19th Sunday After Pentecost 2026

Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And blessed be God's family.

Now and forever.

Amen.

Together.

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

Let's the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit.

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

Let us pray.

Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve.

Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us of those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Savior, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.

Amen.

Please be seated for the lessons.

I now invite all of our kiddos, the grade and under to head to the back.

We got Miss Kate, we got Miss Emery there for our godly play.

Ooh, got a good crew today.

All right.

The first lesson is from two Samuel, not one.

Now it was after the defeat of the Ammonites that the sister of Absalom, David's son, was beautiful.

Her name was Tamar, and Amon, the son of David, loved her.

Amon was distressed to the point of sickness over Tamar, his sister, but she was a virgin, and it seemed impossible in his eyes to do anything to her.

Now Amon had a friend whose name was Jonadab, the son of Shemiah, David's brother.

And Jonadab was an extremely astute man.

He said to Amon, Why are you so dwalling royal son?

Morning after morning, will you not tell me?

Amon said to him, Tamar, sister of Abon, my brother, I love her.

Jonadab said to Amon, lie down on your bed and make yourself sick.

And your father will come to see you.

And say to him, Please let Tamar, my sister, come and feed me bread and prepare the food before my eyes, so I may see it and eat it from her hand.

So Amon lay down and made himself sick.

And when the king came to see him, Amon said to the king, Please let Tamar my sister come and make heart cakes before my eyes that I may eat from her hand.

Then David sent Tamar to the palace, saying, Go to the house of your brother Amon and prepare food for him.

So Tamar went to the house of Amon, her brother, and he was lying down, and she took the dough and kneaded it and made heart cakes in his side and cooked the cakes.

Then she took the pan and took them out before him.

Then Amon said to Tamar, Bring the food into the room that I may eat from your hand.

So Tamar took the hard cake she had made and brought it into the room to Amon her brother.

And she brought to him to eat, and he seized her and said to her, Come lie with me, my sister.

And she said to him, No, do not do this, my brother.

Do not rape me.

Such a thing is not done in Israel.

Do not commit this sacrilege.

And I, where could I go with my shame?

And as for you, you would be as one of the outcasts of Israel.

No, please speak to the king, but he will not withhold me from you.

He did not want to listen to her voice.

He overpowered her, and he raped her and lay with her.

Then Amon hated her with a great hatred, but greater was his hatred toward her than his love of her.

So Amon said to her, Get out, get out.

But she said to him, No, this great eagle sending me away is more than what you did to me.

And he would not listen to her.

And the king David heard of all these things, and he became very angry.

Yet he would not grieve the spirit of Ammon, his son, because he loved him, but he was his firstborn.

Now Absalom spoke not to Amon, neither ill nor well, but Absalon hated Amon because of that deed that he raped his sister.

The word of the Lord.

And you're responsibly the second verse.

The fire of Sinai is my light, my salvation.

Whom shall I fear?

The God of the journey for my life.

Whom shall I dream?

When evil doers advance against me to devour my flesh.

If a battalion besieges me, my heart shall not fear.

One thing I have asked from the fount of life, that one thing will I seek, to live in the house of the woo of life all the days of my life.

To behold the beauty of the wellspring of life, and to embark in her temple.

She will share with me in her shelter when the day is evil.

She will cover me under the cover of her tent.

She will raise my illness.

Now my head is lifted up above my enemies all around me, and I will sacrifice in her tent joyful sacrifices.

Hear my cry, faithful one, when I cry aloud.

Be ready for me and after me.

To you my heart says, Seek my face.

Your oy is not one of those feet.

Do not hide your face from me.

Do not send your slave away in anger.

You have been my help.

Do not abandon me.

Do not forsake me.

If my mother and father forsake me, if I but believe, I shall see the goodness of she who is faithful.

Wait for the living God, be strong, and let your heart take courage.

Wait for God.

Not referring at all to the sexually immoral people of this world.

Or the greedy and predatory or idolaters.

But now I write to you all not to associate with anyone who bears the name of sister or brother, who is sexually immoral or greedy, or is an idolater, a slanderer, a drunkard or predator.

Do not even eat with such a one.

The word of the Lord.

And he will put the sheep on his right and the goats at his left.

Then shall the one who rules say to those at his right, come, those blessed by my Abba, inherit the realm prepared for you all from the foundation of the world.

For I was hungry, and you all gave me food.

I was thirsty and you all gave me drink, stranger and you all gathered me in, naked and you all clothed me.

I was sick and you all cared for me, in prison and you all visited me.

Then the righteous will answer, asking, Majesty, when did we see you hungry and feed you?

Or thirsty and give you a drink?

And when did we see you a stranger and gather you in, or naked and clothe you?

And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?

And the one who rules will answer them.

Truly I tell you all, as much as you all did for one of the least of these my kindred, you all did it to me.

