From the Pulpit:

The Rev. Margaret Waters

Did you listen carefully to our collect this morning? A collect is a certain form of prayer that collects up our theme for this morning’s worship or crystallizes whatever it is that the book of Common Prayer wants us all to grasp as the common thread of the morning’s lessons In case you weren’t listening all that carefully, here it is again: Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy;  through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.  

Now that you have had a chance to hear it again, it must be obvious to you that I’m going to preach about power. Really, I am. What do you think about when I say power? Muscle. Weapons. Wealth. Big stuff. That’s the kind of power the world knows about, but, you  know, when we come up on this hill, there is a real sense that we leave the world behind. I’m not for a minute saying that the world is bad. It isn’t. God made the world and loves the world, every inch of it, but when we leave the TV and the computer and the soccer field behind, we are every one of us driving out of the mainstream of our life, to come together with people we know and people we don’t know yet, to be apart from our everyday lives. A lot of us don’t really know what others do for a living. We don’t know what neighborhood they live in. We don’t know their families or their schools. But we come together on Sundays  because this is a place apart, a place where we find something we don’t find out there. I spoke with a person not too long ago who had visited a couple of times and was thinking about joining St. Alban’s, he was seriously searching for a church, and he said, I just don’t know if I’ll fit in. I asked what he meant, and he said, well, I don’t think there are a lot of other people like me. I said, if you are looking for a church where there are a lot of other people like you, this may not be the place for you. Look around.  Nobody here fits in. That’s what is so wonderful about this parish. It’s not about looking like everybody else. Nobody has to find their niche, because we don’t have niches. Look at the parking lot. We’ve got clunkers and motorcycles and hybrids and compacts and SUV’s and a swishy car or two. I think our youngest member is four months old and our oldest, if I’m counting right is ninety-one. We have adults with PhD’s and without high school diplomas. Our skin is just about every color that God made. So who fits in? Nobody, which means everybody. Isn’t that cool?  

Wait, I’m talking about power. Actually the power I want to talk about is the power of mercy. Now that is countercultural. The kind of power I’m talking about and that the collect is talking about is a power that surprises the world every time it wins the day. It is the power of mercy. It seems that even Jesus had to learn about the power of mercy.  

The gospel lesson we read today sends me back to reading the scholars  every time it comes up. Every three years I run to the commentaries and preaching journals in hopes that somebody a whole lot smarter than me is going to explain it in such a way that I can say, Oh, that’s better. It doesn’t really mean what it says about Jesus. And every year it’s the same old stuff, and frankly I don’t like it all that much. The story is this, in a nutshell. Jesus is looking for a little r and r, but even in the Podunk town where he’s more or less hiding out a woman recognizes him. Her daughter is possessed by a demon and she knows Jesus has been healing people with just the same problem, so she simply asks for him to do what he does. The problem is who the woman is. She is not a Jew. And, being a woman, she has no business talking to a Jewish man. Jesus essentially calls her daughter a dog, which is very rude. The woman calls him on it, and says even the dogs get the crumbs that are dropped on the floor, and Jesus comes to his senses and heals the girl. Well, here are the only two alternatives the brilliant people have come up with. The first is that Jesus knew all along what was going on and that he was going to cast out that demon – this is the Jesus we like, sort of, though I’m not so keen that Jesus would play this kind of trick – and he’s just testing the woman to see if she’ll persist, and when she does, he rewards her. Not great, but the other one has its problems too. In this one Jesus is having a bad day. He’s just not himself. People have been clamoring all over him for so long, that he’s got compassion fatigue, and this woman opens her Gentile mouth at just the wrong moment, and he lets her have it. I don’t like thinking Jesus had bad days, and I don’t like thinking he was genuinely, intentionally rude. The thing is, this Jesus learns. This Jesus is not so high and mighty that he can’t learn from a woman who is essentially a nobody. This Jesus receives a gift from her, the gift of humility which is what it takes to understand the power of mercy. He’ll never look at anybody again and see a nobody. As I said, you can take your pick, but if you come up with something better, I know a lot of preachers who will be happy to hear it.  

And it’s a strange lesson to be hearing on a day when we are celebrating the sacrament of baptism. Little Alexandra Lee Scott is here with her family. You may not know her because her grandmother is a new member and Lexie lives in New Jersey, but she’ll be coming to St. Alban’s as she grows up and she doesn’t belong to a church there yet, so we get to have the joy of baptizing her here. We are celebrating the fact that no matter what the world may tell her, Lexy is a somebody. She doesn’t have to fit into a niche. She doesn’t have to conform to a standard dictated by the world. She doesn’t have to be one of the cool kids, or a queen bee, or to be a straight A student or to wear the right clothes or live in the right neighborhood to be exactly who God made her to be. We are celebrating the fact that God made her in God’s own image and loves her with a heart that is beyond our capacity to imagine. Her parents will make big promises for her, and we’ll make promises as well, and we’ll pour some water on her head and make the sign of the cross on her forehead in special oil, and we’ll give her a candle to celebrate this birthday. and when we’ve done all that, and she is truly baptized, we’ll say a prayer together and welcome her into the household of God.  

I read something interesting this week as I was preparing for the Thursday morning Bible study class, where we’re going to be reading Paul’s letters this year. It was about what it meant in the first century for Jews and Christians to call God Father. Apparently what it meant was more like paterfamilias, or patriarch, which could just as well be matriarch if the household were run by a woman. It essentially meant head of household. The author asked how you would know if a household were being run well, and concluded that you would make this judgment on how well everyone in the household was doing? You’d look at the immediate family, of course. They’d be well dressed and well fed and educated, but how are the kitchen help treated? How about the servant out pulling weeds in the garden? You would expect the children to be cared for when they were sick, but how about their tutor, how about the maid who sweeps the floors, how about the guy who walks the dogs and takes out the garbage? This is the vision of the household of God, the household in which we are all equally beloved no matter if we are a one-year-old little girl with blond curls or a seventy year old with not so much hair. Whether we are a city council member or a fourth grade teacher or a stay at home mom or a ditch digger. God wants the best for all of us. In God’s eyes Lexie wears a diamond tiara for she is a princess of the kingdom, and that is what we celebrate today in her baptism. She is not a person of power,  but she is utterly and completely loved by the greatest power in the universe. 

And that, I believe, is what Jesus learned that day from a beautifully stubborn woman. I think that maybe he needed to have his heart pricked by remorse in order to understand the power of mercy. In the musical The Fantasticks, there is a line that has always stuck with me, without a hurt the heart is hollow. I don’t think Jesus’ heart was hollow, but when it hurt with compassion, when he tasted the tang of regret, I think he became even more fully human and more fully divine.

Now, let’s get on with the business of baptizing Lexie. Amen.

02/13/2010