18th After Pentecost 2024

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

Amen.

Let's pray together.

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy name through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Please join me as we speak the gloria together.

Glory to God in the highest, and peace to God's people on earth.

Lord God, Heavenly King, Almighty God and Father, we worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory.

Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world.

Have mercy on us.

You are seated at the right hand of the Father.

Receive our prayer.

For you alone are the Holy One.

You alone are the Lord.

You alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father.

Amen.

The Lord be with you.

Let us pray.

Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly.

And even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.

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

Amen.

Hannah and Elkanah rose early in the morning and bowed down in worship before the Holy One of old.

Then they turned back and went to their house at Ramah.

Elkanah knew his wife Hannah, and the Holy One remembered her, and it was with the turning of the days that Hannah conceived and gave birth to a son.

She called his name Samuel, God hears, for she said, From the God who hears have I asked him.

Now the man Elkanah went up along with his whole household to offer to the Holy One the yearly sacrifice, and on account of a vow.

Yet Hannah did not go up, for she said to her husband, Not until the child is weaned, then I will bring him that he may be seen in the presence of the Most High, and remain there perpetually.

I will present him as a Nazarite in perpetuity for all the days of his life.

Her husband Elkinah said to her, Do what is best in your eyes, and stay until you have weaned him.

May the faithful God establish the words of your mouth.

So the woman remained and nursed her son until she weaned him, and she took him up with her after she had weaned him, along with a three-year-old bull, an epa of Epha of flour, and a jug of wine.

Hannah brought him to the house of the ever living God at Shiloh, and the boy was just a little boy.

Then they slaughtered the bull, and they brought the boy to Eli.

And Hannah said, My lord, as you live, my lord, I am the woman, the one who was standing beside you in this place, to pray to God who hears.

For this boy I prayed, and the faithful God gave me my asking, what I asked from God.

Therefore I have bequeathed him to the gracious God all his days.

Will he be a request to the God whose name is holy?

So she left him there, and she bowed down and worshipped the faithful God, the word of the Lord.

Psalm Canical of Hannah.

Hannah prayed and she said, My heart exults in the Holy One of God of old.

My horn is lifted up in my God, and my mouth opens wide against mine enemies, for I will rejoice in my victory.

There is none holy like the Most High, none beside you.

There is no rock like our God.

Speak proudly no more, multiply in pride, nor let arrogance come from your mouth.

For the ages of God is a God of knowledge, and by God's deeds are accounted.

The bows of the mighty are broken.

Those who are full have hired themselves out for bread, yet those who are hungry are fat.

The creator of all kills and gives life.

The gracious one makes poor and makes rich.

God raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from heaps of human waste to seed them with nobles and inherit a seat of honor.

God will guard the feet of the faithful who belong to God while the wicked perish in shadow.

The holy one of Sinai.

Those who strive against God shall be shattered.

The fount of justice will judge the ends of the earth.

Now, sisters and brothers, I could not speak to you all as spiritual, but rather as carnal, as infants in Christ.

I fed you all with milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for solid food.

Even now you are still not ready, for you all are still carnal.

Given there is still jealousy and discord among you, are you not carnal and going around as merely human?

For when one says, I am Paul's, and another says, I am Paulos, are you not merely human?

What then is Apollos?

What is Paul?

Ministers from whom you came to believe as the Messiah granted to each person.

I planted, Apollos watered, but God produces growth.

Therefore, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything.

Rather, it is God who produces growth.

The one who plants and the one who waters are alike, and each will receive wages according to their labor.

For we are God's co-workers working together.

You are God's cultivation, God's construction, the word of the Lord.

Glory be to thee, Lord Christ.

Jesus said, Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth.

I have not come to bring peace, rather, a sword.

For I have come to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and a person's enemies will be members of their household.

The woman or man who loves mother or father more than me is not worthy of me, and the woman or man who loves daughter or son more than me is not worthy of me.

And whoever does not bear the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

The ones who find their life will lose it, and the ones who lose their life for my sake will find it.

The gospel of the Lord.

Praise be to thee, Lord Christ.

Please be seated.

Well, maybe I wish I'd had my surgery this week so I didn't have to preach on this one.

It's a tough one to read, isn't it?

I mean, we talk about Jesus being the Prince of Peace, almost sort of like he was born in the 60s.

And then we've got this other vision where Jesus says, I didn't come to bring peace, but a sword.

So I just feel like I need to say a couple of things about what I don't think this means before I can talk about what it might mean.