Then the one who rules will say to those on the left, Go from me, all you who are cursed, and of the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

For I was hungry and you all gave me no food.

I was thirsty and you all gave me no drink, a stranger and you all did not gather me in, naked and you all did not clothe me, sick and in prison, and you all did not care for me.

Then they also will answer, asking, Majesty, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of you?

And then the ruler will answer them, Truly I tell you all, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you all did not do it for me.

And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Acknowledge we humbly besteach you.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Please be seated.

It's a weird situation where we have to ask, should we give a parent advisory before we read the scriptures in church?

And and here we are.

Here we are.

And let me just ask you to do something rather on Episcopalian if you don't mind.

Would you raise your hand if you're familiar with that passage from 2 Samuel?

If you've read it before.

We talk so much about how we appreciate the Bible and we haven't read it.

And I don't know if you realize that the Bible doesn't just have this one.

There are many of these stories that theologian Phyllis Tribal calls texts of terror, because they represent, frankly, what is unchanged in our world, which is violence against women.

Now, I didn't lean away from this text because I didn't pick it.

We don't pick the stories.

They're picked for us.

And sure, this is from the Women's Common Lectionary, a lectionary for the whole church for women.

It's written by a feminist theologian and scholar who happens to live in the Fort Worth area.

I'm suspicious that the compilers of the revised common lectionary, that's the one we normally would use.

That's the one that our United Methodist Brothers and Sisters and Presbyterian Church USA uses as well.

They give us sort of a tour of many of the scriptures over three years.

I'm suspicious they leave these stories out in some ways pastorally because if the statistics are true and how can you measure them?

One in four women has suffered sexual violence by the age of 18 by somebody that they know.

So to come to their church and hear these scriptures read might reintroduce trauma to them.

If that is you, we'll make this as safe as we can.

And it's of course very, very hard to hear a story like this.

So maybe they don't want us to read it because it's tough in public.

Maybe maybe the lectionary wants us to do personal Bible study, but let's just be honest, we're not doing it.

I hope you don't mind me saying that, but we're not doing it.

So so if we leave these stories out, we're we're leaving out part of our own scripture.

Hey, maybe I want to decide when I talk to my kids about this.

I don't want my hand forced by church.

And you know, Martin Luther said to us repeatedly, how long, how often not now becomes never.

So I'm not trying to force your hand.

Maybe Will Gaffney is when she put this together.

But the truth is this is holy scripture and a really chilling one after it's read to say the word of the Lord is not chilling.

And so I do want to talk to you a little bit about the justice of peace, if if you don't mind.

One more introduction, though, if you don't mind.

One of my teachers who now has become a friend of mine who teaches Hebrew Bible at Duke, he was at Emory when I went there, uh, wrote a book called The Old Testament is dying, in which he sort of remarks that frankly, because we haven't read it, we can't relate to it and we don't understand it.

And it's on its way out.

Because what we do is we superimpose one narrative and we don't like being uncomfortable.

And boy, if you're not uncomfortable, you're probably a sociopath.

I didn't even say that as a joke.

Like, like I even more so than at eight o'clock, and I know the story, like I just what what can you do with the story like this?

Right.

And I think particularly again because we didn't pick it, but God talk about the national timing, right?

Like if you don't know anything about what happened at Cornell University, oh wow, it's almost like the reading just matches it in some ways, isn't it?

And one thing about this reading, having just read about rape last week, sorry to use the R word in church, but there it is in the scriptures, right?

Is that we get two rape stories in a row This one, even more so than last week, though, denies us the opportunity, the thing that we would love to do culturally, which is blame the holding.

What what did she do wrong?

If you don't know what I'm talking about, let me explain to you based on the Cornell story, right?

The story is: well, she took the drugs, so that was like consent.

And let me make it really clear to you that if a man took drugs and he was raped by seven men, we would say never in hell.

Because we don't do that to men.

So why is it that we can say that women were asking for it?

I was a little bit shocked myself this week because I like to think I've come out on the right end of all of this.

I like to think that, and the truth is I'm still a man.

So I was talking to one of my friends who's a professional similar to my age, lives in this neighborhood, does not live in the fifth or fourth ward or whatever bad neighborhood you want to conjure up in your mind, lives in Nassal Bay, which is well illuminated at night.

And my friend said to me, Of course I don't walk go for a walk at night.

Because every man I see is a threat to me.

I didn't want to hear that.

Because, like I'm the man, I'm not a threat to you.

I might have even tried to talk to my friend Anna of this.

She said, every man I meet is a threat to me because of this story, because of the Cornell Seven.

Maybe I just didn't want it to be true.

But at least for my friend, and I don't want to take a straw roll of the women in the congregation, I'm afraid it probably is true.

I have a daughter who I'm raising, and I'm raising hopefully, I'd like to raise her well.

