3rd Sunday

Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and blessed be God's family now and forever.

Amen.

Let's pray together.

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid.

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.

Keep, O Lord, your household, the church, in your steadfast faith and love.

That through your grace we may proclaim your truth with boldness and minister your justice with compassion.

For the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever.

Amen.

As you're being seated, our children in grades five and below are invited to godly play with Emory and Miss Sample and Miss Kimberly in the back.

A reading from Ruth.

Then Boaz said to the elders and all the people, Today you are witnesses that I am acquiring all that belong to Elimlech and all that belong to Chilean and Malan from the land of Naomi.

Also, Ruth the Moabite, the wife of Malan, and am I acquiring for myself as a wife to maintain the dead man's name on his inheritance, to re-establish the name of the deceased on his heritable property, that it may not be cut off from his kin and from the gate of his native place.

Today, you are witnesses.

All the women and men who were at the gate, along with the elders, said, We are witnesses.

May the faithful God grant that the woman who is coming into your house be like Rachel and Leah, if the two of them built up the house of Israel.

May you prosper in Aphrapath and establish a lineage in Bethlehem, and may your house be the children that the fount of life will give you by this young woman be like the house of Perez, whom Tamar gave birth to for Judah.

So Boaz took Ruth as his own for a wife.

He came to her, and the source of life granted her a pregnancy, and she gave birth to a son.

Then the woman said to Naomi, Blessed be Blessed be the faithful God who has not deprived you this day of next of kin, and may the child's name be renowned in Israel.

He shall be to you a restorer of life and a provider in your latter years.

For your daughter-in-law has given birth to him, she who loves you, she who is more to you than seven sons.

Then Naomi took the child and laid him in her laid him in her bosom, and she fostered him.

The neighbor woman gave him a name, saying, A son has been born to Naomi.

They named him Obed.

He became the father of Jesse, the father of David, the word of the Lord.

We will read responsibly by the half verse.

Give ear, my people, to my teaching.

I will open my mouth in a proverb, which we have heard and known.

We will not hide them from our daughters and our sons, but we will recount to generations to come the praiseworthy deeds of she who speaks of life.

She gave her decrees for Rebecca's descendants and placed teaching among Sarah's offspring.

In order that a coming generation of children yet to be might know, then they will put their confidence in God.

And not be like their ancestors, a stubborn and rebellious generation.

To those younger as brothers, to elder women as mothers, to younger women as sisters in absolute purity.

Honor widows who are really widows.

If a widow has children or grandchildren, let them learn first to show devotion to their own family and make repayment to their parents.

For this is pleasing in God's sight.

Now the real widow, having been left alone, on God she hopes and continues in supplications and prayers night and day.

But she who lives luxuriously is dead, even while she lives.

In order that they may be blameless, give these commands as well.

Now whoever does not provide for their own, and especially for their household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Here is the reading, the word of the Lord.

Some Pharisees and religious scholars came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders?

For they do not wash their hands before they eat bread.

Then Jesus answered that.

And why do you all break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?

For God's sake, honor your mother and your father.

And whoever speaks evil of mother or father must die.

But you say that whoever tells mother or father, whatever benefit you might have had from me as a gift to God, then that person need not honor the mother or father.

So for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word of God.

Hypocrite hypocrites.

Well did the prophet Isaiah prophesy of you and say, This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

In vain do they worship me, teaching human commandments as authoritative teaching.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

But that we're going to be called week after week to hear Jesus in light of the temptation, the passion, the incarnation.

I know that goes first Friday and the resurrection.

We're asked to hear these stories, having all of that knowledge in our head about what resurrection is, and frankly, where true life is to be found and how that is different for what we often want and to reorder our lives to make this time a reordinate reordering.

Maybe we should call it reordinary time instead of ordinary time.

I don't know, but ordinary time it is, so let's get to order, if you don't mind.

And boy, this is an interesting one.

It's always interesting to me that the liturgy requires us to say praise to you, Lord Christ, after a reading, that really would just cut us to the quick, right?

Like, oh, like our hearts are far from God, even though God is on our lips.

I mean, if you don't feel like that indicts you, I got nothing to say.

You should be up here, right?

