A Homily for the Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost.

A sermon preached by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on October 22, 2023, the Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost.

In this morning’s Gospel, we find ourselves right smack dab in the middle of Matthew’s passion narrative. Jesus has made his “triumphal entry” through the service entrance to off-key hosannas, branches hurriedly snapped off scraggly trees, and tattered coats tossed down in the dust as a makeshift red carpet. It’s a conscious, prophetic subversion of Herod on his warhorse meant to show us what real power–God’s power manifest in weakness and loving service–looks like when it comes into the world with nothing held back. We associate power with stockpiled weapons, troops massed, and laser-guided missiles raining down. Real power, Jesus shows us, is washing, feeding, agendaless being-with in/as love. Needless to say, this revelation of real power as open-handed letting-go and letting-be, as feeding and washing love, as dying and rising forgiveness even of one’s persecutors, is a threat to all the powers and dominions of this world where might is right, the one with the most toys wins, and image maintenance rules the day.

That’s why, in an act of obsequious flattery, the Pharisees make a show of calling Jesus “teacher,” and laud him as sincere, giving him props for not regarding people with partiality. Jesus represents a direct threat to the religious authorities’ grip on power. The goal is nothing less than to catch Jesus out and find some excuse to put him to death and rid themselves of this meddlesome rabbi who despite having no place to lay his head, seems at home everywhere. As if the whole world were the splendor of his Father’s sanctuary and the trees of the wood a choir hymning the Father’s glory. Such a one–utterly at home in the Father’s love wherever he is—even nailed the cross, mocked, scourged—is a grave threat to authority (religious or otherwise) that wants to enforce who’s in and who’s out, who’s got it and who doesn’t at the tip of a spear.

So we should be very clear that Jesus’ answering of a question with another question–a classic rabbinical move–is simply a refusal to play that game. “Why are you putting me to the test, you hypocrites?!” This isn’t some subtle inquiry into church and state… it’s a calculated ruse, a plot to entrap Jesus and cook up an excuse to get rid of him without too much fuss, or upsetting the existing order of things. This is a collision of self-emptying love poured out for all with self-centered power concerned only with itself. Full stop. When love comes into the world, we trap him  and kill him, even though  he is the one in whom the peace that passes understanding lives. Such is the tragedy of being human.

But Jesus’ question—”Whose head is this, and whose title?”—is one of those questions that can open our hands, open our hearts, and make us aware of our timbered vision, the log in our own eye. I ask this question a lot. Sometimes throughout the day: in a meeting, celebrating mass, walking to the store, at someone’s bedside, driving the car, around the dinner table with Michelle and the kids. “Whose head is this, and whose title?” I imagine each  and every moment of life as a quivering drop of sealing wax, and the opportunity to inquire into whose face is being sealed, impressed, here. Depending on where I’m coming from, where I’m planted, from which living spring or dried up well I’m drinking, someone's face is sealed in the melted wax of that relational exchange. Mine, or the Other-as-Christ’s, I wonder? Do I see the other, or my ideas about the other? Am I truly present with the other without agenda, without expectation, or am I using them to fulfill some unmet need? For example, if I’ve grown up thinking I’m unlovable and my only way to feel loved is to engage in people pleasing–am I ever really with that person? Aren’t I simply using them to get what I want, to get what I think I need? Isn’t it really my face being stamped on the encounter with this precious other? Who I need them to be has very little to do who they actually are! In this case, does the other person even really have a face? Haven’t I made of the encounter an idol with my ugly mug impressed, imposed, sealed, fixedly there? “Whose head is this, and whose title?”

The poet Paul Valery, reportedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature no less than 12 times, writes, “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” Often, names, titles, fixed ideas, prejudices, and preconceptions blind us to the uncontainable effervescence of the other. My mother had this phrase she’d use sometimes–”I’ve got you pegged, Mister!”--when she sussed we were up to no good. But that’s how a lot of our encounters go–we’ve got people pegged, pinned down. The shimmering puddle of wax hardens into versions of, “She’s always like this,” “He’s never like that,” “They’re a such-and-such kind of person.” But love is the forgetting all those names in the act of seeing. Or as Gregory of Nyssa says, “Every concept formed by the intellect in an attempt to comprehend and circumscribe divine nature can succeed only in fashioning an idol, not in making God known.” Every concept. Every idea. Each description, held to as the “way things are,” becomes an idol. Gregory is talking about theological language here, but the same holds true of our concepts of people, creatures, ourselves. The word “orange juice,” is not the taste of orange juice. It would be insane to think we “knew” what orange juice was without having taken a sip. But that is what we do a lot of the time. Whose head is this, and whose title?”

