21st Sunday After Pentecost 2026

A reading from 2 Samuel chapter 21.

2 Samuel 21 · chapter mention

Now there was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year, and David sought the presence of the Most High.

The Holy One said, There is blood guilt on Saul and on this house, because he put the Gibbonites to death.

So the king summoned the Gibbonites and spoke to them.

Now the Gibbonites were not Israelites.

They were a remnant of the Amorites.

The Israelites had sworn to spear them, yet Saul sought to destroy them in his zeal for the Israelites and Judah.

David said to the Gibbonites, What shall I do for you?

And how shall I atone that you all may bless the heritage of the Holy One of all?

The Gibbonites said to him, We will take no silver or gold of Saul or of his house, and there's no one for us to put to death in Israel.

He said, What do you say I should do for you all?

They said to the king, the man who finished us off and intended to destroy us, that we would not be able to stand in all the territory of Israel.

Let seven men from his sons be handed over to us, and we will hang them before the dread God of Gibeah of Saul on the mountain of the living God.

The king said, I myself will give them to you.

But the king had pity on Meribal, son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, because of his oath, because of the oath of the Most High that he was that was between the between David and Jonathan, son of Saul.

The king took the two sons of Rizpah, daughter of Aya, whom she gave birth to for Saul, Amani and Mephibal, called Mebeshus, and the five sons of Merub, daughter of Saul, whom she gave birth to for Adriel, son of Bazali, the Meholite.

David gave them into the hands of the Gibbonites, and they hung them on the mountain before the creator of all, and they fell the seven of them as one.

Now they were put to death in the first days of the harvest at the beginning of Bali harvest.

Then Rizpah, the daughter of Aya, took sack cloth and spread it on a rock for herself from the beginning of harvest until rain fell on them from the heavens.

She did not allow the birds of the air to come on the bodies by day or beasts of the field by night.

Now it was told David, what Rispath, the daughter of Aya, the low-status wife of Saul, had done.

Then David went and took the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan, his son, from the nobles of Jabesh Gilead, who had stolen them from the square of Bethsha, where the Philistines had hung them up on the day the Philistines killed Saul at Gilbach.

And he brought up from there the bones of Saul and the bones of his son Jonathan, and they gathered the bones of those who had been hung, and they buried the bones of Saul and his son Jonathan in the land of Benjamin and Zalah in the tomb of Saul's father, Kish.

And they did all that the king commanded, and God granted entry on behalf of the land after that.

A reading from Psalm ninety four will read responsibly by half verse.

God of vengeance, dread God.

How long shall the wicked just one?

They cush, they speak arrogance.

Window and immigrant they lay, they slay her.

And they say the Holy One she does not see.

Understand, you ignorant among the people.

The one who planted the ear, does she not hear?

The one who for the eye does she not see.

The one who disciplines the nations.

The all-knowing God knows the thoughts of the woman born.

Blessed is the one who you admonish, just one.

For to the righteous justice will return.

Previous, I was a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent person.

But I received mercy, for I acted ignorantly in unbelief.

Then the grace of our Redeemer overflowed with the faith and love that are in Jesus the Messiah.

This message is trustworthy and worthy of full acceptance that Jesus the Messiah came into the world, sinners to save, of who I am the principal.

But because of that I received mercy, so that in me principally, Jesus the Messiah would demonstrate all patience, making an example to those who would come to believe in him for eternal life.

To the eternal majesty, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever.

Amen.

The word of the Lord.

But I say to you, do not set yourself against the wicked.

But when someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to them also.

And when someone wants you to be judged and take your coat, let your other clothing go as well.

And when someone forces you to go one mile, go the second mile too.

Give to those who ask from you, and those who want to borrow from you do not refuse.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Praise you, Lord Christ.

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

Amen.

Please be seated.

So we are coming to the end of like an experimental liturgy that we've been doing here for three years called the Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church.

So a reminder that we normally use something called the Revised Common Lectionary.

It's a lectionary we share with the United Methodist Church, with the Roman Church, with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, among several others.

It's meant to guide us through the scriptures.

I mean, it's not a cook's tour, it's just a guide, right?

You kind of go through maybe major stories on a three-year basis.

So we've done this women's lectionary for the whole church.

We'll end our third year on November 22nd.

And it's sort of a different tour, a three-year tour through the scriptures, and she does some different things.

