26th after Pentecost

Now and forever.

Amen.

Let's pray together.

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known.

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.

Let us pray.

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning.

Grant us so to hear them.

Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.

We may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you've given us in our Savior Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.

Amen.

As you're being seated, our children are invited to your children's chapel with Alex in the back.

Reading from Second King.

Eighteen years was Jehoiaking at his reign.

Three months he reigned in Jerusalem, and the name of his mother washkah, daughter of El Nathan of Jerusalem.

And he did what was evil in the sight of the righteous one, just as his father had done.

At that time the slave troops of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came up to Jerusalem, and then the city was besieged.

And Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to the city while his slave troops were besieging it.

Then Jehoakim, king of Judah, went out surrendering to the king of Babylon, himself, his mother, his enslaved Eurchats, his leaders, and his most trusted officials, and the king of Babylon took him a prisoner in the eighth year of his reign.

Thus Nebuchadnezzar brought out all the treasures of the house of the Holy One, and the treasures of the house of the king, and he cut up all the vessels of gold in the house of the Holy One, which Solomon, King of Israel, had made.

Just as the all-knowing God had said.

And Nebuchadnezzar exiled all Jerusalem, all the leaders, all the warriors, ten thousand exiles, all the artisans and the smiths.

No one remained except the poorest people of the land.

So he exiled to Hogim to Babylon, and the mother of the king, the women of the king, his most trusted officials, and the men called the Rams of the land.

Nebuchadnezzar took into captivity from Jerusalem to Babylon.

The word of the Lord.

God, the nations have come into your possession.

They have defiled your holy temple.

They have given the corpses of your slaves, women, children, and men, as food to the birds of the air.

They have poured their blood like water around Jerusalem.

We have become a ton to our neighbors.

How long, holy God?

Will you be angry for all time?

Pour out your anger upon the nations that do not know you.

Remember not the former iniquities against us.

Help us, God of salvation, for the sake of the glory of your name.

Why should the nation say, Where is their God?

May the groaning of prisoners come before you, according to the great strength of your arm.

Now return to our neighbors sevenfold into their bosom.

And we, your people, mock in your pasture, will give thanks to you for all time.

Fallen is Babylon the Great.

And now she has become a den of demons, a bastion of every unclean spirit, a bastion of every unclean bird, a bastion of every unclean and hateful beast.

And I heard another voice from heaven saying, Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins, and so that her plagues you do not receive.

For her sins touch the heavens, and God has remembered her inequities, pay her back what she herself has paid out, and pay her back double, double for her works, and the cup she makes and makes her double.

Just as she glorified herself and lived, run away, and likewise, give her just as much torment and sorrow.

Now then in her heart she says, I said a queen, I am no widow, and sorrow I shall never see.

Therefore, in a single day her blows will come, death and sorrow and famine, and with a fire shall she be burned.

For mighty is the sovereign God who judges her, the word of the Lord.

Glory to you, Lord Christ.

The day after Jesus healed a centurion slave, Jesus went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him.

He has just approached the gate of the town, and suddenly, being carried out, was a man who had died, his mother's only son, and she was a widow.

With her was a large crowd from the town.

When the Messiah saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, Do not weep.

Then Jesus came forward and touched the coffin, and the bearer stood still, and Jesus said, Young man, I say to you, rise.

The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.

Fear seized all of them, and they glorified God, saying, A great prophet has risen among us, and God visited God's people.

This word about Jesus spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.

Now the disciples of John reported about all these things to him.

Then John summoned two of his disciples and sent them to the Savior to ask, Are you the one who is to come, or for another should we wait?

When they'd come to Jesus, they said, John the baptizer has sent us to ask, are you the one who is to come, or for another should we wait?

In that hour Jesus healed many women, children, and men of diseases, afflictions, and evil spirits, and gave sight to many who were blind.

And then Jesus responded, saying, Go and tell John what you have seen and heard.

The blind receive sight, the lame walk, and those with diseased skin are made whole.

The deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them, and blessed is anyone who is not scandalized by me.

The gospel of the Lord be raised to you, Lord Christ.

Please be seated.

When the compilers of the lectionary, both the women's lectionary, we're using this cycle, and the revised common lectionary, when they put together these fragments from the scriptures, and we always get four of them, they also gave us away an interpretive key in their mind for how it is we collect them together.

It's called a collect.

We begin with the collect of the day.

Now, I wish I could interview these folks so that I could know what it is they had in mind when they put this collect with these scriptures, but since I don't know, I'll do my best.

Inwardly digested, read, marked, and learned so that we can embrace not the right answer, but the hope of everlasting life.

Now, I'm going to talk about the scriptures, because uh that's what the collect wants me to do.

Uh, the collect wants me to talk about these.

So let me tell you one thing that may bother you right off the bat.

Perhaps you grew up like I did in a church that taught that the Bible is inerrant, has no mistakes.

And I just want to tell you, the very first reading shoots a hole in that.

What's the name of the king of Babylon who comes and takes the people into exile?

His name is Nebuchadnezzar, except there is no person named Nebuchadnezzar, there is only a king named Nebuchadnezzar.

Now you may say that's only one letter.

What difference does it make?

It makes a difference between something being inerrant and something being written so that we can study and learn from it.

I hope you hear the difference.

If you hang your faith on no mistakes, I'm afraid you just lost it.

Because it's wrong.

There is nobody named Nebuchadnezzar ever.

The king of Babylon is named Nebuchadnezzar.

Well, so then what did we do with Scripture?

We read it and we learn it and we study it so that we can have the blessed hope of everlasting life, not so we can have a history book.

I don't say that lightly because it took me about 20 years to get around that.

So, how is it that we read this faithfully?

Just to make sure you know the story, Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, comes and carries all the people who are literate or skilled out of their home.

He puts them into exile in Babylon.

Who does he leave behind?

People who aren't good at stuff.

People who have the lowest kind of day labor, subsistence farmers, not farm managers.

He takes the farm managers, he takes the chemical engineers.

He probably even takes the aerospace engineers, right?

But he takes these folks up and he puts them into work.

And so now they find themselves far from home.

Not only are they far from home, but look what Nebuchadnezzar does.

He takes all of the stuff from the house of God, the sacred stuff, the things that show that God lives here and lives with us, and he defiles them utterly.

He melts them into gold bars.

He has a meal to his own God on the altar.

I don't know what he does in the font, but something not great.

He uses it as an ashtray.

You know, anyway, use your imagination.

He takes the holy stuff and he treats it like it's not holy.

So the people in Jerusalem, whether they were carried into exile or they're at home, are living in the state of cognitive dissonance.

This is God's home.

Like the only God in there's no home anymore, is God homeless.

And all of God's stuff, like the ark, God's footstool, is gone.

So where does God stand now?

All the holy stuff is gone.

God, I thought we were your people.

God, I thought your home was permanent.

God, I Thought your kingdom was going to look like a place where there were no tears, where there was no suffering, and here we are being led into captivity with a fish hook in our nose.

By the way, that's true.

A fish hook in your nose.

You don't need handcuffs.

Because nobody's going to try to run away from that nose rope.

So, what's their response?

This is a lovely thing about scripture.

I want you to hear it as lovely.

We read that song.

This is like a song, like it's set to music and meter.

We don't know the tune.

But imagine turning it into like WKBJ to hear a Christian song on the radio to uplift you.

And instead you hear like some lyrics that say, like, uh, let it be known among the nations, vengeance poured out in blood for your servants.

Hallelujah.

I didn't think you'll hear that on KSBJ, like, God murder these people who murdered us.

Amen.

Glory.

Doesn't sound like a great song.

That's in the hymn.

Anybody ever sung a praise song like that?

I don't need you to raise your hands.

Does God do that?

Or do we want that?

Because those aren't the same thing.

Because something is in the scriptures, it does not mean it describes how God is.

But frankly, it might describe who we are.