Valery’s “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees,” finds its equivalence in Christian dispositions of “poverty of spirit,” “self-emptying,” and “radical welcome.” Love sees past the descriptions to the person—Christ the Stranger— at the heart of every encounter. Love knows each stranger as “surnamed” by God. Love doesn’t see Israelis as only “colonialist oppressors” and clap its hands at the slaughter of innocents. Nor does love see Palestinians only as “terrorists,” and seek vengeance on the first Palestinian-American six-year old one comes across. Love recognizes that these idolatrous divisions are exactly what God in Christ through the Holy Spirit is here to undo: “I will break in pieces the doors of bronze and cut through bars of iron,” as it says in our passage from Isaiah.  “Whose head is this, and whose title?” opens us onto the vast expanse of boundaryless love where we recognize with Jean-Paul Sartre that we are half victim and half accomplice like everybody else. We can decry the attacks on Israel and raise our voices against civilian casualties in the ground war in Gaza… we can be a people who live in intimate relationship with the Prince of Peace. People who breathe in his breathed out peace in the locked, barred, gated closeness of that upper room. People who know there is no way to peace, but that peace, being peace, is the way. And it’s an inside job.

Peace is an inside job, because to only see our own image of the other in an encounter–”Whose head is this, and whose title?”--is actually murderous. We erase the strangeness of the other in favor of comfortable descriptions, or use them to get what we think we need from them. “We don’t see the other, we eat them,” as Simone Weil says. Ouch. But the Good News of the Gospel is that there is another way, one that this broken and hurting and divided world of ours desperately needs, one that God has literally died to show us. With the Thessalonians we can receive the unconditional belovedness that is our birthright. Once we begin to feel our way, ease our way, into this belovedness, once we begin to befriend the love of God that’s poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us, we’re less prone to use other people as means to ends, as transactional fixes for our unmet needs. I don’t need to make you like me because I think I’m unlovable. That whole project collapses in a great “not one stone will be left standing” apocalypse of Love–the seed of seeking fulfillment in making others do our bidding falls to the ground and something more open-handed, spacious, and lovingly responsive bodies forth. 

Knowing ourselves as loved, we are freed to love others, to be with them without agenda, without making them in our image. Knowing ourselves to be loved, perhaps the stranger’s face is seen for the first time. Knowing ourselves to be loved, perhaps the all-too-familiar faces of our so-called “loved ones,” become mysteriously strange to us. Knowing ourselves to be loved, perhaps we forget the name of the one we see and love them, from our poverty, for the first time. This is life-changing, world-changing work. And the miraculous thing is that it’s God’s work in us. All that’s needed is our consent, our yes, our willingness to put on the darn free wedding garment and join the party.

Our stewardship theme for this year is “a place of springs”--a reference to psalm 84 where we get that heart-breakingly intimate portrait of “The sparrow [who] has found her a house and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young; by the side of your altars, O Lord of Hosts.” It’s from that picture of intimacy with God–nested in the God who nests in us–that we get those lines of our theme: “Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs.” That’s, ultimately, why this Cathedral is here. To remind us of God's steadfast covenant faithfulness to us, of God’s presence and action in our lives, even when what we see is, at first glance, a desolate valley. 

The Cathedral is a place where the waters of God’s love irrigate us–wean us off our stories of fear, scarcity, lack, and not enough—and open us to the stunning fact of our irrevocable belovedness. We exist as an open door to this transfiguring encounter with God. Through prayer, spiritual formation, weekly worship, dwelling on God as revealed to us in Holy Scripture, service to the least of these of bread to feed, water to wash, oil to heal and wine to slake the thirst of the parched, we play our humble little part in being loved into loving, in being made beautiful by the Beautiful One. It’s from having the Place of Springs Beautiful One at the center of our individual and corporate lives that Beloved Place of Springs Community emerges. A look at the news–climate change, war in Ukraine and the Middle East, a deeply divided nation where fewer and fewer people even see each other let alone listen to one another–and it’s obvious that we are in desperate need of another way of seeing and being in the world. Another way of seeing and being that God’s Kingdom, not this fractious and fractured hellscape of our own devising, might come to be in and through these very hands and feet, these very peace-witnessing lips and these unstopped listening ears open and responsive to the cries of the world. 

It’s life changing work. It’s world changing work. And it costs money. We ask, “Whose head is this, whose title?” not just of our encounters with others, but also of how we portion our time, talent, and treasure. Who’s worshipped with my money? Does our living and giving match what we profess with our lips? Let’s make the old saw about everything except Episcopalians’ wallets going under the waters at baptism (all of me O Lord except my wallet) just that: an old saw. Something immature and unhealthy that we’ve grown past on our journey into generous living and giving. Pray. Reflect. Take an honest look and then give and give generously. Help keep St. Marks a place of springs.

Amen.