Now, this is written by an Episcopal priest who's a Hebrew Bible scholar.

She calls herself a womanist, which means a black feminist.

Right?

So she's tried to highlight stories of women, and she does some interesting things when she picks the gospel.

Like, I don't know if you realize, we read the same gospel five weeks ago.

That's that's sort of different that you get the eye for an eye for a tooth for a tooth twice in the same year.

You get it every year because the same saying is in Matthew, in Mark, and in Luke, right?

But but here we we we get it twice in five weeks.

And look, I don't have anything more insightful to say on this than Sean did five weeks ago.

But I do want to say something different about it, if that's okay, not for the sake of being different, but it strikes me differently.

Sean told you, rightly so, that an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was actually an old way of limiting retribution.

Before the code of Hammurabi, if somebody took your eye, you'd kill their whole family and their children.

Right?

So, so unlimited retribution.

There weren't like strong bumpers and boundaries.

How often was that practiced?

Who knows?

But we have codified laws to say there's a limit to vengeance.

If somebody hits your car, you can't kill them and take their house, right?

Like this is sort of okay, that makes sense.

Uh so this wasn't about tit for tat, it was about limitation.

And then Jesus goes on to say, well, these three really weird things.

Like they're weird because we struggle with them.

Like if we took them at face value, well, what would there be left for us to do other than just give up everything we had?

That might be why Francis did that.

And St.

Anthony.

Maybe they gave away all their stuff so they weren't worried about it anymore.

But I want to keep stuff.

You want to keep stuff.

So, like, what do we do with these three bits?

And Sean walked you through this.

Like, I think if we take this so literally, we might forget to take it seriously.

But theologian Walter Wink, Episcopal priest, he's now deceased, drew out these themes, right?

So in the ancient world, you're a peasant, you're like herding your sheep, or you're like tending your fields, and a Roman soldier walks by with a 60 to an 80-pound pack, and they can force you to carry their pack for one mile.

But if you carry it longer, that's considered oppression.

And there could be reprisal for them.

So, of course, it's a big pain.

How long does it take you to walk a mile?

I don't know, 20, 25 minutes.

And then you got to walk back.

And there went an hour of your day, and you were already working hard, and now you're tired.

So when Jesus says, Well, take it a second mile, that actually puts the the Roman soldier in a little bit of trouble because they are like overdoing their privilege, as it were.

Somebody could sue you for your cloak.

Now keep in mind this isn't Texas, this is the same latitude as San Diego, and just like San Diego, it's a desert, which means it can get hotter today, but it cools off at night.

So if somebody sues you for your cloak, you're gonna have a cold night.

And what does Jesus say?

I don't like this translation.

He says, give him your loincloth as well.

To be clear, like that's your underwear, right?

So you owe a debt, you sold your soul, you owe your soul to the company store, the company wants your robe, and you say, Take my drawers.

Now, you might say, Well, geez, then you would be humiliated.

Yeah, but you'd also be saying, the company takes your dignity.

Then there's this bit about the striking, and this is the least convincing, which was why I saved it for last, even though it comes first.

If somebody hits you with the back of your hand, and this is what it says, we used to call this in the 90s the pimp slap, the way to degrade somebody completely, turn the other cheek, and then they have to strike you with their palm or their fist, which is at least saying you're like a real adversary.

The least convincing on its own, but when you put them all three together, this is what Walter Wink calls Jesus' nonviolent third way.

That is, it is not pure pacifism, nor is it pure aggression.

It is sort of saying you have to recognize the personhood in me when you come to take my commodities.

This is what informed Gandhi first, and then Martin Luther King Jr.

knew Gandhi in correspondence and in person and read about this and built his idea about nonviolent protest.

And I think we recognize that like the civil rights, the passage of the civil rights was predicated largely on nonviolent social protest, particularly because we had cameras.

I think if we didn't have TV, frankly, it wouldn't have worked.

But when people all over the world watched people marching right from Selma and getting sprayed with fire hoses and attacked with dogs and just getting back up and walking again, they said, This has got to stop.

These people aren't fighting back.

How can you continue to beat people who don't hit that?

Without the TV, I don't think it'll work.

But we had it.

And it changed the law.

I wish I could say it changed our hearts.

That's a different matter, but it did change the law.