Do we worship a God of collateral damage?

I mean, do we worship a God who to get at one of our enemies will set up a bond that takes care of women and children alongside them?

Or do we just worship that ourselves?

I hope you understand what I'm asking.

Do the scriptures prescribe we do this, or do they describe this is who we are?

This is how we read, mark, and inwardly digest.

We ask questions about that.

What's the use of this?

By the way, it shows up in Revelation 2.

Did you see it?

Revelation is about the new Babylon.

Probably Rome.

Maybe it's Dubai if you've been there.

It's probably New York City a hundred years ago.

Fallen is Babylon the Great.

Fallen is the empire, the city, the locust of all the power and wealth you thought possible.

The place that never could fall is fallen.

And pay her back double.

Hear this, we can read this to our own peril by saying, God condones violence, so let's use it and we'll show whoever's not faithful enough what it means to suffer the wrath of God.

People have done that.

People have done that.

But if you read carefully, the scriptures encourage us don't take part in the sins of an evil empire.

Don't do that.

So do we believe in Jesus the warrior?

Or do we believe in Jesus the forgiver?

When it suits me, I like them both.

Don't you?

Fortunately, Jesus forgives me, which is great, thanks.

And now I'd like you to be a warrior against people who don't think like I do, because that would be most convenient for me.

Is that what I want?

Or is that what God wants?

These are always important questions when we read the scriptures.

Do they reveal our desires, or do they guide us to the blessed hope of everlasting life?

Revelation says, just like St.

Augustine, if you've ever read City of God, I will ask your hands.

Anybody read City of God?

Thanks.

It's a long book.

Not going to say I recommend it.

But Augustine says, we find ourselves actually living in two cities at once.

There's a human city that we know very well, and then there's the divine city that wants so badly to occupy the land.

And the question is, where are our feet firmly planted?

Augustine says we actually have this opportunity as disciples to increasingly immigrate into the city of God, even though we find ourselves living in the city of humans.

Humanity is not bad, don't get me wrong, but what Augustine has in mind, right, is that we sort of live in a city that is very reactionary most of the time.

And in so doing, we find ourselves living in exile, that is, far from home.

This is the story in the Hebrew Bible that the people are far from home.

First they're far from home in Egypt when they're slaves.

Far from home.

Then they find themselves far from home in Babylon.

And the question is, how do we actually go home?

And what is home like?

Is it a place where people who look and think like us get everything they want?

Or is it a place where God's vision is played out?

Am I saying that God's vision is different from mine?

I am.

I am.

And now we get this story from a guy who, wouldn't you think, knows completely who Jesus is?

Like this holy guy John the Baptist, and he's confused about Jesus.

Which means if you're not confused about Jesus, you probably should be.

Because this guy's his cousin and has known him for 30 years and baptized him, and he's confused.

So if we think we've got Jesus completely figured out, we might want to refigure.

I hope that's okay that he said that.

And what do I mean?

Well, John finds himself, what do you know, in a place of cognitive dissonance.

He says, Jesus, are you the one we've been waiting for, or should we wait for somebody else?

And Jesus, he never sure gives an easy answer, does he?

He says, Well, tell John what it is you see.

Blind people receive their sight, and lame people walk, and those with diseased skin are made whole.

The deaf hear and the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

And blessed is anyone who is not scandalized by me.

You may say, Well, that's a complete answer.

John's going to be satisfied, unless John, like I am, is expecting Jesus to solve the problems of the world.

I learned as a kid Jesus is the answer for the world today.

Trust him like no other.

Jesus is the way.

Anybody know that song?

It's a great song.

It's lovely, and I can put a lot of emotion into it, but then what do you know I have this cognitive dissonance because my eyes function visually, I'm able to see things, and what I see doesn't match what I'm supposed to perceive.

What I see is collateral damage and war.

That doesn't sound godly to me.

What I see is 40,000 children are going to starve to death today in the world, roughly.

What I see is 22 veterans are going to take their life today.

That doesn't sound like Jesus has answered those problems.

