St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Owings Mills MD
June 26, 2022
Year C, Proper 8: The Third Sunday after Pentecost
2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14
Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20
Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Luke 9:51-62
Rebuilding Bonds of Love
Back in Jersey City, many of our parishioners lived in neighborhoods that were regularly scarred by violence.
These good people never knew what they might face each time they stepped out their door – worrying about their kids until they got back home safely – passing by the makeshift shrines set up at corners where yet another young man or woman had been struck down by gun violence.
Each time someone was killed in Jersey City, we would pray for them by name in church – and, for a while, a group of clergy would gather to pray at these places of violence and death, hoping that our witness would be a sign that God’s love was present, even in these bloodstained and seemingly hopeless places.
After a while, most of the clergy stopped coming to these grim vigils – maybe even they found them pointless or just too depressing.
Here, of course, it’s different.
Now, thanks to alerts from the “Owings Mills – Reisterstown Patch,” I know that there is some violence here in our immediate neighborhood, but most of us leave our homes without feeling like we are taking our lives in our hands.
But then there is the city just down the road.
You know better than I that the epidemic of gun violence has battered Baltimore.
There is so much death, so many victims, that I am ashamed to say that they become a kind of bloody blur. But every once in a while a violent death stands out as especially tragic.
Maybe you remember from the news that the other day Trevor White was shot and killed in Baltimore City.
He had played football at Boston College - he was the father of three, a CPA, an entrepreneur – he had recently opened a restaurant in Little Italy.
But, what really caught my eye was that for the past five years he had worked with ReBUILD Metro – which, as many of you know, is a grassroots effort to restore city neighborhoods block by block.
As I read Trevor White’s obituary, I grieved that someone so talented and, most of all, someone working hard to rebuild long-neglected city communities, had fallen victim to gun violence.
Meanwhile, here at St. Thomas’, lately quite a few of our parishioners have faced difficult and sometimes heartbreaking challenges.
Some have endured serious illness or injury, the death of a loved one, or a rupture within the family.
No matter what, these are difficult challenges, but a few days ago I heard one of our parishioners who has been going through a hard time speak very movingly about how much harder it all would be without her faith in God - how much harder it would be without the love and support that she has received from our St. Thomas’ community.
Amen.
There is no getting around the fact that life is often hard, and sometimes unspeakably sad.
And yet, it’s often in the midst of the hard times, and during the sad moments, that we get little glimpses of the way God has always meant life to be:
The kind note or concerned phone call.
The delicious homemade meal dropped off at the door.
The tender touch of a friend’s embrace.
A church full of people gathered to celebrate a life well lived and to console a grieving family.
Little glimpses of what God has always intended for us.
Right from the start, God’s great hope has been that all of us – God and us – that all of us would be held together by bonds of love – bonds of love, stronger than the violence we inflict, stronger than any disagreement or division, stronger than any challenge, stronger than any heartbreak, stronger even than death itself.
Today’s lesson from the Gospel of Luke marks the beginning of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem and all that awaits him there: a joyful welcome that was followed quickly by betrayal, rejection, suffering, and a death that seemed to be the end of his story.
Perhaps it’s Jesus’ awareness of his fate that shapes the serious and challenging tone of what we heard today.
Jesus and his disciples began their journey from Galilee to Jerusalem by traveling through Samaria.
Now, because of the famous parable, we tend think of Samaritans as “good,” but back in the first century there wasn’t much love between Jews and Samaritans. Although Jews and Samaritans were related, they had different ideas about scripture, worship, and the messiah.
So, probably it was no surprise that Jesus was rejected by at least one Samaritan village.
And, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that the brother disciples James and John respond to this rejection with let’s say, a wild overreaction.
Their threat to call down fire and destruction reveals an astonishing overconfidence in their own power – just the latest episode of our long-running series, “The Disciples Just Don’t Get It.”
Although they’ve been with Jesus for a while now, James and John seem to have missed, or maybe have just conveniently forgotten, that we are supposed to forgive those who wrong us – that we are meant to love our enemies.
But, then again, we have been with Jesus for a while, too, and we also struggle with those teachings.
It would be fun to spend the rest of my sermon picking on the disciples. But, no matter how much I want to skip it, I can’t avoid talking about the second, more challenging, half of today’s gospel lesson.
Jesus has brief interactions with three unnamed would-be disciples.
And, each time, Jesus emphasizes the high cost of discipleship.
It is costly to follow a Savior who has no home of his own.
It is costly to follow a Lord who insists that he comes first, ahead of even serious obligations like burying one’s father.
It is costly to follow Jesus who insists there can be no looking back at what we have left behind.
We’re not told if, after hearing about the high cost of discipleship, these three would-be disciples ended up following Jesus.
I wonder.
As I’ve sat with this really hard passage, I’ve come to see it as Jesus’ version of God’s commandment:
“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage. You shall have no other gods but me.”
God began that commandment by reminding the Israelites of God’s liberating power – and then God demands an exclusive bond between God and God’s people.
Now, God does not insist on this exclusivity because God somehow needs our love and devotion.
No, God insists on being first because God knows that we are made for God, made for God’s love.
And so whenever we try to put something else – or even somebody else - in God’s place – we very quickly go off the rails.
But, when we accept God’s bonds of love, then, as St. Paul wrote to the Galatians, we are set free – free to truly love one another, free to generously serve one another.
I’ve mentioned before that some of us have been thinking about the mission of St. Thomas’ at this time of our history.
You’ve heard me talk about my vision of us as a servant church – but maybe we need to go even deeper than that.
We live beside a violent city in an appallingly violent country, a frightened and angry country, ever more armed to the teeth.
We live in a land where on Friday the Supreme Court deleted a right, further inflaming the country, and leaving many people, most especially our gay family, friends, and neighbors, fearing what will be lost next.
We live in a time when people don’t know God or the church (and, frankly, considering our track record, many do not want to know the church).
And we live in a time when people don’t know each other, either.
So, in a time and place such as this, maybe our mission is to show the world out there what it means to be a community where, despite our differences and disagreements, the bonds of love – the bonds among God and us – are so strong – a community that looks more and more like what God has always intended for us.
With God’s help, may we rebuild our bonds of love.
Amen.
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