And the truth is, how do we talk to our daughters about what clothes they're allowed to wear?

I mean, at a certain point as a dad, I have to say something like, of course, wear whatever you want.

And you also have to be mindful about how people will treat you based on what you wear.

Not because it's wrong, but because they have power that you don't have.

My friend said to me this week about the Cornell Vill 7, same one talking about N SLT.

You see, the problem with the judges is, and I don't know if you know this, a couple years ago, there was that guy at Stanford who raped that girl.

His name was Brock, and he got sentenced to two years, and the judge commuted his sentence to like a couple of months because he didn't want to ruin that young man's life over one mistake.

Jesus Christ.

Have mercy on us.

What my friend said is, of course the judges won't convict because they'd be indicting themselves.

They might have sexually abused women themselves.

So what are they going to do?

Convict other people for the very things they've done?

Consider, I don't know what you think about the Supreme Court, but they're not without allegations.

So what are they going to do?

Condemn themselves.

I didn't try to make the sermon about lament, but what is there to do but lament?

Well, there's other things too.

And I just want to suggest to you, actually, uh, that with this story as the backdrop, this whole story about the sheep and goats takes on a little bit different character, doesn't it?

I I mean, like, I think we know this story.

Whatever we do for the least of these, we do for the Lord.

And whatever we don't do for the least of these, we do for the Lord.

But man, there's a third possibility here.

The way we mistreat the least of these or the way that we rape the Lord.

Here's the shocking part.

I would almost put money on this.

At least four of the seven from Cornell would identify as Christian.

I'd take that with you.

So, how is it that we as people and we as Christian people do not see the Lord in front of us?

I wish I had an easy answer for that, but I don't.

But I think that's the question I want to ask.

How is it we don't see Jesus in a woman who is past act and decide that she should be protected instead of taken advantage of?

How is it?

Sean told me he thought that sometimes it is because we are overwhelmed with despair.

And that might be right.

I I'm not sure that our human brain has evolved to handle all that is wrong with the world, which we hear frequently, do we not?

I mean, that is probably 95% of news media content is what's wrong with the world, as if we didn't know that there are things wrong with the world.

But I think there is something about that despair that causes us not to look at another at another bit.

I think it is really easy to see Jesus as the jovial guy who's well dressed, but man, looking at the cross is tough.

I don't like looking at people on crosses.

I don't know about you.

It's disturbing for me.

So maybe we have so much despair already.

We just we just don't want to look.

By the way, I'm not gonna resolve this story from the Hebrew Bible as if we could.

I mean, maybe at the end of the day, we just have to sit with it, and maybe we have to make the admission that things haven't changed all that much.

God help us.

So if you're looking for an answer, I don't have one, but I think the the story this week, this story and the story of national events does ask us to really consider why don't we see these people as the Lord?

Why do we see them as things for us to be played with or tossed away?

So despair might be one.

Despair might be one.

Because at the end of the day, be mad.

Be mad about the Cornell Seven, but what are you gonna do about it?

So maybe it's not just despair, maybe it's our own powerlessness that causes us not to look.

You ought to be reminded of you're being powerless.

I don't.

Good thing I'm a man.

I don't have to remember it as often as if I were a woman.

I don't mean that as a joke.

I mean Jesus Christ, think about this.

Who wants to look at your powerlessness?

Because that's like you being on the cross.

So maybe that's why we don't want to see it, because we realize at the end of the day that our anger at seven boys changes nothing.

If that's all we do.

I hope you heard what I said.

Be angry, and then what do we do about it?

Becomes the next question, right?

Do be angry.

Oh, by the way, could I see Jesus Christ in the Cornell 7?

I sure could.

He was on the cross there too.

They just were holding the hammer.

Let's not pretend we've never held the hammer ourselves.

I don't mean we're all okay.

I just mean let's think about this.

God was not absent from them.

I think there's another reason we don't see Jesus and one another often.

And it comes, it's very, very culturally expedient.

And hey, you want to read the book of Proverbs, you will find this in the scriptures to support you.

And the best way I can say it is to quote a Middle Eastern proverb, which is anytime you come across a blind person, you should kick them.

There's no reason you should be any nicer to them than God was.

If I can unpack that for you, it is this idea that we get what we deserve.

Jesus handles this himself in the scriptures.

Neither that man nor his parents sinned.

He was not born blind because of sin.

He was born blind because, well, some people are born blind.

But man, you know, when you see somebody on a street corner asking for food, I'm a priest and I know not to do this, but I sure find myself thinking they must have made a mistake.

They must have made a mistake.

Hey, did you know that most people who live on the streets are veterans?

Like an inordinate percentage of them.

My dad had what's called PTSD.

So weird.

He had it his whole life.

I mean, why couldn't he get over it?

As if he deserved that.

Do you hear what I'm saying?