The thing about Martin Luther King Jr., and I told you this last year, is he didn't say that nonviolence was a stratagem for winning.

It could be.

But Martin Luther King Jr.

said, go sit in at Woolworths, and if the person smears mashed potatoes on your face and dumps tea on your head, you love them.

And until you're ready to do that, I don't want you going into Woolworths.

Because all you're gonna do is hate them in your heart and be part of the same thing you despise in them.

Now, if that's a hard gospel, I could probably stop there.

That's a hard gospel, isn't it?

That we don't counteract powers in the world because we have shrewdness.

We do it because we love the people who are doing the oppression.

And I want to suggest to you that is actually what I hear Jesus saying about vision.

Now I understand that there are people who are like visibly have disabilities, and I don't think this is about that.

It could be, but I think actually this is really meant to be an analogy.

I had a friend in Atlanta who was a really high-functioning attorney, and she had a retinal detachment, right?

So she didn't have to lose her job, she could still read, although the strain on her other eye was really hard.

And of course, the biggest problem that she had was in driving.

She didn't have major roadway accidents.

Her issue was she was in a tight parking garage with a lot of pylons, and often she would scrape one.

And do you know why?

Because she'd lost a lot of her depth perception, right?

I used to have chickens in my backyard, and you know, birds are really funny, right?

Particularly chickens, because they like constantly do this.

Do you know why they do that?

Because they don't have rods and cones, they do this so that they can have depth perception.

And I want to suggest to you that maybe the gospel is really challenging us who consider ourselves so sighted as to whether or not we perceive the depth of the embodied Christ in front of us, we might actually not perceive as much as we think we do.

So here's an easy, here's an easy one for you.

I am sure that sometime in the last year you've received a call that you answered faithfully.

You didn't recognize the number, but you took it.

You took the call.

And sure enough, it was either somebody trying to sell you something or scam you of something, and you might have found yourself put out by that call.

You might have even really let that person have it.

I mean, who are they to bother you?

Take your time and scam you and do this thing.

I mean, God help you if you made a Political contribution, you're gonna get 500 of these calls a week, right?

I mean, that's what you get, right?

No good deed goes unpunished.

So you get these calls, and boy, I sure like letting that person have it.

Like, how dare they do that to me?

Remove me from your call list, never call me again.

Who do you think you are doing this?

Well, they're just trying to earn a wage.

And somehow that was their best choice is working in a call center.

Now, me, I've got better choices, or at least I've somehow found them, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that I got to go to college and my parents raised me and gave me education.

So it's an interesting thing, right?

That I can look at the telemarketer as the villain.

I mean, who's the real villain though?

Their supervisor.

Hey, if you connect me to your supervisor, I'm gonna let them have it.

Because that's how we're gonna get justice.

Boy, you talk about a lack of depth perception.

Oh, you know what?

Maybe it's the owner of the company.

Maybe that's who I need to connect it to, so I can tell them how wrong what they're doing is.

But I mean, the truth is we operate in a system that allows these things to happen, do we not?

So if that company went out of business, what would prevent another one from popping up?

And I gotta tell you, man, I am super myopic.

I'm using this analogously, right?

When I see something I don't like, Paul says it himself, I was a persecutor.

I was a blasphemer, I was violent.

God have mercy on my lack of depth perception.

Curiously enough, we read this rather long reading from the Hebrew Bible.

And what do you know?

It's about an eye for an eye.

And I just want to be really clear about it.

The Gibeonites are having this drought, and what they decide they need to restore the land is the death of Saul's children.

Now just keep in mind, David has now usurped the monarchy from one family.

How convenient that all of Saul's heirs would be the price of healing, isn't it?

Because then there'd be no political rivals.

You might be saying, are you suggesting that this was expedient to David?

You better believe I'm suggesting that.

And he got to blame other people for it.

So what does he do?

He kills all of his political rivals.

And did you notice what happens to the land?

Nothing.

The land isn't healed until Saul's bones come home.

The vengeance didn't heal the land.

The vengeance was convenient for David and the other people, but killing more people didn't bring any life back, did it?

Talk about a lack of depth perception.

I don't think the Hebrew Bible is there to tell us what we ought to do.

I think it's there to warn us against retribution for its own sake, especially when that retribution is really convenient for me.

And boy, you're talking about an indictment for how we handle Christianity in America.

