"The Cost of Truth" | Nathan LeRud | March 17, 2024

Well golly, it's a beautiful day. There's a piece of me that thinks I should just send you outside to look at that magnolia tree... and that's kind of my whole sermon. There's a tradition in the Episcopal Church– it goes back to a a famous 19th century preacher named Phillips Brooks, who built a great preaching house in Boston at Trinity Copley Square– and he had the carver of his great wooden pulpit in Trinity Copley Square engrave, in a place where only the preacher could see them, the words that we just heard from John's gospel: "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." That's what he wanted inscribed on his pulpit, where only he could see it: "Sir"– because back when that pulpit was carved all of the preachers were men– "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." It's a humbling reminder for a preacher: don't wow us with your oratory, don't impress us with your Greek and your Latin. At the end of the day, sir, we wish only to see Jesus. My ex-husband James, who was at one time a priest at a church across the river St Michael & All Angels, told his boss Chris Craun about that tradition, and James suggested to Chris that that they have a similar plaque made for their pulpit at St Michael's. And then they invited (and I knew that that was happening) they invited me to preach once, so I climbed up into this into this pulpit and there, engraved on the right here, where I only I could see it, was a plaque where the only the preacher could see it– these famous words from St John's gospel with a slight change. It said, "Ma'am, we wish to see Jesus." Don't we all? It's a good reminder women had to put up with the accoutrements of men for hundreds of years, so I am more than happy to show up and be reminded: "Ma'am, we wish to see Jesus." Certainly the Greek pilgrims who ask this question, this is what they want, right? They want to see Jesus. That's likely the reason that they've come to Jerusalem in the first place. Jesus is gaining a reputation; that means he's also getting some considerable pushback. He is famous, and he's a lightning rod for controversy– of course they want to see this guy, right? They've heard all about him. And Jesus's response to their perfectly reasonable request is elliptical at best: "Sir, we wish to see Jesus," they say, his disciples. And Jesus responds: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains a single grain. If it dies, however, it bears much fruit." What? That is not a response to the question that he is asked. On the surface of things, that's not an answer at all. They want to see him, they want to catch a glimpse of him, they want to take a selfie with him or get an autograph to take home and impress their kids. And basically Jesus says no. He redirects the question. The stakes are too high right now, he says, for selfies and autograph hounds. The fear around us is palpable. If those tourists want to catch a glimpse of me, he says, tell them to show up at Golgatha on Friday afternoon. That is where they will see me, he says, when I am lifted up from the earth. I will draw all people, not just the Greek tourists, all people to myself. If you want to see Jesus, right, if you want to understand Jesus, if you want to– I mean, dare I use this term?– if you want to believe in Jesus, pay attention. Right? Watch how he spends the last moments of his life. He spends his life until there is nothing left. That's a curious phrase in English, "to spend your life." It's a it's a pretty common idiom. Sometimes we talk about it in terms of time: "This is how I spend my time." It's as if our language knows at some level that time, like breath, like life, is a limited commodity. We only get a little bit of it, and not all that much in the grand scheme of things. Most of us sitting in this room will not be remembered by the history books. We get a few short days to bury our toes in the grass and enjoy the sensation of the sun on our face before we shuffle off this mortal coil, cash in our chips, and become root inspectors. That is the whole point of Lent as the church has historically understood it, right? It's my opportunity, as if I needed the reminder, to contemplate my mortality. My days are numbered, and that bag is quickly running low. "Those who love their life will lose it," Jesus says to his followers. Time is running out, and there's no savings account available to you to stash it away. Spend it now. Spend your life wisely, use it well, cause you're only going to get one. I mean, maybe this is just the mid-40s talking, I don't know. Maybe I'm hitting my midlife crisis, maybe this is leftover covid trauma, maybe it's all the funerals we've had around here these past couple months, maybe it's getting to the age where I'm burying people who are my friends, people that I've known well and worked with closely. Some of you were here yesterday when we laid my friend Ron Wesner to rest. Ron was a longtime member of this congregation. He was one of our venerable lectors– you might remember him, the the elderly guy with a strong tenor voice. He broke on Christmas Eve. Those of you who were there remember when he read that great lesson from Isaiah: "unto us a child was born." He got so choked up, but by golly, Ron made it through, right? He was one of our greatest lectors. He was a man who had been ordained an Episcopal priest back in his day. He was ordained by Bishop Pike, that famous and controversial Bishop in San Francisco, and Ron's career took him a lot of different places. It took him to a Chinese mission in San Francisco, to the American Cathedral in Paris, actually, finally to that pulpit across the river at St. Michael and All Angels, before they put "Ma'am, we wish to see Jesus" on the pulpit. It was from that pulpit in 1975– '76 I think, that Ron came out, and he lost his job as a result. He was asked to renounce the priesthood, and he did I don't think Ron ever regretted preaching that sermon. He went on to become, like his savior, a kind of lightning rod for controversy. Ron went on to lead Integrity, which was– or is an organization in the Episcopal Church that works for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people at every level of our church's ministry. He became an activist. He was interviewed by newspapers, and he became kind of the public face of the movement for gay rights in this church. And he died in January. He was surrounded by his friends. He was given two weeks to live. It kind of freaked him out at first, and then I think Ron realized, like, what an incredible opportunity this was, to get to say goodbye to the people that meant the most to him, I got a call. Many of you got a call. We gathered around Ron's bed, we shared stories. He was able to to lay some old rifts to rest, heal some old wounds. His friends surrounded him at the end, and they sang and he died. And I'm jealous, if I'm being perfectly honest. I'm jealous that Ron got to be surrounded by such beauty and peace while the rest of us are down here trying to figure this stuff out, how to navigate our lives in the midst of all the things– election and financial insecurity and war in the Middle East and the threat of mass destruction and global warming– and just trying to find a date for the prom, for heaven's sake, just trying to make it, right? As Sonny Bono wrote about Mary Tyler Moore, "just trying to make it after all." And now Ron's on the other side of all of that. He took his last breath, he handed off his baton, and I wonder if I'm up for carrying it. I wonder if we are up for carrying it. I don't know if I'm ready to pick up the struggle to which Ron devoted his life, the struggle for justice, the struggle for visibility and honesty, what it means to fight. And these days, at least to me, it feels like a fight. What it means to struggle against what Paul calls "the powers and principalities of this world," so that vulnerable people are not continually being scapegoated and strait jacketed by institutions hellbent on their own survival at the expense of human thriving.

