Preached on Sunday, February 4, 2018 at St. Aidan's Episcopal Church in San Francisco. The texts for this sermon were: Isaiah 40:21-31, 1 Corinthians 9:16-23, Mark 1:29-39, and Psalm 147:1-12, 21c.
During the State of the Union speech this past week, President Trump highlighted several moving stories of extraordinary citizens. Like all State of the Union addresses, these stories were specifically chosen in order to convey certain values and a particular vision of what America can and should be. However much I disagree with those values and that vision, the stories, and the people they honored, were indeed admirable. One story in particular, the story of Ryan and Rebecca Holets, stuck out for me because it was not just a story about courage and compassion. It was also a story explicitly about God.
When the young Albuquerque police officer encountered a pregnant woman on the street about to inject heroin, he heard God’s voice urging him to offer the woman’s unborn child the safest home he knew.* Ryan, and his saintly wife, Rebecca, adopted the baby as the fifth of their four young children, and named her Hope. Incredible courage, inspiring faith.
Yet it was what was left out of the story that most caught in my heart. The homeless woman, Hope’s biological mother, went unnamed in the retelling. It turns out this important omission, the name Crystal Champ, was emblematic of a larger, if unsurprising, editorial stroke.
What wasn’t told on Tuesday night was the complicated, messy part of the story. The bit about how Ryan and Rebecca have pledged to remain in Crystal’s life, through the difficult, frustrating journey of connecting her with help and the treatment she needs. The very real part of the story--and of most stories of addiction--that cannot be wrapped up in a nice, neat bow, or fit into a political platform’s sense of morality. God is in that part of the story, too.
When I read today’s Gospel passage, it is hard for me not to notice who is named and who is not. Whose story is told and whose existence is hinted at, but ultimately unacknowledged. Jesus's disciples, Simon, Andrew, James, and John are named, but Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, who is healed and moved to serve Jesus, is not. Peter’s wife is simply not mentioned at all, even though an earlier account in the Epistles suggest that she accompanied the apostle on his missions.**
The stories that have come to us in the Gospels are echoes of real lives lived. In trying to package them into neat little lessons for my own life week after week, it can be easy for me to forget how messy they must have been originally. How these moments were lived out by real people in a real, imperfect human world with all its injustices and prejudices. God was in the parts of the stories that didn’t make it into the Bible, too.
Whose stories get told--and how we tell them--matters. It’s why we do things like declaring February to be Black History Month. Yes, our faith is about listening to and highlighting the forgotten, untold stories. It is also about learning how to tell our own, so that through them, others may know God. So that, through them, others may learn how their stories intersect with the larger story of salvation we recount every week here at the Eucharistic table.
Learning how to tell our stories is a matter of liberation and justice. It is also right there, in our baptismal covenant. “Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?” Feeling compelled by faith proclaiming the Gospel is a strong theme in today’s Epistle. It’s also the reason Jesus gives for his incarnation and journeying on to other cities.
Like most promises in our covenant, it's not always easy, but so needed. Now that my Christian faith is one of the first things people learn about my identity, thanks to my vocation, I encounter again and again how grateful people are for an excuse to open up about their own complicated, messy relationship with God and church and spirituality. I get to hear the unfinished kind of stories that don’t fit neatly into sermons and speeches.
It can be difficult, too, to have those conversations within our families, especially as the way we transmit our religious traditions across generations continues to shift. It took a class assignment in college for me to work up the courage to sit down with my parents and grandparents and ask them what God and church has meant in their lives. Ostensibly I was collecting oral history recordings for my research on the sociological phenomena of denominational shift in the US. But on a profound and unexpected level those voice recordings have become a precious connection to my rich, unspoken heritage in the Christian faith.
I learned for the first time through those interviews how my maternal grandmother’s church had been there for her through my grandfather’s cancer diagnosis, why my father had left the Catholic Church at age 40, and what that had meant to my mom. I learned how my paternal grandmother’s Catholic identity will always be inextricably linked to the resilient faith of her colonized ancestors, and the courage it took for my mother to seek out a new spiritual home as a teenager. Ordinary stories. Complicated stories. Stories I would have never known, but that have now become part of me and how I tell my own story of faith.
This spring, I am embarking on a project to collect your stories about how God has moved in your lives. How church has been there for you. What kind of weird and winding spiritual journey you’ve taken but never had the chance to share.
My hope is for us to practice creating intentional spaces for talking about faith together. We won't be looking for neatly packaged tales with a clear message but the real, complicated, still unfolding kind of stories that can open others to their own.
In the end, the stories we don’t, or can’t, tell are not forgotten, not by God. There is no name, no story, no human being unknown to God--all are known completely. "Why do you say, O Israel, my way is hidden from the Lord?” chides the Prophet Isaiah. “God numbers them, calls them all by name...not one is missing."
God counts the number of the stars, and calls them all by their names, echoes the Psalm. The nameless are called and named by God, for ever.
May this messy group of ordinary, complicated Christians and all our stories be a sign pointing to that steadfast love.
Amen.
God numbers them, calls all them by name...not one is missing.