Thanks, God.

We're hypocrites.

Like that is an interesting thing to hear.

Which reminder, like, this isn't ordinary, like plain time.

This is like holy work we've got to do, right?

So if you don't mind, I want to offer to you an idea that, you know, it's not just because I'm young, but I want you to hear the difference that I don't think we often make in English.

There's this word called tradition.

And sometimes we say living tradition, but really, like when we talk about tradition in church in a holy way, tradition is where we learn from the wisdom, the trials and errors, the mistakes, the foundations of those who have gone before us.

And the places there's life.

Like this is part of why I really like the Book of Common Prayer, because the prayers in there have been prayed by Christians, some of them, for like 1,500 years.

So, like, we didn't make it.

And why I love written prayers is because they often say something in me that I don't have the adequate wording for in myself.

Right?

No, there's room for spontaneous prayer, don't get me wrong.

We have that in a church.

And then we have the Book of Common Prayer to say when we get together, how can we really be on the same page?

And and we do it not only with the people in this room, but the dead people in that columbarium, and people like St.

Francis of Assisi and Martin Luther and Martin Luther King.

That's tradition.

It's full of life.

And then there's this thing called traditionalism, which is a made-up word, and it's pretty much just peer pressure from dead people.

Now, traditionalism, you know it, whether you want to identify it or not.

Traditionalism is how we do things around here.

What's interesting is, as a in a congregation, it takes about three years to live into traditionalism.

The first time you do it, it's novel.

The second time you do it, we really like it.

The third time, we've always done it that way.

So it takes about three years to always have done it some way.

And I want to suggest to you that there might actually be an argument between arguments up to you, whether you decide it, there might be an invitation for us to consider between Jesus and the teachers of the law what areas of our lives we support with tradition, and what areas of our lives we succumb to traditional ism.

So I don't know if you know this.

But the first five books of the Bible Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, we call it the Pentateuch.

We also call it the Torah.

That's the Hebrew word, the Torah.

And I don't know if most of you know this.

It turns out there were two Torahs given to Moses on top of Mount Horeb or Sinai when he was up there for 40 days and 40 nights without eating or drinking.

There's the Torah that we read, and then there's the oral Torah that Moses passed on to like his kids and his brother Aaron and Aaron's kids.

So if you think you understand Judaism based on the Bible, you're totally wrong.

And why is that?

Because there's this whole other Torah that was passed down orally, and it tells you, ah, we've got the writings, but it tells us like how to read the writings and how to live into the writings.

So when Jesus talks about the traditions of the elders, he's talking about the oral Torah, which we didn't get until about a hundred years uh BCE, it started being written down, and we call it the Talmud.

And there are a few of these, because what do you know?

When you pass down stories a lot, they can change.

There's like a Babylonian one, and there's a Spanish one, and there's a Jerusalem one, and there's a couple of these, right?

So we often don't realize that there's a Torah and an oral Torah, and maybe you've heard before, I know I'm maybe belaboring the point, but I want to do it anyway, because I went to school for a long time to do this.

Um maybe you've heard that if you're Jewish, you can't eat meat and dairy in the same meal.

Right?

There's an injunction in the written Torah, don't boil a kid in its mother's.

In Hebrew, the word is halev.

Which could also be the word caliph.

One word means milk, and the other word means fat.

Now, if it's fat, it means don't kill two generations at once.

Because if you do that, there'll be no more.

I hope we get that one, right?

Why do our Jewish brothers and sisters interpret it as milk?

The oral Torah tells them to do that.

So even though there's ambiguity in the text, the oral Torah says nope, the words milk, which is why you can never have a cheeseburger.

You can have cheese, and then later you can have a burger, but you can't have them together.

If you ever wondered.

That's that.

So the Pharisees and teachers of the law, God, the clergy of the day, they're experts on the scriptures.

They know about the liturgy of the church, and they're there to tell you when you get it wrong.

And they come to Jesus and they say this furious thing, which is really a backhanded way of criticism that most Southerners know.

Oh, hey, teacher, why don't your students do the right thing?

Who are they criticizing?

The students?

No.

The teacher.

