In response to a school assignment to write about his favorite place, Evan wrote:

Evan 11/28/94

My favorite place is with my Grandma and Grandpa, and Mom and Dad. I like it because Grandpa goes hunting and brings back deer meat.

The sound of my Grandpa’s house is logs crackling in the fire. The smell in my Grandpa’s house smells like Japanese cooking. It smells like Japanese cooking because my Grandma is 100 percent Japanese. Her cooking tastes fabulous!!! When I am with my Grandma and Grandpa, and Mom and Dad my heart is happy.

Victoria and I recently celebrated 29 years of marriage. Here’s part of the wedding homily I preached at the wedding of Evan Robert Ellsworth and Kristin Signy Torok, 31st May 2008 at All Saints Episcopal Church, Pasadena, California. Based on John 2: 1 – 11.

Three days earlier John the Baptist had looked at Jesus bar-Joseph and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” One would think Jesus would head for Jerusalem or Rome, to the centers of power. Instead, the Evangelist John tells us that on the third day — a phrase that might ring bells in our minds — Jesus is at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. Mark in his gospel writes that following his baptism Jesus went straightway into the wilderness where he was tempted by Satan. Breathless, Mark was in a hurry to write his account. John is not in a hurry. Jesus headed to the wilderness soon enough. Before he did he first went to the wedding of a friend.

John doesn’t tell us who the bride is or who the groom is. The only thing we learn about them is that they wanted Jesus and his mother at their wedding. What John vouchsafes to tell us is not the momentary happiness of the occasion but what happened when that happiness was threatened.

The wine ran out. The teetotalers and the gentlemen who prefer bourbon among you, the ladies who like their beer, might think, So what? But that would fail to appreciate what wine means to the Jewish and Christian imagination. The first thing Noah did when he got off the Ark was plant a vineyard. Jesus commanded his disciples to drink wine poured out in remembrance of him.

Mary says to her son, “They have no wine.” Consider this woman. She never had a fairy-tale wedding like this herself. Why? Because she is his mother, and thus above all mortal examples the very picture of what discipleship looks like and sounds like. “Be it done unto me according to thy word,” she had said to the Archangel, our Lady bearing not just in mind but in her flesh the truth that “God,” as C. S. Lewis said, “doesn’t do anything that he can get somebody else to do for him.”

“They have no wine,” she says to him. In New York City she’d be called a noodge. And Jesus replies with strange words. “Woman (γυνή he always calls her, not μητέρα, except at the very end when he speaks to her from the cross), what has that to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” Now’s not the time.

Jesus is never in a hurry in the gospels. Have you noticed that? He receives word that his friend Lazarus is dying and he does not hop the first train back to Bethany and Lazarus dies. Jesus is on time. It’s just not our time he’s on but the Father’s. We forget that. He never does.

Mary knows a thing or two about being on time with the Most High. And she says something loud enough for Jesus to overhear. Speaking to the servants she says, “Do whatever he tells you.”

It is an echo. It echoes something he had heard three days before at the Jordan, when the heavens opened and a voice said, “This is my beloved son. Listen to him!” Do whatever he tells you. That expression of trust from the woman acquainted with heaven touching the earth, who showed him what being on time with the Father looked like, that word coming from her apparently told him that actually now was the time. He tells the servants to fill the jars with water. And Jesus turns the water into wine.

It is Jesus’s first miracle, and it may seem to us utterly gratuitous. He does not bring someone back from the dead. He does not heal someone of a grievous disease. He does not put to rights some grave injustice. Instead, he makes delicious wine for people who have already been drinking and who are in no shape to appreciate it. Of all the things Jesus might have done, why spend a miracle — the first of only seven in John’s gospel — merely to protect the joy of a couple at their wedding? Couldn’t he find something more important to tend to?

The answer to that question is No. Apparently not. The Most High attaches a significance to marriage that places the highest hedges around it. If we’re surprised to hear that it is only because we’re amnesiac. We’ve forgotten the immensities that arch over a man and a woman when they start a family, even as they do so standing at an altar consecrated to that act of self-giving that makes all things new.

12 December 1991 — Evan entered kindergarten this fall, so one day early in September I found myself rubbing my eyes at a dizzying array of grade school backpacks — fluorescent green and pink, periwinkle and lavender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle bags, all of them trying hard to look enticing but all of them shining on my retinae as the price to be paid for growing up. My son, they tell me, needed something to carry his papers in, so it fell to me to get him a backpack, the harbinger and first installment of that baggage for which children are so famous and beautiful for not wearing. By dint of will I chose one, a black one — the zipper, the straps, all of it is black — the good reason being that it would be easy to spot amid the neon, the real reason being that when you consider what it is a child leaves behind to go to school his outfit ought to be funereal.

I’m shamelessly overprotective. I know. I am a sissy. But Lord, What am I doing? seems a fair question to ask when you look into your child’s eyes and see not only tears but terror.

A couple of weeks ago we were lying in bed and Evan asked me, “Daddy, who came first, the Indians or God?” I started to say God but not wanting to have gone to school for nothing I thought to tell him that God came first except that God doesn’t have a beginning the way people do, that time and space are beneath God, God being above and beyond it and all that. I didn’t expect him to understand this any more than I myself understand it, so I just said, “God did.”

But God isn’t above and beyond it. Not anymore. Think of it. The message of Christmas is news that whereas from eternity he was timeless now, over there in Mary’s womb, God hunkers down in time. The Unconditioned Being becomes conditioned. The Infinite who could have said humbug to our flesh and our finitude tries it on for size. He takes on baggage he’s supposed to be famous and beautiful for not wearing. Unless it were true it would make no sense at all.

