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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be ever acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Amen and good morning. Who is wise and understanding among you?
St. James, in today’s epistle, asks a pretty good question, don’t you think? And we’ll get to that, but as I prepared for this sermon several things crossed my mind, the lessons of certainly, but things like capable wives, and receiving a child as well – which of course will require an update on my lovely granddaughter little Blaise – and the importance of stories, those we read and those we are writing, and I also expect Jimmy Neil Smith to drop by, and maybe Abraham Lincoln and F. Scott Fitzgerald, too. And then this church has baptisms today, so we’ll want to touch on that – and maybe, if I’m fortunate, we’ll see that all of these things are really about the same thing. So let’s get started, shall we?
Let’s start with stories. Stories are powerful creatures, aren’t they? That may be what the wise and understanding know, I think. And the wise and understanding don’t have to look far to see that, do they, especially not in this election year when two contrasting stories about what America is are on full display. Stories are our human stock in trade. Jimmy Neil Smith wrote, “We are all storytellers. We all live in a network of stories. There isn’t a stronger connection between people than storytelling.” He should know. In 1973, he founded the National Storytelling Festival and the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tennessee after he heard a story about ‘coon huntin’ on the radio while he was on his way back from a field trip to the Grand Ole Opry. Since then he has written and spoken extensively about the ways stories add color, depth, and nuance to our lives.
I’m a big believer in stories. As some of you know, one of my several careers was in secondary education. For about fifteen years, I was the chaplain, humanities department chair, and finally Academic Dean of a small Episcopal boarding school way up in the mountains of New Hampshire. Over the course of my tenure there I taught at least a dozen different classes – I was a kind of utility infielder for the humanities department – but every one of them started with the same statement and the same question: This class is a story about you. Where do you see yourself in it? I think there was some wisdom to this approach. Not all high school students are interested in philosophy or history or literature, but they all are interested in themselves, and each of them is trying to figure out what his or her place in the world is. So, if I was teaching about Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative or Paul Tillich’s concept of ultimate concern or Martin Buber’s Hasidic mysticism? These, I would tell them, are all stories about you. And the Scarlet Letter is a story about you, as is The Great Gatsby or The Color Purple. Ukiyo-e, the floating world of the Japanese Edo period, is a story about you, as is the Gettysburg address.
Let’s try it out. Take Lincoln’s famous words about America, which highlight the country’s central tension, and locate yourself in them. Are you yourself conceived in liberty or dedicated to the proposition that all humans are created equal? If so, how are you writing this story with your own life? Are you free to do whatever you want, or are you bound by the proposition that everyone you meet is your equal and must be treated that way? Doesn’t that resonate just now, in this tumultuous national moment? Or look at that last line of Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words about you? My experience as a teacher was that even a sixteen-year-old, who doesn’t actually have much of a past, feels caught by it, and all of them are trying to invent themselves in much the same way that Jay Gatsby did. Aren’t you and I sometimes caught by the past, too? By what happened last week or last year or ten years ago or when we were ten? The stories that Lincoln and Fitzgerald were telling, the ones they are still telling, are stories about us.
The Bible is a story about us. Not literally, of course. The single book we call the Bible, which just means ‘book’ in Latin, is actually a collection of different kinds of writing, written at different times, for different audiences: historical narratives, myths, poems, letters, apocalyptic visions, and so on. But collectively, this hodge-podge of writing tells a story about a people’s relationship with God. Our story. A story about us. It’s a map of sorts, the kind you might find on a corner kiosk that shows you the neighborhood you’re standing in with a little arrow that says “You are here.”
Let’s try it out with some of today’s lectionary. We can see this dual dynamic pretty clearly in this morning’s reading from proverbs. On the face of it, it seems to be some guy fantasizing about what constitutes a good wife, which is a dangerous topic for a married man to preach on. Now I have always thought that I’ve been blessed with a wonderful spouse, but reading this bit of scripture makes me think I might have been a bit short-changed in the wife department. While it is true that Barbara does me good and not harm, and that she does not eat the bread of idleness, I cannot recall her ever making linen garments to sell, or sashes for the merchants, and I don’t think she has ever planted a vineyard. And, as you can see, all her household is not clothed in crimson.
But maybe that’s not what the story is about. Maybe it IS a story about me, or about us collectively. In today’s epistle, St. James advises us that if draw we near to God, God will draw near to us. So where in the Book of Proverbs can we feel ourselves coming nearer to God? For me, and perhaps for you, too, it’s not about the vineyards or sashes or crimson clothes. For me, in this passage, God is nearest in the saying that tells me that the teaching of kindness should be on my tongue. That spot – you are here – is where this collection of verses becomes a story about me. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful story if the teaching of kindness was on all our tongues? Wouldn’t it be great if our lives wrote that story?
So, too, with today’s Gospel – doesn’t it show us a story that our lives could have written? In it, instead of listening to the hard news from Jesus about what can happen to those who embark on the Way of Love, the disciples are arguing about who is the greatest. That could certainly be a story about me. But Jesus, as he so often does, flips the script on them, and on me. “Whoever wants to be first,” he says, “must be last of all and servant of all.” Probably not what the disciples had in mind. Definitely not what I have in mind most days. And then Jesus does a curious thing. He picks up and holds a little child, and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” The one who sent him, of course, is God. Jesus is saying that God is like a little child. How can this be?
Well, I’m not much of an expert on anything, really, but since our granddaughter, Blaise, came into our lives, I have learned or relearned a lot about small children. Little Blaise, who is now a bit over two, is a force of nature, not unlike God in that respect. She’s also adept at giving commandments, and she rushes at everything, she notices everything, she seems to be everywhere at once, and also seems to have no fear. In little Blaise’s universe there is only one moment, Now, Now, Now, and she doesn’t hold back; giving each Now everything she’s got. Just like God does. But every once in a while, say when she’s trying to climb onto a high up piece of furniture, or go down a steep flight of stairs, or carry something heavy, she turns to me or Barbara and raises her hands and says, “Help me.” I think God does that, too. I think Jesus is saying to us, “I’ve given all that I’ve got. I need you to help me.” That’s the Bible story that we are called to. It’s a story about us.
Baptism is also a story about us, a beautiful story. Many people cry at funerals, and some people cry at weddings, but I have to confess that baptisms are so beautiful that I sometimes cry. And in just a few minutes, Zachias, Zyaire, and Leanna will be baptized right here. For them it is the beginning of a story, the ‘once upon a time.’ For us it’s a moment that takes us back into the past, back past our own baptisms to the earliest days of Christianity. This is the moment when Zachias, Zyaire, and Leanna will say yes out loud, as we say it silently. Yes I will resist evil, yes I will love my neighbor, yes I will seek justice and peace, yes I will respect the dignity of every human being. Yes I will give this life everything I’ve got. They may not be old enough to know it yet, but sometimes these promises are hard to keep. But here’s the beautiful part about baptism, the part where I cry. We say and they will say, yes I will with God’s help. With God’s help. When we have given everything we’ve got, we can turn to God, just as God turns to us, and to all the baptized people around us in this church, Christ Church Cathedral, and in all the churches in all the world, and say, “Help me.” And help will come. This is the promise and the mystery and the story of baptism. It’s a story about all of us.
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