Now, it's possible that Jesus does this countercritism criticism the same way I do most of the time when you criticize me, which is I'll find an ad hominem so that I can avoid whatever you say.

It could be Jesus goes into detail.

By being really offensive.

Oh, you think I'm breaking the tradition?

Let's have a look at what you're doing.

I just don't think Jesus is as bad as I am.

So I'd like you to invite you that we don't have any stage directions in Scripture.

There's no italics.

Did Jesus immediately answer, or did he just sit there and think?

Like, hey, maybe you guys are on to something.

And hey, if we're going to talk about that, what if we talked about this other thing?

So keep in mind, in the Torah, the only people who wash their hands are cler are priests, right?

Before they do stuff at the altar.

So to generalize that from everybody is frankly a step away from the written Torah.

I do it sometimes here.

You know, there's distilled water in there, but let's be honest, that's symbolic.

I'm not using any antibacterial soap up there.

I do use hand sanitizer every week.

But if I didn't, it'd be fine, probably, right?

This is symbolic, what's happening.

And Jesus sort of says, like, okay, so symbolically you could be right.

And then, and then, man, geez, if we're not following this, what else are we missing?

And then he comes up with this really interesting example in which, and I want to make sure you hear what's happening and what's not happening here, in which apparently there was a practice where people were tasked to care for their aging parents.

Anybody else done that?

And instead of doing that, they took the money and donated it to the Jerusalem temple and said, Well, I don't have any more money for you, pops.

I gave it all to God, and now the temple will take care of you.

By the way, the Jerusalem temple did not have an assisted living or a memory care facility in it, nowhere.

So, what happened to moms and pops?

Nothing good.

Whose money did they give to God anyway?

Moms and pops.

They gave their inheritance to the temple instead of using the money their parents had accrued to care for them.

Now look, I want to make sure you hear.

This is not the same as putting a loved one in assisted living.

Because that provides for them care and sustenance that we can't do.

Okay?

So it's not that.

What it is, though, right, is a way of saying, how do I not take care of my parents and get religious credit for doing it?

Woe is me, Jesus, help us, right?

But that's that's in the I didn't make that up.

That's the story, right?

That's the story.

Now that sounds a lot like traditionalism to me, if you don't mind.

It's like getting religious credit for doing something that's really not great.

I mean, however rough our parents were on us, boy, who deserves that?

So, what's happening in me as I think through these stories, right, is here's the opening invitation.

Like, we often stand really firmly on what we think is tradition.

And maybe we need to reorder some of that because it's actually traditionalism.

Jesus uses this phrase in Isaiah, right?

That words about God are always on our lips, and our hearts are so far.

And I want to make sure you hear this is like before the Romantic era.

Your heart was not the center of your emotions or being in the Bible.

Your heart was the center of your will.

That is to say, like our brain, the thoughts we have when we encounter difference or need or lack in others and ourselves.

That's where our heart is.

And I can tell you, having grown up in an evangelical tradition that I took so literally, I rarely took seriously, that I sure have all the right feelings about God, but my heart was far from God.

Christian music was on my lips.

I could quote scripture left and right to justify the jerk that I was.

Oh.

Woe is me.

I'm in the story.

Like I'm telling you, I'm unlike that thing I used to be.

Like I'm in the story.

In fact, like I was editing some work I did on the book of Matthew like two years ago to turn it into a monograph.

And okay, fine, great.

And I'm reading it, I'm like, these are really great ideas.

What if I did any of them?

You know, like I have these really great ideas about grace and like, you know, being reconciled to parts of myself I don't like and slowing down, and like I'm sure that they're right.

God, I don't do them.

And I think this is what Jesus is asking us to really reconsider.

Where are we not doing this stuff and making it a death-giving tradition?

A traditional ism.

Now, just so I can be clear that we see some examples of this in the others in the other scriptures, right?

I talked about Leverite marriage last week, and and just quick recap, right?

Woman dies without having born.

Sorry, husband dies, there's no son.

So next of kin has a baby with widow in order to recreate dead husband.

Reminder, what's at stake there?

You when the husband is regenerated, as if where all the assets go to the baby.

And if you were the secondborn and you were only getting 10%, when the firstborn dies, you get 90%.