I mean, I just hate to tell you this, but as a priest, I'd rather tell people I'm an Episcopalian than that I'm a Christian.

Particularly because of the way Christianity is weaponized.

Look what Paul says in Timothy.

I'm not going out there to force people into the cognitive principles I believe in and shame them into getting out of hell.

He says, I believe that I'm a sinner.

Me, a chief of sinners.

This is Paul, the guy we look up to.

He's not putting himself on a pedestal.

He's saying I was wrong to go around telling other people they were all wrong.

Now that's interesting, isn't it?

Because somehow, growing up in the church, what I embodied is I'm more right than everybody else.

And here's Paul saying, the guy who wrote the book, I'm more wrong than all of you reading it.

Because of the violence that I have, because of the blasphemy, because I'll say God isn't in you because I know better.

God help us.

You talk about a scripture for clergy, this is it.

You talk about a scripture for Christian nationalism at a time when we're doing electoral campaigns.

This is it.

I hate to tell you this.

But when Jesus felt like somebody was pushing on his boundaries, he did not stand his ground with a handgun.

I know we're not supposed to talk about politics in church.

The problem is the gospel is political.

It really invites us to live differently.

And I sure would rather have my rights than be righteous, which is a problem of depth perception.

Because through our evolutionary biology, we have learned really quickly to make black or white choices.

Right?

That's what keeps us alive on the savannah.

Is it a lion or is it a gazelle?

We need to know the difference so we know whether to flee or fight.

And what do you know?

That part of our brain works so much faster than this mammalian part of our brain that's able to say, you know, there's a lot of gray area.

There's a lot of gray area.

You probably know that we have the same biological response to a lion as we do a criticism on Facebook.

I mean, it's funny, but friends, like that's what the research says.

Our brains view that as an existential threat.

And what do you know?

We release cortisol and adrenaline like we get ready to run and fight.

That's because of like the way our brains have evolved.

And boy, we very rarely take the time to say, like, whoo, I've lost my mind over that comment.

Well, let's just think about it.

It doesn't actually have real teeth.

It's not actually like coming to kill me, like it's some random person who said some like really weird thing.

And again, we could say it must be because they're wicked or they're bad.

But you know, like I was filling in something on the playground out here after I went to Iran 10 years ago, and I was talking about Iran and what I learned about it, and one of the parents said to me, like, he's really smart.

He was like, you know, the problem with the Shah is nobody ever told him no.

He was raised in a house that never told him no.

Which meant when he was an adult, he didn't know what no meant.

You could be mad at the Shah, you could be mad at his parents, but man, our best thinking said they should have the Shah.

And no one told him no.

Which is why the Iranian secret police was maybe worse than the Gestapo.

Because he could do anything he wanted.

Now, I don't want to say that I feel sorry for the Shah, but I feel sorry for the Shah.

What kind of life is it when you were taught to regard nobody but yourself?

I mean, I guess it's powerful.

It just seems sad.

Because the saddest times in my life is when I regard only myself.

I almost think we get this idea about vision over and over and over again because we're so confident that God sees the world the same way we do.

The problem is we have very little depth perception, which is why it's helpful to travel and move sometimes, to move around a little bit, so we can get a little bit of a different view.

And hopefully the composite can put it together.

And boy, that's why I think we do this together, because as Bishop Doyle told us, one of the scariest things that happened from the Protestant Reformation is that we decided we can read the scriptures by ourselves.

And then there's nobody to call you out on God being as crazy as you are.

But when we do this together, I can say, man, I just think Jesus is calling us to stand our ground.

And Jim can say, Well, that's sweet, Mike, but like let's consider the rest of the book.

Because the truth is, you can make the Bible say anything you want it to.

And the truth is, we don't worship the Bible, we worship the risen Jesus Christ.

And when we get it wrong, we have no depth perception.

You want to support slavery?

You can use the Bible to that end.

I don't see the risen Christ doing it.

You want to support your rights over your personal property and how you earned everything you got and nobody did anything for you.

You can use the scriptures for it.

I just don't think the risen Christ did that.

How did he travel on roads other people built?

Now, this sounds like a weird sermon because I haven't talked about baptism at all and we're getting ready to do it.

And I'm going to tell you why I think baptism is an exercise in depth perception and why I'm glad we do it with infants.