I hope you'll agree with me.

Actually, when I look at the gospel, what's kind of confusing to me is that I see Jesus healing symptoms, not defeating structures.

Can I unpack that?

There's a story about the widow in a town called Nain, and I don't know if it's helpful for you to know that the word Nain means pleasant or beautiful.

So Jesus goes to a pleasant city.

And the pleasant city has a problem.

The problem is there's this widow who has a son, and the son's dead.

Why is that a problem?

Because widows can't own property.

Women can't own property.

Her husband's dead, so her claim of the property is not her own.

Her son could have it, but he died.

So now there's no one to own or claim the property.

And by the way, in the ancient world, claim of property was the premium, not your last name, but the land.

The land is your legacy, not your name.

Your name only makes sense with the land.

So what will happen to her land?

It will be given to some other family because she can't hold it.

Jesus solves the problem temporarily by resuscitating the boy.

He doesn't resurrect the boy.

Right?

When you're resurrected, you don't ever die again.

There's only one resurrected person in human history, that is Jesus, right?

So everybody else who gets their life back will lose it again.

So why do I say Jesus only deals with the symptom?

Because the son could die tomorrow.

And then the widow would be right back in the same place.

What would a systemic solution look like?

Equity for women.

Wouldn't that be systemic?

If she could inherit the property well, then her future would not be reliant on her male offspring alone.

She may have had girls, by the way, but they weren't important enough to mention in the story.

I'm sighted.

I'm sighted.

If I lose my sight and it's restored to me, can I lose it again?

Again, right?

There's this word that's interesting that's used here.

The lame can walk.

For how long can they walk?

And I hope we're all aware increasingly that our abilities tend to decline with our age.

Like lockstep.

So if I'm temporarily unable to walk and I'm made able to walk, how long will it last?

You know what I think might be a better solution to the problem?

Accessible buildings.

Because then it's not reliant on your ability to walk.

You can go in in a wheelchair.

I know that sounds amazing.

It sounds like a systematic solution to a real problem.

What I want you to hear, right, is that part of the reason I think we as people of faith often live in cognitive dissonance if we're willing to be honest with ourselves is because we see symptoms fixed instead of systems overturned.

Now, maybe you've heard of this like saying that we use so that we can talk ourselves out of helping people who are poor.

Give a man a fish, feed him for the day, teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.

Notice women don't show up in the story because we're still misogynists.

But you realize that there's a third consequence.

You can teach a man to fish by dragnetting a river, and you will eliminate the entire fish population and make it unsustainable.

I know that sounded really weird and environmental of me, but I used to live in Alaska, and that's the truth.

You stretch a net across a river, you will catch every single salmon in a generation, and then they'll be gone forever.

So I think it's important to remember that there's three things happening that need to happen.

Usually we only see the immediate need in front of us, and we say, Well, I don't know how to fix that, so I just won't.

Or sometimes we say, There's a need in front of us.

Look, I could give you a meal, homeless person that I see, but then where are you gonna eat tomorrow?

So, what would be the point of me giving you the meal?

Anybody ever had that conversation in their head?

I have it all the time.

People come to me and they say, Hey, um, priest, I just need a place to stay tonight because I'm so hot outside.

And in my head, I'm like, okay, where are you gonna stay tomorrow?

You're just gonna like beat the churches until you get your stuff, right?

And I have to tell you, it often makes me a little bit cynical.

You ever felt cynical when you see the need in front of you?

It's easy to be cynical, isn't it?

Jesus is probably actually doing something a little bit different.

You notice he just refuses to be pinned down.

Which really aggravates me because I'd really like to pin him down.

Like, Jesus, who would you have voted for in this election?

Well, he wouldn't have been in the election, right?

Like he would have lived in Syria-Palestine, so we couldn't vote.

Um I still wish I knew.

I wish I knew how it is that Jesus would handle systems of poverty.

Because to be honest, I don't always know how to do it.

I don't.

I know how to give somebody a hand down.