Sometimes the blame comes across as real innocuous, and it's still blame.

So if you ever find yourself thinking, I wonder if she wasn't asking for it, whether she knew it or not, repent.

Repent.

Otherwise, you're holding the hammer.

Do you hear what I'm saying?

But I do think sometimes we like that hammer.

Because a hammer feels powerful and it takes us off the cross at least.

And man, sometimes I'd rather hold a hammer than I would gather with the women who stand to weep.

Wouldn't you?

Particularly as a man, because weeping doesn't really feel powerful to me, but a hammer does.

If there's somebody I can hammer, that's how we'll think about it.

Turns out that's goat behavior, not sheep behavior.

What's so funny about this story is that Jesus doesn't say that lambs are inherently better than goats.

In fact, as a shepherd, they're not.

Goats kid twice a year, sheep can only lamb once a year.

They're not inherently better.

What Jesus is saying is these ways of being are so different that you can immediately spot them.

And yet we don't.

I think we've commingled the flocks in our corporate body.

And if you don't mind me saying, in our Christian spirituality, we often commingle the flocks so that we have a hard time looking at a goat and realizing that's what it is.

It's not a sheep, it's a goat.

I almost think that's what Jesus is trying to say as we muddle this up.

Now, look, I do want to take a little bit of the edge off for you because eternal punishment is not really a great, it's not really a great translation.

This is really about eternal destruction.

Because after all, if God punishes us eternally for things that we do are temporary, that God is not any better than we are.

God just has more power.

I think actually what Jesus might be suggesting is that there are parts of the flock in us that don't have any life, and at a certain point they'll be like, rest.

We can either wait till we die or we can join God in cowing the flock now.

Just because we can get away with something doesn't mean there's life in it.

And I think that's what Jesus is actually suggesting this week in this story.

Y'all are used to getting away with shit.

And there's no life in that.

Sorry.

I figure since I used the R word, I could use the S word too.

Man, there's so many times I can get away with stuff, and therefore I think it's effective.

I might even think it's right because I got away with it.

I think that's the mentality Jesus is offering that we can reconsider.

Now, look, I told you, I don't know that there's much that we can really do other than just speak the truth.

This isn't different now than it was then.

It's not.

It's not different.

I've never heard somebody say publicly that if you really like a man, you grab it by the balls because he'll be yours.

But I've heard it the other way and you have too.

Just proof that nothing's changed.

By the way, that's her brother.

Oh, because nothing's changed.

Because 90% of the time it happens to a woman, it's from someone they know and trust.

I don't know if you realize that hymn that we sang, Many and Great.

It's the only hymn in the hymnal that's written to a Lakota tune.

It's also the hymn that was sung at the largest mass execution in the United States in history, that there was a little bit of an upset in South Dakota, and so more than 30 Lakotans were hanged.

They weren't guilty, by the way.

And they were Christian, and they sang this hymn one by one as they were hanged, as their hymn of lament and protest.

What do we have?

We have the ability to tell the truth.

God help us if we won't at least say this is true and that it's wrong.

We have that.

I think we have the ability to repent.

I I do.

I think we have that because I think God believes that too.

And then we also have the ability to lament that this shouldn't be.

And we have the ability to be anointed with oil and said, This is not as God intends, even though it is.

And I think we have the Eucharist to say, God, we need power just to go on.

We need energy to go on.

And I think we have the community because the truth is, I don't think that God allows rape and sexual violence to happen because we haven't prayed hard enough.

I don't think God is going to solve this problem for us.

I think God would like us to solve this problem.

The scary thing is, God is apparently more confident in myself than I am.

God actually thinks we can.

If we would just choose to.

What will we let go?

And what will we repent of?

I don't know if I left you with any hope, but I do want you to hear that your priest often struggles with recognizing sheep from the goats in himself.

And maybe one last category to Sean's point.

Why don't we see it?

Because I don't want to believe I'm that bad.

I I don't.

I'd like to believe that I'm different from these people.

So how consoling was it that my same friend in the neighborhood said, if I'd been one of the 50 on the text chain who didn't respond, I probably wouldn't have responded either.

I sure like to think I would have said don't do it.

But you know.

All the people who lived around the concentration camps said they didn't know it was happening.

We'd like to think that we're not those people.

And maybe that's why we don't see Jesus often, because we like to think we can.

So what's the hope part?

We can we we can.

We can with God's help, with one another's help, and in the meantime, we have the sacraments to support us, that we have this opportunity not to just throw our anger away, but to but to say to a joke at work or to a movie script or to our kids that is not how we treat humans.

I didn't say that's not how we treat Native Americans or women.

We tell our kids that's not how we treat humans.

And then we follow our own sermon.

I wonder if y'all would join me in taking three deep breaths.

Breathe in.

Exhale.

Breathe in.

Exhale.

Breathe in.

Exhale.