10 June 2018 – 3rd Sunday after Pentecost

The Rev. Dr. Austin Leininger
Sermon of the 3^rd Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 5
10 June 2018

Readings:

Genesis 3:8-15
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35

Who is God to us? From the beginning, as in today’s passage from Genesis, this has been one of our biggest questions: Who and what is the divine other that is both beyond us and within us, how are we in relationship, and what does that relationship look like.

For the creator to be in relationship with the created introduces an interesting dynamic worth exploring, particularly as we are said to be created in God’s image and likeness and brought to life through God’s own breath breathed into us.

In today’s portion of the second creation story in Genesis, the man and the woman in the garden have hidden themselves from God’s physical presence as God walks through the garden, at the time of the evening breeze, seeking relationship with them. But try as they might to hide their physical nakedness from God—a symbol of their vulnerability and shame—they cannot hide from God’s own breath that rhythmically fills their lungs. And so they answer from their place of hiding, from their place of defiance, to acknowledge the relationship in which they remain with God and in which the woman now chooses courageously to admit their choice to exercise their freedom in ways contrary to God’s instructions.

There are consequences to their choices, as there always are in our lives, but the consequence is neither to lose relationship with God, nor to lose God’s favor, love, or forgiveness. As today’s passage continues, God details the consequences to the man and woman, who only after today’s passage self-select the names of Adam and Eve. God then continues loving them. Out of compassion for their shame, God sews clothing for them, and continues in active and personal relationship with them as well as with their children, each who hear God’s voice speaking to them until somewhere in the lineage of Adam and Eve’s descendents, many of us simply stopped hearing God’s voice. And yet the whole of salvation history throughout the Hebrew testament is an unbroken story of the generations of human family in relationship with God. And from the very beginning, who God has been to us is the one who comes to us, searches us out, and calls for us so that God can love us.

As our Psalm reminds us, from the beginning our response has been to reach out to the one who knows our depths, who is our source and our strength, who is our hope and our refuge. And so we get lost, we turn our backs on God, make mistakes, and finally in our desperation, out of the depths, we call to the one we know will never forsake us because no matter what we have done, God has never abandoned us and never will. Our souls thirst for God, knowing that we will be satisfied, forgiven, loved, sustained. Who God is to us in the lens of Psalm 130 is our eternal hope, redemption, and salvation.

Taking us back and forth between our experience of God at our spiritual core within us and our metaphysical experience of God beyond us, Paul draws our attention to where and how we encounter the divine within our hearts and minds, externally in community, and points to our eternal relationship that connects us all as a community of saints that is sourced in and points us back toward God as the eternal hope of our faith. As saints in Christ, (Paul teaches his community), we become a part of the dawn of God’s reign—a part of the spreading of God’s grace to more and more people as we live the good news of God’s love, forgiveness, and compassion in the world.

Focusing on Christ in today’s Gospel, Mark changes the direction of the question from our perspective on God to God’s perspective on our relationships with one another: Who is our family? Who are our mother and brothers and sisters, but those who do God’s will—i.e. those who teach us, who support us, who love us, and who are in community with us as instruments of God’s abundance—those who are open to God’s Spirit and in discernment of what God is doing and asking us to do as God’s family; as God’s children.

Who God is in Mark’s gospel is the one who undermines the systems of oppression, privilege, discrimination, and inequality. God is the one who opens our eyes, through love, to see the powers of darkness and sin at work in our world, and who emboldens us to stand up to make a change, even when the darkness has captured the reality of our own families.

I’ve spoken before about some of the things my family taught me that they never intended to teach me, but for their blindness to their own prejudices. Amongst the most personally harmful, they passed down messages of God’s inability or unwillingness to love some people that. As it turns out, and as I’ve mentioned before, I am one of those they taught me God couldn’t love. They passed down racism. They passed down indifference to the suffering of others. They passed down intolerance. They passed down a demand for violent punishment for breaking their rules. They passed down fear. And none of it was intended. What they taught intentionally was very different as they lovingly sought to help my brother and I learn what we needed to find success, friendship, love, and health in our lives. But the unexamined positions they passed along with relation to race, gender, class, theology, and unhealthy conflict perpetuated systems of power, inequality, privilege, and hate that continue to plague our world.

This is what Jesus was dismissing in today’s gospel. It wasn’t a disavowal of his ties to his biological family. Rather he was making the point that even those who love us and are seeking after our own good can be motivated by fear rather than love, and can ultimately be a tool of the same disordered systems that have kept them down, oppressed, and powerless. Communities that support us in standing up to the powers of our world that are opposed to God’s love are also family.

Last week Calvary sent what became a total of fourteen of its family to march together in the Pride Parade. Sixteen of us gathered ahead of time on Calvary’s lawn for an interfaith worship together. It was a day dedicated to God’s love for all of God’s children who have been told by empires that included the Christian church for centuries that they couldn’t be God’s children. It was a day when our chosen family came together in support of standing up for and celebrating God’s love in ways that many of our own biological family members past (and some present) had been taught were impossible.

Yesterday Calvary also celebrated one of our own chosen family member’s PhD Graduation. For those who haven’t heard Dr. Enriquez’ story, this is the culmination of years of work and dreams that the world would have made impossible if it weren’t for the perseverance of Richard’s hope and the love and support of a community of people who have become his family, not least of all, Patrick, who for over 25 years has stood by his side.

Who God is in all of these stories is the one whose Spirit sustains and nurtures our dreams of making the world a better place, who lifts us up in communities of love, healing, and care to make us families that help us to brush off the dust of oppression and persevere against systems that have been designed to keep our world a place of inequality, hatred, and discord.

These unjust systems, Jesus refers to as Satan. Just as in his own world, the demonic forces of fear, hopelessness, powerlessness, inadequacy, mistrust, and hatred are still at work in our world today. And also as in his own world, we are called on to join together in the resurrection of hope, in the resurrection of courage, in the resurrection of God’s indomitable love that casts out the demons that keep those around us from also knowing the blessing of being and living as God’s children.

May we be blessed with family to sustain us in hope and to awaken us to God’s presence in our lives, and may we be family to those still oppressed by the darkness of our world.

Amen.