See, I grew up in a church that said it's for adults only.

I was 10.

I was 10.

I didn't know anything.

I mean, you want to baptize an adult.

I mean, let me ask you this: when were you an adult?

I mean, what a slippery question that is, isn't it?

God, when did you know what God was going to ask from you?

I haven't figured it out.

I mean, like, let's just be honest about this.

When are you enough?

And the scriptures say you never were.

So this is the great thing.

You don't have to be enough for God to love you because it's love isn't about what you earn, it's about what God gives.

So I'm actually really delighted we do it with infants because the truth is, if you don't have the depth perception to see the incarnate Jesus Christ in an infant, you're a sociopath by definition.

Because as mammals, we understand to regard the young as helpless and needy.

I'm not wrong about this, right?

When a baby cries, only a sociopath would say, it's because you're selfish.

Right?

And there are those people, and I'm not making light of them, just there are not many of them.

Most of us are like, oh, the baby needs a thing.

Like we could meet that need, the baby is crying out for help, right?

So we understand that God is fully present in people having needs.

It's easy with babies.

But we would forget is that the Shah of Iran had needs that never got met.

And maybe he wouldn't let them get met, but he had needs.

And the political person that's driving you crazy has needs that might not be getting met.

And the question is: can you see Jesus Christ incarnate in the people that you hate?

And if you can't, it's a matter of your depth perception, not God's.

That's my conclusion.

I'm concluding that because it's the hardest takeaway.

And I don't think this stuff is easy.

This is what I hear Paul saying.

I spent my life being right and I realized that being right was wrong.

I spent my life saying, I will triumph over the ungodly, and I will show them that I am godlier than them, and I realize that was no way to be.

This is when Martin Luther King said, if you hate the person putting the potatoes in your face, don't go to wars.

Don't stay home.

You talk about a tough teaching.

He struggled with it himself.

I hope you all know that.

Martin Luther King struggled with his own teaching because it's that hard to see the incarnate Jesus Christ in the Ku Klux Klan.

I'm not trying to be political, I'm just trying to be difficult.

The baby's easy.

We're gonna do it joyfully, and then we're gonna leave, and you're gonna come across somebody who isn't easy.

Probably at your home.

We're close to Thanksgiving.

Which is why we're gonna return to this text again next year.

Now, I do want to make sure you hear there's something really lovely.

This is a Jewish, like mid-rash kind of story, and there's this lovely children's book about it, and I'm just gonna tell you the easy bit here, and it's about I think the depth perception, the depth perception of the angels.

So the story goes once upon a time, there was this really, really bad, churlish Jewish guy who was very, very rich and oppressive, and he did all the kind of awful business practices you could ever do.

And one day he was riding his very heavy and expensive, probably gold-gilded, marble-clad carriage down the road, and he happened to like hit somebody and stopped on their foot.

And I don't know, it came untethered.

It's been a while since I read the book.

The conclusion is the important part.

For some reason, once in his life, maybe he had a bad dream the night before, maybe he had like a mushroom that wasn't completely sanitary for dinner, who knows?

He gets out of the carriage and he helps lift it off this person's foot.

And then he rides away.

And shortly later he dies.

And the angels do this thing for him at his death.

They put all of his bad deeds on a scale, and they are really, really heavy.

I mean, like it's max, it's maxed out, right?

And then comes along his guardian angel who puts the one good deed in his life on the other end.

It's the whole carriage, and the weight of the carriage upturns the scales.

Talk about depth perception.

In some ways, I don't enjoy that way of seeing the world, which is why the gospel calls us to repent again and again and again, not every three years, not even every five weeks, but every time we come in contact with the incarnate Jesus Christ, who is sitting there, and there, and there, in persecutors, in blasphemers, in political people you don't like, you fill in the blank.

Can we see the risen Christ in front of us?

And for some of us in the room, because I've been here long enough that I know you, there's this lovely line from Khalil Jabron.

I don't know if you know him.

He wrote a book of poems called The Prophet.

And the line says this God told me to love my enemy.

So I took God seriously, and I began to love myself.

Depth perception.

We're about to invite a new wonder of God's own creation into the family of God.

You'll see it.

You'll see something really beautiful.

It's a human child, innocent and lovely and beautiful, and then look at your neighbor when we're done with this and see that innocence and beauty in one another.

Amen.