. 

It is a Christianity in which there is an “in crowd” and an “out crowd,” distinctions made based on right behavior or belief, as determined by people who think they have it right. And, if they have it right, anyone who acts or thinks differently must be wrong.

They are Christians, so Muslims must be wrong.

They are white, so people of color…

They’ve been living here for a while, so immigrants…

They are men, so women…

They are wealthy, so those struggling to make ends meet…

They work, so the unemployed…

The list goes on and on…

And that way of thinking, which has nothing to do with Jesus, with the way he lived his life, leads to all sorts of reactions and decisions  an ways of being that underscore difference for all the wrong reasons. This emphasis on the difference that separates results in fear and anxiety and more distancing behavior, and this cycle, too, goes on and on.

Pick up the paper, or listen to a newscast, and you cannot help but come across this. People are talking non-stop about how to control others, about how to get people in line with their way of thinking, of their way of behaving. We encounter people working overtime to erect barriers to inclusion, to unity, to the common good, in order to protect their own positions, their own understanding, their own privilege. This is “in crowd” and “out crowd” writ large.

These are not evil people. These are people like you and me, people who want to do the right thing, who believe they know what it takes,  who believe they have the answers to the questions of what has gone wrong. In big ways and small, we all fall into this way of being sometimes.

Now, you may be thinking that I am reading the Gospel in a particular way – the way I grew up hearing it read, in fact: that the Pharisee and the tax collector are examples of a wrong and a right way to approach God.  It’s the equivalent of a zero sum game. In that reading, the Pharisee is self-righteous and Jesus is saying that he has it all wrong. It is the tax collector, who has it right.

But what if it’s not quite that simple? What if the message for us is that faithfulness is not just a matter of doing the right things v. doing the wrong things? God’s love is not finite. God’s love is more expansive, more generous, more forgiving, more merciful, more just than we can imagine. God’s love is unconditional. God’s love is not a zero sum game, and we are not one-dimensional players.

Each of us has a bit of the Pharisee and the tax collector in us. There are ways in which get it right and can offer thanks to God for that, as the Pharisee is doing, albeit gratitude tinged with something of a litany of his righteous behaviors. There are ways in which we realize we fall short and need to ask God’s forgiveness, as the tax collector is doing.

What would happen if we read this Gospel passage keeping in mind that it is part of the larger narrative of God’s love, grace, mercy, justice, and compassion – the source of hope?

Each of us is called to act faithfully and to express our gratitude to God for the opportunity to do so, and each of us has the opportunity to ask God’s forgiveness when we fall short. If we believe in the mind-boggling expansiveness of God’s love, in which there are not winners and losers, but only God’s beloved, humility is key. For it is when we are humble, whether in our faithfulness or when we stray, that we know God is God, and we are not. In our humbleness, just as in those fertile gray areas between black and white, we experience the possibilities, the promise, and the grace of God.

This is my sermon for the Seventh Sunday after the Pentecost, Year C. You can find the lectionary here.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is asked by one of his disciples to teach them how to pray.  And in what seems like an uncharacteristic response given that Jesus often responds to questions with yet more questions, Jesus teaches a prayer.  And it is a prayer that we pray together every Sunday and which many of us pray daily.

If we were to outline this prayer, it might look something like this:

1. Praise God’s name.
2. Pray that everyone gets what they need.
3. Commit to a way of living in community and discipleship.

As I read this prayer in Luke’s Gospel with the parable, which Dr. Amy-Jill Levine calls, “The Parable of the Pushy Pal,” I realize that, as familiar as this prayer is, as commonly prayed as it is, I am not sure that we always understand what it actually means.   

I also find it somewhat ironic that a parable – parables being known, perhaps being notorious for raising more questions, causing more confusion – acts as a commentary, an explanation, of a prayer that is known and prayed fervently throughout Christendom.

The Lord’s Prayer, as it is commonly known, is far more radical and counter-cultural than we may realize.  It is rooted in the ancient Jewish tradition of praying daily for what you need to shape your so that you are able to live righteously, and that is “faith” as a verb, what we often refer to here as “living our faith.”  It is that kind of faith that we hope to shape. It is something of a roadmap to living our days as God would have us live them to achieve God’s dream on earth.

Jesus is giving this prayer to the disciples, to us, at a time  of political conflict, at a time in which he is working day in and day out to all attention to social, political, and economic injustice, to ensure that everybody gets what they need to thrive. It is offered at a time in which the institutions and religious legalism make it really difficult to reconcile the way people are forced to live with Jesus’ mission of mercy, justice, compassion, and hope.

