12th Sunday After Pentecost- Bishop Doyle

Our service continues on page one of your leaflet: Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

There is one body and one spirit.

There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism.

Almighty God, to you all hearts are all desire and from you.

The secrets are hidden.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit.

That we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

The Lord be with you.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin and also an example of godly life.

Give us grace to receive thankfully the fruits of his redeeming work and to follow daily in the blessed steps of his most holy life.

Through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

Amen.

Please be seated for our first lesson.

And as you're being seated, just a reminder that we're not having godly play today, but the prayground's open, and we'll recommence with a reinvigorated godly play next week.

A reading from Genesis.

So no one stayed with them.

But Joseph made himself known to his brothers, and he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it.

Joseph said to his brothers, I am Joseph.

Is my father still alive?

But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence.

Then Joseph said to his brothers, Come closer to me.

And they came closer.

He said, I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt.

And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here.

For God sent me before you to preserve life.

For the famine has been in this land for two years, and there are five more years in which there will be neither ploughing nor harvest.

God sent me before you to preserve you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors.

So it was not you who sent me here, but God.

He has made me a father to Pharaoh, and to the Lord of all his house, and ruler over all the land of Egypt.

Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, Thus says your son Joseph, God has made me the Lord of all Egypt.

Come down to me, do not delay.

You shall settle in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near me, you and your children, and your children's children, as well as your flocks, your herds, and all that you have.

I will provide for you there, since there are five more years of famine to come, so that you and your household and all that you have will not come to poverty.

And now your eyes and the eyes of my brother Benjamin see that it is my own mouth that speaks to you.

You must tell my father how greatly I am honored in Egypt, and all that you have seen.

Hurry and bring my father down here.

Then he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck and wept, while Benjamin wept upon his neck, and he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them.

And after that his brothers talked with him.

Then Joseph said to his brothers, Come closer to me, and they came closer.

He said, I am your brother Joseph, and you sold to Egypt.

And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.

The word of the Lord.

Found myself repeating.

Now we will read Psalm 133 responsibly by the half verse, as indicated in your bulletin.

Oh, how good and pleasant it is.

It is like fine oil upon the head.

Upon the beard of Aaron.

It is like the dew of Hermon.

For there the Lord has ordained a blessing.

A reading from Romans.

I ask then, has God rejected his people?

By no means.

I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin.

God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew.

For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

Just as you were once disobedient to God, but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now been disobedient, in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may receive mercy.

For God has imprisoned all in disobedience, so that he may be merciful to all.

The word of the Lord.

Then the disciples approached and said to him, Do you know the Pharisees took offense when they heard you what you said?

Jesus answered, Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted.

Let them alone.

They are blind guides of the blind, and if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.

But Peter said to Jesus, Explain this parable to us.

Then he said, Are you also still without understanding?

Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach and goes out into the sewer?

But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.

For out of the heart come evil intentions murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.

These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyrae and Sidon.

Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, Have mercy on me, Lord, son of David.

My daughter is tormented by a demon.

But Jesus did not answer her at all.

And his disciples came and urged him, saying, Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.

Jesus answered, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

But she came and knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me.

Jesus answered, It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.

She said, Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table.

Then Jesus answered her, Woman, great is your faith, let it be done for you as you wish.

And her daughter was healed instantly.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Amen.

So it's kind of a big day, and I have uh sat with uh this my thoughts this morning for for a while, and so here it goes, you know.

Psalm 133, first, it really stood out to me this sign, this image, if you will, of a great man, Aaron, we're told, right?

And the anointing of Aaron is what the psalmist is talking about, and how there is this fine oil, we're told, which is poured down upon his head, and it runs into his beard, a big long beard like mine, and then it drips down, so much oil that it drips down on his collar.

The psalm follows that oil, and we see the blessing, an important figure of the tradition, being given God's blessing in this action of pouring out oil.

However, or and what I would remind us is that in our church, having evolved over many years, what we've come to learn, sometimes in difficult ways and sometimes easy enough, is that every human being gets to be anointed in the act of baptism with fine oil.

Every child of God receives the anointing of God in that moment, in that profound moment.

Now, the problem is, I think, as a species, as human beings, we're really good at celebrity and hero.

Like we, this is, we we look for that.

We're attracted to that.

It speaks to us, especially when they look like us.

Especially when they look like us.

We're good at the face in a photograph, a voice on TV, the folks at the top of a rock, even though their flame sometimes goes out too soon.

Today, on the one hand, I feel very proud to be an American, to recognize the great feats that NASA has accomplished, the great moments that I've been able to witness over my lifetime, to give thanks, to treasure it, to hallow it, to hallow the greatness and the good folks among us who have done that.

So powerful is this image that we had the former Archbishop of Canterbury with us a couple of months ago, and I put him in that big old Jeep and drove.

He wanted to go to NASA.

So I said, okay, well, we'll go to NASA.

But I saw there in Mission Control the head of the Anglican Church humbled in that moment.

Seeing that place where the first moon landing took place.

I mean, he it was awe to be in that space.

Joseph is another person we get to see today in our scripture.

Sure, Joseph was a great man when we encounter him today in the scripture.

