SERMON: 2022, Year C, Last Pentecost, St Edward's

Over the past 25 plus years I have had the opportunity to see Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak. Diocesan events across the country, mostly youth events, I was able to see him speak at two different Episcopal Youth Events. Then in 1996 the graduating class of my seminary asked me to be his personal chaplain. So I got to drive to the airport, pick him up, chat with him get all the things he needed to be prepared set and ready and then sit next to him for the graduation ceremony of those students at CDSP.

That was quite the honor, although I think the graduating planning committee were more trying to create a meme than anything else, as I was much taller than Bishop Tutu, and I am sure seen standing next to him, we were quite the opposite, in physical stature. He was really short.

Anyway, Bishop Tutu always gave inspiring sermons and speeches, I always walked away from his words feeling ready to take on the world, I always felt taller than I already was. But this graduation sermon he preached taught me an interesting lesson about Bishop Tutu. He said the same thing every single time. This was the third time I had heard him, and it was indeed a very similar sermon to the two I had heard before.

The main theme of this sermon was speaking about how when we fall, when we fail, God dusts us off and gets us back on our feet and reminds us that God loves us as if we were the only person on the planet. At the time my newly formed Seminary mind scoffed at this, and wondered why he wouldn’t expand his library of knowledge and share more information, I mean the man had seen it all. It wasn’t until a few years later when I began to see how we treat ourselves that I fully comprehended his compassionate message.

You see, there is no one in this world who is more critical of our effort than ourselves. There is no one in this world who beats the you know what out of us more than we do to ourselves. We walk into places and situations understanding from the start that we are not worthy, that we are not sufficient to receive the love of others much less the love of God. We identify our own sin a whole lot more powerfully than any priest or bishop ever did. Bishop Tutu knew this and though his sermons varied from place to place, they always centered around the idea that when we fall, when we fail, God helps us to our feet and reminds us that God loves us as if we were the only person on the planet.

Think about that, think of that concept, that you are the only person that has the full and undivided attention of God. You are the only person in the world that is so fully loved by God that the only thing God can do is watch your every step, and help you when you fall. Bishop Tutu was always careful to create an image of God that was not the white bearded man in the sky, but a mother caring for her newborn. A father helping his child after a fall while riding a bike for the first time. A friend who wants only the best for you, and calls you simply because they wanted to hear your voice.

I talked about failure in this week's Happenings, not expecting to go down this road for my sermon. I was planning on writing about Kingship and the Reign of Christ, and how it's foreign to us as American Citizens. I was planning on challenging you all to think about your power and the power we give to the corporations and powerful people around us. How information is truly our King in 2022 and how that information is selectively disseminated to each of us so that we remain docile and cowed to the rich and powerful.

But instead, Bishop Tutu was all I could think of. I miss him, I miss him a lot, he was a voice of hope, and a voice of God’s love to all of us. This week I was writing about failure and how we fail and why we fail and how we can prepare, with courage and hope, for the failure of this community, the failure of the Episcopal Church. For all intents and purposes the numbers tell us that the Church is failing, it is shrinking, it is becoming more and more irrelevant to more and more people.

Why is that? Lots of reasons, I suppose, but one reason is that we don’t emphasize this kind of God in our world today. We don’t emphasize this kind of loving, forgiving, helping and compassionate God. We drill into our heads an image of how we are supposed to look, what we are supposed to be, how much money we need to buy the next thing. And when we don’t reach those goals, usually set by the commercials and tv shows we watch and by our limited knowledge of things we don’t understand, we destroy our self confidence and our wholeness by thinking we are not enough, and we are failures.

But God dusts us off, helps us up and tells us, NAME, NAME, NAME, you are enough, you are loved, I love you as if you are the only person on the planet. Everytime we fall, everytime we fail, this is what God does. There is no end to this kind of compassion. There is no limit to the amount of love that can be shared. There is no cap on how many times we fail, we can fail, God will always love us as if we are the only person on the planet.

Today is the last Sunday of Pentecost, much of what you might hear today revolves around Christ the King. There is no biblical concept quite as foreign to us in this day and age than that of Kings and Queens. We are taught from a young age about the history of the US and how we threw off the yoke of the Monarchy in order to embrace our current democratic political ideal. Today is the day we celebrate Jesus as our King. It doesn't feel right, it doesn’t sound right, especially in the light of all that I have just said. We know Kings and Queens to be harsh and vindictive power hungry people. No King or Queen was ever not those things.

But today is also the end of the Liturgical year. Today is the last Sunday of Year C, starting next Sunday we begin Advent and Year A. Advent is a time of waiting and anticipation. Advent is a time to look to what is to come and how we will respond to the slowly revealed Son of God. Today is our new year in the Church. Today is the day we can begin to think about resolutions, Spiritual, and Theological. Liturgical and Formational. Today we can say, I have failed and I am going to allow God and the Spirit to transform my life in some way because of how I will respond to God’s love in my life.

I have a story I stumbled upon from a man named Jeremiah Wright who was a Baptist Pastor somewhere down south. The story is a bit contrived, but give it a shot. He spoke years ago at a Youth Event I attended:

An 8 year old girl and her mother were at Cub Foods, and at the checkout, down by the knees of we grownups, where the eyes of children tend to focus, the little girl spotted some green pearls. She begged her Mother to buy them for her, begged and begged. Mom picked up the pearls and did what most parents would do, looked at the price, $1.98, with tax, $2.14. "Ok," Mom said, "but you are going to have to work to pay for these." The little girl assured her mother that that would be fine, she was, after all, 8 years old. Sure enough she worked hard to pay off those pearls, she raked her yard, her neighbors yard, everyone's yard and finally got the money to give back to her mother. (I guess 8 year olds only make 25 cents per yard...) The little girl absolutely loved those pearls and wore them everywhere she went, except to bed and in the shower because her Mom said they would turn her neck green.

Shortly after she paid back her Mother for those pearls her Dad started an odd ritual. He would walk into the room each night, after she had hopped into bed, read her a story and said, "Baby, do you love me?" The little girl would say, "Yeah Daddy, you know I love you!" And Daddy would say, "If you love me, give me those pearls." At first she was shocked that her Dad would ask such a thing, then each night she began to negotiate, "Baby, do you love me?" "Yes Daddy, I love you!" "If you love me, give me those pearls." "Daddy, you know I love you, how about I give you my favorite Teddy Bear instead." Or she would say, "Daddy, you KNOW I love you, how about I give you my Barbie Doll!" Or she would say, remembering this was 1996 or so, "Daddy, how about I give you my Spice Girl!" Each night her Dad would say, "That's OK, you know Daddy loves you." and he would tuck her in and give her a kiss good night.

This ritual went on for many weeks, until one night her Dad came in to find the little girl on top of her bed, not under the covers, crying. "Daddy," she said, "I love you. Here." And she handed her Daddy the green pearls she loved so much. He took them and put them in his pocket and pulled out a leather case and opened it. In the case were real, genuine, cultured pearls that were extremely valuable. He said, "Baby, I have had these all along, but in order to receive the good stuff, you had to let go of the Cheap Stuff."

Moral of the story, what is the cheap stuff we are holding on to keeping us from understanding God's love. What is the cheap stuff we are holding onto that is weighing us down and creating shame and guilt that prevents us from understanding how much God truly loves us? What is the cheap stuff we can let go of and be made new in this approaching year?