So if you regenerate that, well, you're back to 10.

And Boaz says that garbage.

He says, look, everybody, I'm taking all the assets today.

Because I'm doing what God wants.

I'm marrying Ruth.

And he kind of forgot Ruth could have a baby, is how it seems.

Right?

And at the end of the story, she has a baby.

What do you know?

Who becomes her dead husband?

And here's where you really get to hear it.

Naomi takes it and puts it in her arms.

Naomi is post-menopausal, and she is putting it in her arms to nurse it.

It's not going to happen.

That's a traditionalist thing to do.

Do you hear it?

So Boaz is doing the religiously right thing, perhaps for his own gain.

And the story ends where Boaz ends up losing it all.

Interesting.

Then there's this letter to Timothy, which a lot of scholars would say Paul maybe didn't write, but you know, whoever wrote it clearly didn't have kids.

I'm just going to say that right now.

Because Paul said, whoever wrote it says this interesting line: don't rebuke an elder man, but speak to them as a father.

Well, I mean, if you've ever had kids, maybe it's just my kids.

They rebuke me every day, right?

Like, I mean, I think the kids' number one job is to rebuke their parents.

So whoever wrote this, uh gosh, anyway, I don't know.

Then that author goes on to say this thing that we struggle with in a partisan way in the United States in a really sad way.

Take care of real widows.

Jesus help us.

Do you know what makes a widow a widow?

Her husband died.

You can't fake it.

So what's the author worried about?

Well, widows with means.

As if because you have enough money to prevent you from begging, you don't need a community to come around you in a moment of grief.

God, help us.

You talk about traditional ism, and I suffer from it.

Look, we've had this fluid distribution here for six years, and I offended somebody last year by saying this, but I'm going to say it again.

In the first couple of years of doing this, sometimes I would look at somebody more than once because they were driving a car that looked nicer than mine.

And what did that reveal?

Not that they were gaming the system, but that I didn't have any grace.

I don't know if they live in that car.

I don't even know if it's theirs.

But I sure am worried about cheating the welfare system because people shouldn't get something for nothing.

And that's the same part in me that while I'm on this thing, I won't let anybody help me because I don't need it.

Episcopalians, we love helping people.

Don't try to help us.

And I want to suggest that that might come from some traditionalism, that you should only be in abject need before you accept any help.

I know that's part of me, and I still struggle with it.

Like really struggle with it.

Because I don't want to need nothing from nobody.

What a lonely way to live.

And I'll tell you, I do it.

I'm gonna do it today.

And it's traditionalism.

There's no life in that tradition.

No life.

Now, I'm really piqued.

I mean, look, every single one of us has traditionalist parts and real tradition in us.

And look, I guarantee you it's different for everybody in the room, but there's probably some common congruence.

I'm gonna tell you a religious one first, and then I'm gonna tell you one on climate change that we hit this week in being with Sam Wells.

So let me tell you a religious one.

I used to work in Coronado, which is an island off San Diego, and all summer long the choir had a break, like ours did, right?

Our choir's got a break right now, and they had like an endowment that they would hire bands to come in during the summer.

Bluegrass, or like they had a Celtic band, which was actually the same band.

Yeah, anyway, it's pretty much the same thing.

They were good, right?

But then there would be like an opera singer one week, and there'd be, you know, varied stuff.

It was really great.

And then somebody had set this endowment up.

And turns out that bluegrass band, who also was the Celtic band, they'd sit up front in the chancel and they'd stay there.

And for communion, we'd serve them first, right?

And then we'd serve everybody else.

And the lady who was the vocalist, she she played maybe a mandolin or something too.

She had a son who had Down syndrome.

And I'd seen him a couple of summers.

I mean, they came every summer.

So it's probably the third, third, the third summer he'd been there.

And he sat up in the chancel with them, not out there.

So when we came by with the communion for the band, you see he was right there.

And I put the wafer in his hands because he put his hands out.

And his mom immediately, she didn't cry, she wept.

She wept.

And she got her composure and carried on.

And after the service, she said, you know, listen, we grew up in a church that said because he has Down syndrome, he can't understand the Eucharist, so he can't have it.