During the State of the Union speech this past week, President Trump highlighted several moving stories of extraordinary citizens. Like all State of the Union addresses, these stories were specifically chosen in order to convey certain values and a particular vision of what America can and should be. However much I disagree with those values and that vision, the stories, and the people they honored, were indeed admirable. One story in particular, the story of Ryan and Rebecca Holets, stuck out for me because it was not just a story about courage and compassion. It was also a story explicitly about God.
When the young Albuquerque police officer encountered a pregnant woman on the street about to inject heroin, he heard God’s voice urging him to offer the woman’s unborn child the safest home he knew.* Ryan, and his saintly wife, Rebecca, adopted the baby as the fifth of their four young children, and named her Hope. Incredible courage, inspiring faith.
Yet it was what was left out of the story that most caught in my heart. The homeless woman, Hope’s biological mother, went unnamed in the retelling. It turns out this important omission, the name Crystal Champ, was emblematic of a larger, if unsurprising, editorial stroke.
What wasn’t told on Tuesday night was the complicated, messy part of the story. The bit about how Ryan and Rebecca have pledged to remain in Crystal’s life, through the difficult, frustrating journey of connecting her with help and the treatment she needs. The very real part of the story--and of most stories of addiction--that cannot be wrapped up in a nice, neat bow, or fit into a political platform’s sense of morality. God is in that part of the story, too.
When I read today’s Gospel passage, it is hard for me not to notice who is named and who is not. Whose story is told and whose existence is hinted at, but ultimately unacknowledged. Jesus's disciples, Simon, Andrew, James, and John are named, but Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, who is healed and moved to serve Jesus, is not. Peter’s wife is simply not mentioned at all, even though an earlier account in the Epistles suggest that she accompanied the apostle on his missions.**
The stories that have come to us in the Gospels are echoes of real lives lived. In trying to package them into neat little lessons for my own life week after week, it can be easy for me to forget how messy they must have been originally. How these moments were lived out by real people in a real, imperfect human world with all its injustices and prejudices. God was in the parts of the stories that didn’t make it into the Bible, too.
Whose stories get told--and how we tell them--matters. It’s why we do things like declaring February to be Black History Month. Yes, our faith is about listening to and highlighting the forgotten, untold stories. It is also about learning how to tell our own, so that through them, others may know God. So that, through them, others may learn how their stories intersect with the larger story of salvation we recount every week here at the Eucharistic table.
Learning how to tell our stories is a matter of liberation and justice. It is also right there, in our baptismal covenant. “Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?” Feeling compelled by faith proclaiming the Gospel is a strong theme in today’s Epistle. It’s also the reason Jesus gives for his incarnation and journeying on to other cities.
Like most promises in our covenant, it's not always easy, but so needed. Now that my Christian faith is one of the first things people learn about my identity, thanks to my vocation, I encounter again and again how grateful people are for an excuse to open up about their own complicated, messy relationship with God and church and spirituality. I get to hear the unfinished kind of stories that don’t fit neatly into sermons and speeches.
It can be difficult, too, to have those conversations within our families, especially as the way we transmit our religious traditions across generations continues to shift. It took a class assignment in college for me to work up the courage to sit down with my parents and grandparents and ask them what God and church has meant in their lives. Ostensibly I was collecting oral history recordings for my research on the sociological phenomena of denominational shift in the US. But on a profound and unexpected level those voice recordings have become a precious connection to my rich, unspoken heritage in the Christian faith.
I learned for the first time through those interviews how my maternal grandmother’s church had been there for her through my grandfather’s cancer diagnosis, why my father had left the Catholic Church at age 40, and what that had meant to my mom. I learned how my paternal grandmother’s Catholic identity will always be inextricably linked to the resilient faith of her colonized ancestors, and the courage it took for my mother to seek out a new spiritual home as a teenager. Ordinary stories. Complicated stories. Stories I would have never known, but that have now become part of me and how I tell my own story of faith.
This spring, I am embarking on a project to collect your stories about how God has moved in your lives. How church has been there for you. What kind of weird and winding spiritual journey you’ve taken but never had the chance to share.
My hope is for us to practice creating intentional spaces for talking about faith together. We won't be looking for neatly packaged tales with a clear message but the real, complicated, still unfolding kind of stories that can open others to their own.
In the end, the stories we don’t, or can’t, tell are not forgotten, not by God. There is no name, no story, no human being unknown to God--all are known completely. "Why do you say, O Israel, my way is hidden from the Lord?” chides the Prophet Isaiah. “God numbers them, calls them all by name...not one is missing."
God counts the number of the stars, and calls them all by their names, echoes the Psalm. The nameless are called and named by God, for ever.
May this messy group of ordinary, complicated Christians and all our stories be a sign pointing to that steadfast love.
Amen.
* Elizabeth Bruenig. "Trump honored a hero cop for saving a baby. What happened to the mother?" The Washington Post, January 31, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-honored-a-hero-cop-for-saving-a-baby-what-happened-to-the-mother/2018/01/31/93067b06-06a9-11e8-b48c-b07fea957bd5_story.html
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