by the Rt. Rev. Andrew Waldo
preached at the joint St. John the Evangelist & Holy Apostles Episcopal Churches Eucharist, Crosby Farm Park, St Paul, Minnesota
What a joy it is to be with all of you here today–not only to celebrate the Lord’s Day together in this beautiful setting, but to celebrate our oneness in Christ, through whom we have been called from every family, language, people, and nation to be a royal priesthood to serve our God. (Rev 5:9-10)
So, we’re here today in gladness for our common life in Christ at a time when dissonance and divisiveness pervade the world around us. That we gather as one body is indeed one of the ways we resist those forces. Even so—if we are honest with ourselves—we can also recognize ways throughout each week in which we might unwittingly participate in the divisiveness. For we do live in this broken world as it is, even as Jesus calls us to live a better way.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus addresses both of these tendencies within us— our participation in worldly separateness and our joy in our common life in Christ. Jesus recognizes that when we say or do things that dishonor others, these words and actions defile us, too. In talking about the words we use, Jesus reminds us that we stray from God’s will when, on the one hand, we read the words of scripture―but then on the other hand, we speak words that betray our love for God or neighbor. Our words can defile our relationships with God and each other. As followers of Jesus we must speak truth and respect the dignity of every human being.
In the meantime, We are being flooded with harsh words in news reports and social media from all directions these days, with violent words too often resulting in tragic actions. In the middle of it all, we long for a time when we can live more peaceably with one another—a time when we depend upon the love for one another that God has planted within us, and a time when we can live by that love.
―There are times when we do have to push and push and push to protect ourselves and others against very real harms, as when people across the Twin Cities stand together or individually against illegal government enforcement actions. At the same time, this Gospel pushes us to remember that when we do take action—even appropriate action—we cannot let ourselves hate those whom we resist. For hatred defiles our own hearts. It betrays the love God has planted within us.
Jesus teaches us something about this in the second half of today’s Gospel, when he at first dismisses the Canaanite woman’s plea to heal her daughter. It’s a mystifying and perplexing moment in scripture. But, as New Testament scholar N.T. Wright reflects on this passage, “If Israel is indeed the promise-bearing people [to whom Jesus has come], then Israel’s Messiah will ultimately bring [God’s] blessing to the whole world.”[1]
The Canaanite woman calls Jesus out as she persists in asking to have now what Israel’s Messiah promises for the entire world’s future: healing and restoration, in this case, for her daughter’s illness. ―Through her faith and persistence, Jesus recognizes her point and changes his own perspective!
―This tension between the now of our present needs for healing, and the promise of a future reign of God, is at the heart of Jesus’s command earlier in Matthew’s Gospel—in his Sermon on the Mount—that we “love our enemies.” The way we tend to think when we hear these words is, “Someday, when these people finally stop acting badly, I can love them.” Only this morning I received information that a son of parents in the Holy Apostles Hmong community is likely to be deported to Laos in the near future, after living his entire life in the United States. Situations like his make crazy angry―But when Jesus says, “Love your enemies,” he uses the present tense—not the future tense. Jesus tells us to love our enemies now, even when we are in the heat of battle, as it were―not later.
When the alarming news came out this week that the Department of Homeland Security had done secret surveillance of a meeting at St. John’s and at other churches this past April, our brother in Christ, Craig Lemming, posted an excellent letter in response to these reports. I won’t go into the content of the letter here, but I was struck by how his words of encouragement at the end of the letter speak to the hopeful “now” of our gathering here today as well as the hope we have in Christ.
“May God continue to gather us in Christ’s beloved community with all of our neighbors to show forth the love of God as we love one another as Christ loves us.”
And the people say, “Amen!”
[1] Matthew for Everyone, part one, N.T. Wright.