Is that okay?

Um, there's lots to look at.

One of the things you can look at is those red boards, which we're about to run out of room for.

Right?

There's gonna be, well, we've got room for three more on the bottom.

I don't know if you can tell, but there's now stacked three tall.

Those are the mass shootings that have happened in our country this year.

That means four people or more were wounded or killed.

And again, if you just look through there, that represents 320 already, and there's two more on the way.

Um, the reason I want to say that's one of the things I don't the script don't think the scripture can mean is that this is not, but just don't think it can possibly mean Jesus is advocating wanton use of violence.

I'm real sensitive to that idea because I grew up with the hymn Onward Christian Soldiers Marching as to war, which is a hymn we won't sing while I'm the rector here.

We won't sing it.

Because while I recognize that the Army Corps of Engineers can do some incredible things, Christian soldiers sound so much like the military fighting offensive crusade.

I just can't imagine Jesus being really excited about us slaying the infidel in his name.

I hope this is not controversial what I'm saying.

So got a little bit of trouble with us bearing the sword.

At least here.

Maybe Jesus has one, but that doesn't mean we get to.

Not wantonly, not even in Jesus' name, right?

Because as much as 9-11 bothers us, we also had the Crusades and the Thirty Years' War and the Spanish Inquisition, and the death of the Albigensians, the Qatars.

Those put together killed more people than World War II.

That was people bearing the sword in Jesus' name.

Now, I've also heard, well, look, this is Jesus telling people, you gotta either fish or cut bait.

So if you love me and you want to prove it, well, then you better be willing to forsake your family.

So as a young person, I heard this interpretation, meaning that what God wants us to have is extreme faith.

And if you could show extreme faith, and what's more extreme than disinheriting your parents because they don't believe enough?

If you had extreme faith, well then you'd have proved yourself to God and God would reward you with heaven.

But if you didn't, you see, God might punish you with hell.

That's a plain reading of the text, isn't it?

If you just read it at face value, you might get there.

I've also heard, hey, actually, this is a hyperbole.

Jesus is saying we're supposed to love God so much more than we love our parents, that the love we have for our family will seem like hate compared to the love we have for God.

And I just can't, I just can't buy that.

How could you possibly love God more than people you can see and interact with?

I mean, that just doesn't make sense in my brain.

I've also heard people say, well, this isn't Jesus prescribing us taking up arms.

This is Jesus describing what can sometimes happen when we stand up for our values.

Right?

So, two ways to read scripture.

We can hear it as God prescribing what we ought to do and God describing what it is we do.

I hope I haven't lost you yet.

None of those are real satisfying for me.

Still, none of those are real satisfying for me.

Particularly because you know in the Book of Common Prayer, we do have this lovely prayer for peace.

It comes on page 814.

I don't know if you know this.

We have some prayers for random events like schools and national life and guidance here in the back.

Um, I used to think, hey, prayers have to be spontaneous to have meaning because I grew up evangelical.

So a written prayer didn't mean anything because it didn't come from you.

Part of why I love these prayers is because they allow me to express myself with more depth and eloquence than I could have on my own.

And also because, frankly, Christians have been praying these prayers for more than a thousand years.

So it's a way in which we join the community of saints living and dead.

So here's prayer number four.

Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn, but the sword of righteousness, and no strength known, but the strength of love.

So mightily spread abroad your spirit, that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace, as children of one Father, to whom be dominion and glory now and forever.

I cannot imagine hearing Jesus with the sword in an offensive manner when I read that prayer.

The goal is not to eradicate people who believe differently from us, it is to be united under one father.

I hope that's okay what I just said.

So if we go with the book, it's gotta mean something than literalism, and it turns out that little quote that you get, and it's all set on purpose here in the bulletin because it is a quote from the book of Micah.

This is a poem from the prophecy of Micah, and in Micah it talks about how there will, in fact, be a time when people are persecuted for their faith, and this is what it's going to look like.

You are going to try to stay faithful to your values, and other people are not gonna like it, even members of your own family.

And Micah ends, but the righteous will live by faith.

But the righteous will live by faith, not by the sword, but by faith.

I don't know if you've lost members of your family because of your values, because of your faith.

I don't know.

I've lost friends because of some of my beliefs, which makes me nothing but sad for both of us.

In this political season, I almost think there's a machination that we want that to happen.

And when I say we, I mean the powers that be.

They would like us to be polarized against one another based on how we vote, not even why we vote, but how.