The prayer starts with a command.  We are to praise God’s name.  We are to ground everything we say and do in an awareness of the sacredness and mystery of God’s holy name, the sacredness and mystery of the Divine.  We are to acknowledge that God is God and we are not.  And that leads to everything we pray after that.

We ask that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Note that there is an immediacy to this.  In asking that God’s will be done her on earth, we are asking that it be done now, not at some future time when earth is not more.

What we may not understand is that this request is a bit dangerous, at least for those of us who fear the kind of change that is necessary to realizing God’s dream now.  This is a prayer that is all about “us,” all of us, all of God’s children, all of God’s creation, and not about “I.”  Though we pray it personally, we always pray it “give us.”  It’s about building community.

We ask God to give us – all of us – what we need to live each day, no more and no less.  Coupled with the immediacy of asking that God’s will be done on earth, that means that we are praying that all of God’s people get what they need now, as as soon as they need it, not when it’s more comfortable or more convenient for us to do our part. 

This is the choice that the “pushy pal” in the parable is making.  He chooses to disturb his sleeping neighbor because it is the only way he can feed his unexpected and hungry guest.  This man chooses to risk his status as a  good neighbor to ensure that he extends the radical hospitality that Jesus would have him extend.

In doing this, he reminds us that God’s will is not magically achieved.  We are Christ’s Body in the world.  We are Christ’s hands and feet.  We do the work, the on-the-ground work, of ensuring that everyone has what they need.

We then acknowledge that we don’t always get this right.  We ask God to forgive us for our failures and misdeeds.  And we ask this knowing that part of the work God has given us to do is to forgive others for the ways in which they, too, need forgiveness, for the ways they have hurt us and other people. 

Seeking God’s forgiveness while forgiving others is part of the whole.  We need both if we are to be part of the realization of God’s will being done here on earth now.

And then, because we know that in our brokenness we need reassurance that we can praise God’s holy name in all that we are and all that we do, every single day, we ask God to help us stay the course.

This Gospel gives me hope that as people of faith we can make a difference in God’s world now.  I heard this week a description of prayer that brought this home:

Prayer is powerful…Are we living with the understanding that when we pray, God enters into the situation about which we’re praying and uses the work of the Spirit to create real change. [This is my aside:  That is the Spirit who works in and through us.]…

Prayers are aspirational.  They are speaking into existence things that we hope will happen, but do we actually trust that they will?”  (The Rev. Will Ed Green)

I would add to that the question of whether we are willing to risk the kind of change that embodying Jesus’s radical love and hospitality requires.  The Lord’s Prayer is a call to action, which brings with it certain risk that we have to let go of some things we hold dear, some of the ways of living and being with which we are so very comfortable in order to ensure that everyone has what they need.

I am reminded of the adage, “Be careful what you ask for.”  And I pray that God gives each of us the strength and the courage to be a part of changing the world from the nightmare it is for so many, into the dream that God has for it (to paraphrase Presiding Bishop Michael Curry).   Amen.

Copyright 2022 The Rev. Paula J. Toland

This is my sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, preached on July 3, 2022. The lectionary is here.

In October of 2020, seven months of living in a deadly global pandemic in a year that also saw an escalation of deadly racial violence and an intensification of truly frightening political maneuvering around such issues as how to care for infants and children caught up in the debate about immigration, I was weary.  I was so weary that I wrote a newsletter message about being weary.  Although it may be the height of hubris to quote one’s own writing, I share that message with you now:

“Beloved Community,

Are you as weary as I am?  Weary of the constant influx of news that reminds you of how broken the world is?  With the seemingly never ending tide of news about war, about conflict? About an almost unimaginable array of ways we fail to love one another as Jesus calls us to do?  About our apparent creative genius in finding new ways to ignore the call to respect the dignity and worth of every human being and the world? 

Even in the midst of a life that is full and rich and good, on this journey deeper into the heart of God with all of you in this amazing community, this week I have been feeling weary.  I have found myself wondering why it is I think I can make any difference at all to address problems that are far beyond my resources and capacity.

And then, as she so often does, the Holy Spirit (“wild and free” as my former bishop says) reminded me that the call to me simply is to be a faithful disciple, to live my life in such a way that whatever I do, small or not, is done with love for God’s people and creation.  It is not up to me to solve the problems, but it is up to me to be a part of the solution.  And that shifted my thinking, lifting the burden of weariness, at least for now.