You talk about traditionalism.

Jesus Christ.

Traditionalism.

Now I can only see it because I wasn't in that institution.

Does that make sense?

As if I always know when I'm doing it.

We have to step outside where we come from to see it for some reason.

Surely this season is about ordering our lives around that.

As if you cognitively understand the Eucharist.

As if I do.

And listen, I've read I don't know how many thousand pages about it.

I don't get it at all.

But I know it's good for me.

And I know it's good when we all get to have it.

Okay, here's the other thing about climate change.

And boy, you know, I love recycling.

And I'll tell you, I get a lot of despair knowing that most of everything I put in that bin is going right in the landfill.

I hate to give you bad news.

But I love doing it anyway, because I'm a principled guy, unless it involves what I have to say.

So I do this religiously and carefully, and we're doing this being with course by theologian Sam Wells, and he talks about climate change in a way that really pricked me.

Because Sam says, you know, uh the truth is the real problem we have to contend with is not whether resources are renewable, but our whole relationship to the I guess the batteries are dead.

Okay, so here's what Sam Wells says.

He says, as much as an environmentalist as I want to be, recycling, thinking about renewables like solar, there's a thing we never talk about, which is frankly our fundamental relationship with creation and the earth.

And what Sam Wells argues is that we are, even when we think about clean energy, we usually think, how can it support maximal human consumption?

We talk about using renewable resources so we can live the lives we're living and get packages the day we order them, whether it hurts the planet or not.

And listen, I have Amazon Prime.

And boy, that was hard to hear.

That frankly, one of the things we struggle with is that we treat the earth as an object to be exploited instead of as a subject loved and created by God for us to be in communion with.

Still beloved by God, but not humility.

Humility calls us to be in a subject-to-subject relationship, not only with those we disagree with or who don't look like us, but frankly, the rest of creation, which God created and loves, humility.

Then Sam says, Well, we might really need to consider being in solidarity with other people, because the truth is, hey, in Nassault Bay you can jack your house up 18 feet, and then you probably won't get flooded.

But what about people who live in the Maldives?

So it's important that we think about not how do we escape, we think about how we all live or don't.

Solidarity.

Seems really important when we talk about what we do with our aging parents, doesn't it?

Or what school I pick for my kid, because I've got resources and I can make decisions other people living in Webster can't.

Solidarity.

Then Sam says we need to really consider, he uses the word example, I don't like that word, our integrity.

I don't do things to make an example for you.

I either do them because they're right or they're not.

The best example is somebody living into virtue because they believe in it, right?

What I learned from Brene Brown a long time ago is that if I want my kid to have a positive body image, it doesn't matter what I say.

It matters whether I have a positive body image.

And if I do it for her, I've shown her I'm not worth it.

Did you hear that?

Which means if I want my kids to appreciate being embodied, I'd better appreciate it for myself.

Otherwise, I'm lying through my teeth.

Integrity.

Circle three.

Circle four is about accountability.

We make promises all the time.

Do we do them?

I'm pretty sure that's why we have the baptismal covenant over and over again.

Like those are pretty holy promises.

Who holds us accountable for whether we keep them?

Usually just we do.

And I sure know how to talk a cop out of a speeding ticket when I'm the cop.

I don't even remember the last word.

Oh, we do.

It's hope.

It's hope.

It's not wishing.

It's not wishing this will all go away, or God will take care of it.

It's actually hope that's founded in trust that God has decided to be with us, not to fix us.

And that God has a vision for the world we can live into if we choose to.

And I want to suggest to you that traditionalism is when we cut off God's hope and settle for our wishes.

Whether that traditional happens in the service, at our family meal, at Thanksgiving, or any other event you might go to or be a part of.

There's nothing ordinary about that, because I do it all the time.

Hold on to dead garbage.

I know it's killing me.

But I can't seem to let it go.

That's why we'll hear the story again in three years.

You'll have the same opportunity then, but I hope we'll have traveled some together before then.

God help us.

That we are a sanctuary as parents of all kinds, whether they're your biological, you're spiritual.

The people here are just gentle with you.

Hopefully, we will learn to be sanctuaries in a way that is traditional and life giving.