He was a great man, but Joseph knew from whence he came.

And I think as he sat there, he remembered well that he had been thrown into the bottom of a pit by his brothers and enslaved, and given a price.

But you gotta remember that Egypt ate for seven years because of the gift that Joseph would bring to them, and the parsing out of the dreams and the same would need to prepare for lean times.

You have to consider that the man that had been enslaved had also been the man that saved a whole country, a whole nation.

The empire survived because of a person the empire once owned.

And when the moment finally comes to reconcile with those who sold Joseph into slavery, he sends the room away, and his weeping is so loud that people in the palace can hear.

In that moment, where he reveals his true self to his brothers, and he says, I am Joseph, the one who lay in a pit but rose to run the granaries of this country.

Today we will go and bless this monument to say out loud this morning that we memorialize and give thanks to God for great people who have been previously unnamed to us.

This nation reached orbit on arithmetic done by hand, on wells and wiring, stitched layers of a suit so a man could breathe where breath is impossible, on floors mopped at two in the morning, so that a clean room stayed clean for the astronauts.

Much of that labor came from people this nation has declined to list over the years.

So I want to honor that.

I want to say the two things, we come to this moment, two things are true at once.

Something we as a country have trouble doing is holding two things together at once that are different.

One is that each mission was whole and great, a miracle and a masterpiece of human endeavor.

And that our memory has always been partial to what happened.

That in the church we remember that everybody is anointed, but in the world we haven't done so well.

We're here today to repair that memory in some bit, as we confirm and remind ourselves that everybody is welcome, that everybody is receiving the blessing of God, God's Holy Spirit, of every kind, of every journey, of every background.

We will then go outside and remind ourselves that that also is true for the world, and that we need to remember the names of those who have participated.

Some of the people we honor have waited decades.

Some waited past their own lifetimes.

So it is a type of monument and memorial.

It is for the health of our own souls that we should probably let the slowness of our national work sting a little bit, because it stung a lot of other people.

That stings the beginning of repentance.

It always is.

It's how the church learns to see with clarity the next time.

And how it learns, it's how it learns to open itself up to the different, to the unknown, to the names, to the people, and all the roads that they've taken to come this way.

So it brings me to the woman in the gospel.

At the edge of today's gospel.

She has no name in Matthew.

She has a daughter and she has a voice, and she asks and receives silence.

She asks again and receives a hard word from those who follow Jesus.

You see, it's always been this way.

It's not something new.

It's that human behavior again.

But she stays.

And she answers even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table.

Jesus calls her faith great, right?

Jesus in that moment recognized, oh, yes, everybody, welcome to this table.

Here is what this church did with this, by the way.

Here's what the Anglican church and its great wisdom through Trump, Thomas Cramner, did.

He put her answer in our mouths.

In one of our church services, the oldest one, every time we pray before we come to the altar, we say that we're unworthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table, O Lord.

We are quoting someone who was outside of the community and brought in.

A stranger, unwelcome, but then welcomed.

One who refused to leave and say, I am worthy here of this place.

Her theology became our liturgy.

The one outside became the frame or the gate through which we as individuals approach God's holy table, reminding us we've all been lost, haven't we?

We've all been on that broken, haven't we?

We've all felt shame.

We've all felt this sense that we weren't loved, and yet God's love continued.

God's love pursued us, if you will.

God's love blessed us.

That anointed oil runs down our head.

At this table, the crumb and the loaf are the same bread.

Whoever comes hungry receives the entire Christ.

There are no lesser portions for anybody.

There's no back row, if you will, of grace.

Paul says in one line to a church that had begun to forget the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.

You cannot hold them for yourselves alone, and you must give them away because God gives them freely to all.

God rescinds no one.

God's memory holds every name that we failed over the years to carve into some monument and memorial, but who gave and worked and endeavored to make the mission whole.

You see, that's what we learn is that it takes, as that little bumper sticker says, it takes all of us.

It takes all of us working together.

And when we work together and remind ourselves of this blessing upon each of our heads, why what we do is good work together.

The monument is a good sign of that.

And it is something that we should practice day in and day out.

We should, and today especially, give thanks for the women who computed trajectories with a pencil but have their names on no memorial.

Thank you for the seamstresses who stitch layer upon layer of a pressure suit, whose stitches hold human life within them across a quarter million miles.

We should thank the electrician and the machinist and the technician, the custodian with the mop.

For the secretary who guarded the calendar, for the parents who over the years have drove them to the fence gates and said, You dream.

Your place is on the other side of this.

Thank you for the hands who have always seen this equality of God and God's grace.

There is an old story.

I don't even know if this is true.

I didn't, I didn't I don't know.

Maybe it is.

The president met that janitor at NASA.

Some of you probably heard this.

And the president asked what he did there.

And he said he was helping to send people to the moon.

We, you and I, in this church, along with all of our brothers and sisters and siblings in the Episcopal Church, are called to a unity where the oil blesses all people, and where each of us, and together, we make up the mission of God and the world that too easily forget the names who've made everything possible and worked hard, who believes that maybe grace is just for a few of us, or that there are only a few kings.

Maybe just one.