I hope this message, from the Talmud, speaks to you as it does to me:

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief.

“Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now.”

You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

Peace & Blessings,

Paula+”

You may be wondering why this journey into the newsletter archives. Or perhaps you get it without explanation.  The world seems even more broken today than it did then.  I find myself just as weary, though now often without an awareness of the energy or resources to do the work that needs to be done, even as I understand that work as a call on my discipleship just as strongly as I ever have.

As I’ve rallied for sensible gun laws on the national mall, listened to a man yell, “I’ve got a gun!” and witnessed hundreds of terrified people stampede to escape the threat, I’ve grown weary.

As I’ve watched the January 6^th hearings and read the news from the Supreme Court, with decisions that strip the rights of women to control their own bodies; Miranda rights, gun safety laws, and climate change regulations diluted, I’ve grown wearier.

As I’ve talked to my young adult daughter about how scared and despairing she is about the future ahead of her, it’s impossible to believe but I’ve grown even wearier. 

And when I’ve thought about how many times we’ve fought these same fights over the years, I’ve wondered if it is even remotely possible to make the kind of difference that needs to be made. 

I’ve been angry. I’ve been afraid. And I have been wearier, more exhausted than I ever remember being.  There are days I feel as if I am looking up at the bottom of my hope, trying to see a glimmer of light to motivate me to do the work that I’ve been doing since I developed a social consciousness, some 50 years ago, all over again as if for the first time.

And then I read today’s lectionary.  That wily Holy Spirit got me again. This line from Galatians seemed to jump off the page:

So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up. So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.

It was as if the Holy Spirit was speaking directly to the weariness of my heart, reminding me of what I know to be true:  the call to people of faith is to persevere.  Working for the good of all whenever we have the opportunity is an essential element of Christian discipleship.    

It doesn’t matter that the work that needs doing now is work that has already been done.  We work for the good of all.

It doesn’t matter that the resources of a seemingly unstoppable minority of privileged, powerful people can wreak havoc on the lives of a majority of the rest of us.  We work for the good of all.

We advocate for the rights of women and children, immigrants and the poor, people of color and all whose voice is not heard and whose basic humanity is often denied, and for God’s creation.  We grab onto our hope, even if our grasp feels tenuous, less full of hope than it has in the past. 

We do not let the enormity of the world’s grief or our own weariness overtake our faith in the promises that God has made to us and to all people.  Those promises are faithful and true. We follow Jesus, no matter what the rest of the world seems to be doing or not doing. We invite the Holy Spirit to work in and through us, reflecting God’s love and God’s light in all that we are and all that we do. We do this because it is the work we have been given to do. We live our faith.  We persevere. We show God’s love for all people all of the time. Full stop. 

Copyright 2022 The Rev. Paula J. Toland

This is my sermon from June 26, 2022, the Third Sunday after Pentecost. It was a great day at St. Stephen’s. We baptized two of God’s beloved.

The lectionary may be found here. We use Track 1.

In this week in which we are reminded by congressional hearings, Supreme Court decisions, and a mass shooting targeting LGBTQ+ people in Norway, of these reminders of our brokenness and the ways in which we struggle so often, so consistently with living into God’s commandments, today’s reading from Galatians some much needed clarity, some comfort, and some hope.

We are reminded that God is a liberating God, the God who will free us from all bondage, including that which we inflict and impose on one another and ourselves.  This is the God of love, God human and divine, the God who gave us the command to love one another and lived with us, lived as one of us, to show us what it means to overcome our fears and our brokenness and to incarnate, to embody, the love of God for all people. This is the God of love, who died as one of us and then rose again to show us that even death cannot overcome God’s love.

We are told that living by the flesh – which is a way of saying living according to our will, as opposed to God’s will – that living by the flesh limits our ability to feel and express the love of God in us and for all people. But when live by the fruits of the Spirit we can be free from all that limits our ability to experience the fullness of God’s love.  And that, my friends, is the comfort and the hope.

Wen we live as God created us to live, as Jesus showed us how to live, as God’s Holy Spirit, here alive with us, will guide us in the way of faith, then , and only then, we will know what it means to be truly free.