In the late '70s, Ron was interviewed by the editor of a of a venerable Episcopal journal, somebody who was taking him to task for some of the "radical ideas" he was promulgating– that homosexuals are created in the image of God– *gasp* scandal! So this editor asked Ron, "You know, in the' 60s, we had these issues of injustices, the injustices to blacks that were forcibly raised in the church, and then we had to deal with the prayer book revision, and then with the ordination of women, and now we're being asked to deal with the gay issue." (That's how they talked about it in 1978, right? The gay issue.) "When is it all going to stop?"

"I mean, when is it all going to stop?" And I can imagine Ron chuckled a little bit. His response was, "Never. It never stops. This is the way God speaks to us. The prophets were controversial, Jesus was controversial," he said. "All of our creeds come to us through controversy. Controversy," Ron said, "Controversy is the fertilizer of the church. You might not like the smell but it makes things grow." I love that line. I would like that, right, across the top of my pulpit. "Controversy is the is the fertilizer of the church. Maybe you don't like the smell of it , but it makes things grow." Jesus says something kind of similar, I think: "Unless a grain of wheat," which is to say a human life, right? "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single seed." But when it dies, it has the opportunity to do something amazing. That is when it has the opportunity to start bearing fruit. And so now I've got this little ghost on my shoulder, and it speaks to me in the voice of Ron Wesner, who spent the most precious things he had, which was his priesthood, right? The cost of what he did, the cost of coming out, the cost was high. And he had to spend pretty recklessly in order to do it. He let his very life fall to the ground and die. He refused to resort to pious platitudes in the face of ignorance and sinfulness and pride. He lost his life and his vocation, and in losing them he found his deepest life and his deepest vocation. He got his life back, and that life bore fruit. It is still bearing fruit. My sense is a lot of us have a ghost like that on our shoulder, a love that will not let us go. Nobody likes conflict– well some of you do, let's be honest. Some of you never pass up an invitation to an argument. But more of us, I suspect, in this room, we're good Episcopalians, which is to say that we tend towards introversion and conflict avoidance and maintaining a veneer of respectability as a way of masking our anger and our grief. When will all of this nasty controversial stuff go away so that things will just be the way they used to be? When do I just get to go back to church and feel good?

That was not Ron's tack. He had no patience for pious platitudes. Ron knew this: the cost of truth is high, and it's worth it. It's worth spending everything you've got in order to find truth. And my sense is that many of us are longing to spend a little bit. We're longing to spend what remains of our days working to something bigger than these little gardens of anxiety that we've learned to tend so faithfully. I think we long to be invited into something that will ask everything of us, something that comes with a cost, something that will demand everything we've got and then ask a little bit more. Which is to say, along with these visiting Greeks in John's gospel, we want to see Jesus. "Ma'am, we wish to see Jesus." And we know somehow– instinctually, if nothing else– we know somehow that when we're walking that knife edge what the what the psalm calls "the valley of the shadow of death," right? we know that's the place where you go looking for him. Right? It's the foot of the cross, it's the place he told them to go find him, because those who cling to their life are going to find it slipping through their fingers. Those of us who spend our lives recklessly, wantonly, promiscuously, scandalously–we trust, maybe foolishly, we trust this promise of our savior that if we spend out everything we have left, literally let it drain out of us in service to the truth, we will discover the secret to eternal life. So I hope you get a chance to catch a glimpse of that magnolia tree out in the courtyard as you leave this morning– she has never looked as beautiful as she does today. The petals are starting to drop a little bit from the heat, she's like poised right there on the verge of just starting to move into this death that she is going to move into now. She's at her best for about 24 hours every year. I think we're maybe just on the other side of that 24 hours. Her moment in the sun is so brief and so spectacular. I mean, what a privilege to get to see her do her thing, what glory she blooms for one brief shining moment. She does it every single year without fail. Just when you think spring will never arrive, there she is, shining bright in the sunlight. The most beautiful thing I get to see all year long. She spends her petals recklessly and shamelessly and provocatively, without an ounce of decency or modesty or selfishness. They fall to the ground, they turn brown, they create the mulch that's going to allow next year's seeds to grow. That's how the Earth works. We get these moments, these little blips of time, a little bit of beauty, a few beautiful petals before they fall to the ground. You can hoard them, right? You can try to keep them on, or you can do what that tree does: spend them. Let them go. The cost of truth is high. It's going to demand everything we've got. So spend recklessly, because the other side of truth is beauty. And beauty, like truth, is worth every single thing we've got.