Once in my life, I did something that I thought was pretty cool.

Uh I used to be a youth director, and our youth group used to go on mission trips, and we would go to places that we knew were full of abject poverty, like the Appalachian Mountain region.

So we went with this group called Appalachian Service Project, and we would do things to trailer hump, you know, basically trailers, right?

We would re-plumb them or we'd paint them, you know, and it's almost like, look what we gave you.

Your house looks more like the ones we live in.

And like it's still a trailer that still has like a well that doesn't always work, right?

And we didn't think about that stuff, we just thought, how do we make this look more like you know, what we want?

And they always told us, right, like the work is an excuse to get to know the person in the trailer, because wow, they need dignity and care.

But you know, I just like doing the work.

You know, like I wanted to be able to say I did something in a week, not that I got to know somebody.

So I doubled down on the work, and man, I did make those trailers look a lot better than they did, and they're still trailers.

I hope you hear what I'm saying.

It matters, and it's also not transformative at the same time.

So, what did we do?

Well, I had this idea that instead of spending all this money on transportation to meet people that we would never meet again in our lives, because we wouldn't, right?

They lived like in some glen or hollow in the Appalachians.

We could make our own project and we could raise money, and what we would do instead of that is only serve homes within a three-mile radius of the church.

We did this.

We made our own project, it was student-led, and we re-roofed homes.

You had to own the home, right?

We weren't gonna fix the home for a slumlord.

We do better than that.

Uh you had to own the home, and you had to demonstrate financial need.

And then the really cool idea would be that when you drove by that home next year, a couple months later, with your friends or your mom, you could say, Oh, that's Mrs.

Smith's house.

I got to know her.

I was really proud of doing that.

We reroofed like 25 homes in five years with that project.

And I was crushed when we finished the first week.

First week we did three homes, and I was crushed because I knew how many more there were.

I was crushed to have put a band-aid on a systematic problem.

By the way, that's how I know I'm meant to be a priest and not a deacon, because deacons live in that space and they don't go to despair.

I went to despair.

I needed reconciliation and sacraments and things like that.

It's part of my call.

Because truly, we find ourselves as people living between symptoms and problems extremes.

Don't we?

And which things of those does God care about?

I'm convinced God cares about all of them.

Although it is hard to reroute the traffic of a river when you're hungry.

Now, Jesus does something that's very interesting here, right?

We could read this as a historical text alone.

Why Jesus brought this guy back from the dead.

Or we could actually take a step outside of that and read this a little bit figuratively.

Right?

Figuratively, Jesus goes to a pleasant town.

Nostalgic America.

You know, with a downtown and flags, and pretty much everybody votes the same, and we all have like, you know, picnics, and it's really great.

He goes to a pleasant place and then there's a problem.

There's this guy on a coffin.

And Jesus, you notice, he doesn't ask about the dead guy's faith.

He also doesn't ask about mom's faith.

He doesn't ask about the town's faith.

He doesn't ask what their pledge was, which I think is a mistake.

I think Jesus should have said, up your pledge and I'll up your son.

Or something witty like that, you know.

He didn't do that.

Instead, he's a problem.

And I want you to say it's a real problem, but I also want you to hear it could be a figurative problem.

In a pleasant town, there's somebody who committed a felony, or there's a town, there's a guy who's got schizophrenia, or there's a guy who's addicted to drugs, or how about somebody who's addicted to their job?

Or maybe there's somebody who's addicted to exercise.

They're an exercise bulimic, so every time they have a meal, they think, I better go run and burn off those calories.

By the way, all of those are living in death.

Oh, Mike, those are all different.

Actually, in your brain, they're not different at all.

They're all called addiction, and they're living in death.

And Jesus goes up to somebody who's living in death and says, get up.

It's almost like that saying maybe you've heard before, that God loves you exactly like you are, and God loves you too much for you to stay where you are.

Have you heard of this before?

And so Jesus says, get up, to a person that frankly the town would rather have just put in the ground.

Is that going to solve the mental health crisis?