Br. Luke Ditewig of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal monastic order, wrote:

What God promises and commands, God also enables.  By the Spirit, we coming more into life, one step at a time.  Jesus keeps telling us that there’s more.  What is Jesus inviting us into?  What might our teachers in our lives and our collective history reflect about Jesus’ invitation into more?  It is not a height to be reached, but a widening embrace of mercy and grace.”

And that brings us to today

Today we are going to baptize Beatrice and Alistair.  Baptism is a Sacrament, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.” (BCP 857)  “Grace is God’s favor towards us, unearned and undeserved; by grace God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills.” (BCP 858)  That’s the teaching of the Catechism in the Episcopal Church.

In Baptism, we are welcomed into the household of God, reminded of God’s promises and God’s commands. It is a step we take together – those being baptized and the community of faith.  It shapes  us and it forms us in ways that are truly a holy mystery. And it reminds us that we are part of a collective history, the story of God’s work in and through creation since the beginning of time. 

Baptism frees us from the limits of our brokenness. It is the foundational way of accepting Jesus’ invitation to be part of something bigger than ourselves, something so much better than ourselves, something that is about the unimaginable, unconditional love of God for all of God’s people.

We are welcomed into the embrace of God’s mercy and grace. We are claimed as Christ’s own forever.

And then to remind us that is real in our lives today in ways that are more tangible, maybe more accessible, we are welcomed into the love and safety, comfort and security, challenge and opportunity of a community of faith that commits to helping us to grow into the fullness of who God created us to be so that we can better reflect the image of God within us.

We become a part of that widening embrace in which all of the fruits of the Spirit are present and in which we are emboldened, enlivened, encouraged, and empowered to live by that Spirit and to love one another as we are loved by Jesus.

We going to welcome Alistair and Beatrice into that embrace, reminding them of a truth that exists whether we do that or not: God’s love for all of God’s people and God’s invitation to all of us to live into that reality with joy and intention in all aspects of our lives.

For those of us who have already been baptized, we’ll affirm our faith using the Baptismal Covenant, as a reminder that the Spirit guides us every single day, not just the day we are baptized, and that this journey of moving deeper into the heart of God is one we can choose to take each and every day of our lives. Amen.

Copyright 2022 The Rev. Paula J. Toland

This is my sermon from June 19, 2022, the Second Sunday after Pentecost. On June 16, 2022, at a potluck dinner, a man welcomed into the community at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Vestavia Hills, Alabama, shot and killed three members of that parish. This tragedy hit close to home for us. The parish was founded by The Rev. Douglas Carpenter, whose sister is a long-time member of St. Stephen’s Millburn.

The lectionary for the day may be found here. We use Track 1.

At the start of today’s service, I offered the prayer from our Presiding Bishop for those who were killed and those who survived the shooting at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Vestavia Hills, Alabama.  I heard about that shooting when I logged onto the internet after getting a couple of notifications on my phone, one being news of the shooting at St. Stephen’s and the other being an update on the arrests of the 31 men who were heavily armed and in body armor on their way to a Pride event in Idaho. 

Though I’m not sure why, because we’ve had a steady diet of these kinds of violent acts, literally several in any given week, but there’s a part of me that is still surprised. It boggles my mind that in a country that has all of the resources we need to stem this flow of violence and death, we continue to lack the will to do it. And I know that it is because resources without the will to use them for good is the civil equivalent of praying with no intention to change one’s behavior and attitudes.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is continuing his healing ministry, his ministry of radical love and radical hospitality. He’s been journeying by boat and by foot all around the Sea of Galilee.  He’s veered off into the countryside away from the shore and then comes back to where we meet him today.

As they arrive by boat to the southwest shore of the lake, he and his followers encounter the man struggling with demons.  We’re told that the other villagers, the man’s community, have been trying to help him.  No doubt, trying to protect him was also about protecting themselves. Demons are unpredictable and scary, but they do try to help him.  He asks Jesus not to hurt him as Jesus is exorcising the demons, restoring the man and his community to health and wholeness. 

Now the man is thrilled. He begs to be able to follow, to travel with Jesus, but Jesus says “No. What I want you to do is to go back home and to witness the Good News of God’s love working in you. The man does just that.  That really doesn’t come as any surprise.  I’d like to think that all of us would listen to Jesus, who has just healed us, and that all of us would do what Jesus asks.

But there were so many other people.  I would have expected that this man’s community would be thrilled.  Or, if not thrilled, I would expect that they felt some relief. Yet that’s not what happens.  We’re told that some were afraid and then, in verse 37, we’re told, “Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, for they were seized with great fear.”  