I just can't think that's what Jesus had in mind.

In fact, I think tribalism that turns us against our own families, and Lord God, I don't need any help to resent members of my family.

Do you?

I'm not talking about all of them.

I mean, there's members of my family.

I don't need help resenting.

Boy, if it were a test of faith, whether I resented somebody, I'm cold.

I've already got resentments.

No, it actually seems like when we settle into that base tribalism, and our options are either you think like me, you vote like me, or I've got the sword, we end up doing exactly what Paul accused the Ephesians of.

We end up being well immature.

Isn't that the accusation?

Y'all are immature because you're arguing about who is more important to follow.

Paul, Cephas, Peter, Apollos.

You're making a claim based on some other person's authority rather than walking in the ways of God.

That's what maturity looks like.

And I've got to say, I've grown up with a lot of stunted spiritual growth because I sure thought that too.

That's why I tried to find the right denomination.

This is the right one for me.

But that doesn't mean that those folks are wrong.

I hope you hear that.

I disagree with them, and that doesn't make that they're wrong.

And this is the right place for me.

I hope you hear that that is a much more generous way of being, which I like to think has a lot to do with maturity.

In my mid-40s, I'm starting to get somewhere.

Actually, I want to share with you why I think maturity matters, because probably you know, thanks to Dan Siegel, the way our brains develop.

So the way our brains work, your brain, you know, is the size.

If you put your thumbs in and close your hands, that's roughly the size of your brain.

This is accurate.

And the way your brain develops, actually, when you're an infant, you just have this little tiny bit that we uh usually call like the limbic brain.

That's the instinctual part of your brain.

It's really good at things like fight, flight, flee, reproduce before F's, right?

So that's the limbic part of your brain.

And then as we grow up and as we grow more mature, your neo and frontal cortex grow over that.

So that actually is a pretty good model for your brain.

And if you've ever been around, well, teenagers, you often see them lose their mind.

They take their higher reasoning away, it's gone, and they just think with their instinct.

So if somebody says, I don't like your shoes, it's almost like there's a lion in front of them.

Our brains actually have not evolved to tell the difference between a spear and a hateful comment on Facebook.

Those have nothing to do with one another when we use this part.

But criticism goes right to fear and panic and fight, which is why people are so horrible on Facebook.

By the way, if you didn't know that, people are horrible on Facebook.

And I almost wonder if Paul isn't saying when we do this thing about, well, so-and-so knows better than you, we're doing that instead of that.

And I almost think if we read Jesus plainly about swords, we're absolutely doing that instead of doing this.

Now, I've read commentators that say, well, this isn't a sword of violence, it's a sword of decision.

It's going to sort of cut away what matters and what doesn't matter.

That still sounds a little aggressive for me.

I do think there is, though, frankly, a decision we often make, particularly with family members, we don't have to say very much.

Maybe you'll see them at Thanksgiving.

What are we going to do with Uncle Steve?

What am I going to do with that cousin of mine that, like, is into punk rock and stuff?

We almost often find ourselves on a sword's edge with their either okay or they're not.

And I just think as I get older and older and older, that the world I live in is no longer so black and white as it used to be.

It's no longer so either or binary.

And I don't think that's because I'm a backslidden Christian.

I think that's because God's grace is not binary.

I think increasingly what I find is that actually I don't have to prove myself worthy of Jesus, because what we say in our creeds is Jesus has already made us worthy in all of our unworthiness.

So if that's happened, we're going to say that in the prayer, right?

For the, he made himself a sacrifice for part of the world.

Nope, we're going to say for the whole world.

You're going to hear it in just a few minutes.

If that's already happened, why is it we think we have to prove ourselves to God by cutting away friends or family or Lutherans or Jews as if that were a testimony to our faith.

Rather, I wonder if we aren't called to carry a different kind of sword.

The sword that Isaiah seems to imagine that gets beat into a plowed chair.

I don't know if you've read that.

The Messiah will turn our swords into plow shears and our spears to pruning hooks.

In general, when I find something is putting me on the sword's edge, it is often a clue that I've got some pruning to do in myself.

Not hacking away at others, but pruning those parts of me that need solid food instead of milk.

I don't know the solution to the red boards.

I just know they're a problem.

I don't know what pruning needs to happen in you, but I am, if I'm willing to admit it, all too aware of the pruning that needs to happen in me.

And that pruning, when done not only for God's sake, but for my own, well, that sounds a lot more like the sword of righteousness and the strength of love.