“Seized with great fear” after witnessing a healing. Why? 

Was it the magnitude of Jesus’ power that overwhelmed them, causing them to feel afraid? 

Was it that Jesus spoke to the demons, giving them what they asked for, only for them to be drowned with the sheep when the sheep flee into the lake?

Was it that the loss of those sheep, their livelihood, meant economic peril? 

We’ll never know. It could have been one of those things. It could have been all of those things. The Scripture doesn’t tell us so I’m going to offer another possibility, and that is:

Even the change we say we want can be scary and overwhelming if we get it, especially if it means we have to give up something important or familiar.  We would rather hang onto to what we know, what we have, even if it is contrary to our wholeness and our wellbeing, and to God’s will. It is said that nature abhors a vacuum and there’s a reason for the phrase “fear of the unknown.” We need something to fill the broken places, something to fill the places where fear resides in us or we choose to hang onto it. 

We don’t like to feel vulnerable.  Vulnerability scares us. Fear makes us feel vulnerable because it reminds us that we are not in control. And, for some people, at least, feeling vulnerable and afraid, out of control, makes them feel angry and leads them to act violently. The anger and the violence mask the fear and fill the place in them where the control they think they should have doesn’t exist.

When I read that all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them,             

when I heard about the shooting at St. Stephen’s and the situation in Idaho, when I heard about the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin, and the mass shootings in Pittsburgh and Buffalo and Uvalde…, I wondered why it is that we can’t trust in God’s love, why we can’t trust our faith to be what fills those broken places.

Why is it that we sometimes act more like the demons in today’s Gospel, asking for what we need and then still going to a place that is about violence and destruction and our own deaths, both literally and figuratively?

Why is it that we cannot see God’s love, mercy, justice, and compassion, God’s grace, for us and all people? Why is it so hard for us to let God’s Spirit, God’s grace fill the place where fear resides?

I don’t have an answer to these questions.  What I do have hope, though I’ll admit in this moment that if it is possible to feel a bleak hope, I think I do. And yet it is still hope. It is hope rooted in Scripture, which is how we’re help to understand God working in and through us.

In today’s story from Luke’s Gospel, as is true in all of the Gospels, we are shown the unconditional love of God for all of us.   I heard on a podcast this week [Terrell Carter on Pulpit Fiction] that “Jesus always goes to all the wrong places, at all the wrong times, and spends time with all the wrong people.” Obviously, “wrong” is a human understanding because for God there are no “wrong” people. There are only people needing healing and wholeness, compassion and forgiveness, love and grace.

In today’s Gospel we are reminded that Jesus travels a long, hard road, literally and figuratively, to give us what we need to fill the places of vulnerability and fear. And all it takes is one teeny tiny crack in our defenses, in our hardened hearts, for God’s Holy Spirit to make her way in and to do what she does best: to work in and through us to guide us deeper into the heart of God, deeper and deeper into that place where we are a reflection of God’s love, and not our own vulnerability and fears.

God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s justice, God’s compassion, God’s hope can overflow our hearts and fill all of the brokenness in our lives. That is what happened to the man cured of his demons. And then he does what we should do. He does as Jesus asks, as Jesus would have us act.  He goes and he gives witness to God’s love and God’s grace.  And I have to believe that his witness opened at least one heart, changed at least one life in a way that furthered Jesus’ mission of mercy, justice, compassion, and hope.

The man cured of his demons is an example for us of how live our faith, how to live our trust in God, how to invite God’s Spirit to give us what we need, to empower, enliven, and embolden us to act in ways that bring healing and reconciliation.  That is our call as Christians.  We are to shed light on the darkness, to be beacons of God’s light and God’ hope in the world.

I’m going to end with a passage from the book that Alex’s brother Doug wrote in the book, The Story of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church: Birmingham, Alabama 1972-2008:

Yes, it was cozy at St. Stephen’s, and yes a parish is the best place in which to absorb the shocks of brutality. The parish is also the best place to learn how to respond to cruelty near at hand and far away. Jesus responded to the news of the brutal death of John the Baptist by feeding five thousand people and healing the sick later that day. He responded to the brutality that preceded his own death by spreading out his arms that all might come within his saving embrace. Paul sums up this radical teaching of Jesus in Romans 12:21, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Let us all be the good that God created us to be.  Amen.

Copyright 2022 The Rev. Paula J. Toland