[A sermon preached 21 June 2009. Based on one of the Old Testament lessons appointed for the 3rd Sunday after Pentecost, 1 Samuel 17: 32 – 54.]

If there is one Old Testament story in our day that people who grew up in church can sing it’s probably this one: “Only a boy named David, only a little sling. Only a boy named David, but he could pray and sing. Only a boy named David, only a rippling brook. Only a boy named David, but five little stones he took.” I’ve sung it countless times with kids. It reaches little boys, especially with the hand motions, when nothing else can reach them, and I’ll keep singing it with kids without apology. But it’s a children’s song about a story not written for children so it has to tell the story as if it were mythic like the Arthurian legend of the sword in the stone. What I hope to show you is that the story in the book of Samuel is even more dramatic than the mythic version.

Preachers today tend to handle the David and Goliath story moralistically as if it were a fable, the moral of the story being the bigger they are, the harder they fall, so no matter how weak or small you are, you can overcome giants. That’s the kind of pap you don’t need the Bible for; you can read it in “Management for Dummies” at Barnes & Noble.

It wasn’t always so. For most of Church history this story was read and preached typologically. What do I mean? I mean that precritical readers, as our seminaries like to call them (it would be interesting to know what they would call our seminaries) believed this about the David cycle: That if in your baptized imagination you could take a rope and tie a lasso around it, it would take you away, and not just anywhere but to the story which it prefigures, that of Christ himself. That is how this story was read by sixteenth and seventeenth century simpletons like those linguistic blockheads named William Tyndale, Martin Luther, John Donne, and George Herbert.

You can see where my sympathies lie. I’m going to ask you to run your fingers carefully with me over this text, looking at six elements in it, and I hope in doing so you will take your imagination and tie a lasso around it and let it take you away.

The size of Goliath. A cubit is 18” and a span is 9”. According to our English translations of 1 Samuel 17: 4 Goliath is six cubits and a span (9’ 9” tall) because the Hebrew manuscript that they translate says that Goliath was 6 cubits and a span. Some well-meaning and devout Christians will say, Can’t God create someone that tall? The rest of us hear six cubits and a span and our minds turn off the way the light does in the refrigerator when you close the door. A tall tale, we think, a story that’s simply unbelievable.

But with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, we now have a manuscript of Samuel that comes from Qumran called 4Q, a manuscript that dates from the first century BC thus making it a thousand years older than the manuscript our Bibles are translating. And in 4Q it says not that Goliath was 6 cubits and a span but that he was 4 cubits and a span — not that he was 9’ 9” but that he was 6’ 9”. So instead of a man whose head nearly touches a basketball rim, we can imagine a smaller guy like, say, John Thompson, the legendary coach of the Georgetown Hoyas.

How tall was the average man in Ancient Israel? Based on skeletal remains from the biblical period, the answer is 5’ 3”. This will please my wife Victoria who will tell you she’s 5’ 3” and a half.

The age of David. “Saul says to David, You aren’t able to go against this Philistine to fight with him, for you are just a boy.” The Hebrew word na’ar [נַעַר] translated ‘boy’ means a male who isn’t yet a father; it is used of the very young and of the not young at all. When the daughter of Pharaoh was bathing in the river and saw a basket in the reeds, she opened it and saw the baby [na’ar] was crying. Rehoboam is called a na’ar at age 41 because he hasn’t yet had a child. Absalom is called a na’ar and this is after he’s led Israel in a revolution against his father David. A na’ar is any male who isn’t yet a father. David Hirsch is a na’ar and he’s leading 21 of our kids on a mission trip in inner-city Philadelphia this week. He’s not a boy.

When Saul puts his armor on David, David doesn’t say, “This is too big for me.” He says, “I’m not used to it.” Do you see? David’s not a boy. He’s a na’ar. He’s not yet a father. My guess is that he was about seventeen.

The size of the stones. We have depictions of Ancient Near Eastern slings in bas-relief. A sling was a leather pouch with a leather strap on each side, one strap tied to the slinger’s hand and the other loosely held in the palm of the hand. The pouch held a round stone, which was the size of a baseball and weighed about nine pounds. David took five stones, as much as a fighting man could carry. A stone slung at maximum velocity by someone with skills could reach a speed of over 120 mph.

Where David’s stone hit Goliath. “And David reached in his bag, took from it a stone and slinging it smote the Philistine … and he fell upon his face to the ground.” Our Bibles say the stone sunk into his forehead, but what they translate ‘forehead’ is the Hebrew word mtzchuh which means anything on the front. The sixth verse of this same chapter (1 Samuel 17) says that Goliath had “greaves of brass upon his legs” — shin armor. The word translated ‘greaves’ is the same word mtzchuh. So here’s what I think happened. David shot the giant’s legs out from under him. The giant went face down in excruciating pain. And David ran up to Goliath where he dealt the lethal blow.

How did Goliath die? David doesn’t strike a fatal blow to the head with the stone from his sling; he strikes a debilitating blow to the shins. He wants to kill Goliath in two stages. First he wants to knock him down so that a conscious Goliath will be humiliated. Then he wants to kill the Philistine champion with his own weapon. David had no sword of his own. So he takes Goliath’s legs out, then he runs up to him, grasps the giant’s sword, pulls it from its sheath, and kills him by cutting his head off.

In the Bible, you can usually tell God’s judgment because he causes his enemies to die by their own weapon. Call it the Benaiah principle. Saul falls on his own sword. You see this in 2 Samuel 23, where Benaiah with a club did combat with an Egyptian who had a spear in his hand. “Benaiah snatched the spear out of the Egyptian’s hand and killed him with his own spear.”

David took the head to Jerusalem. When David decapitates Goliath, he takes the head to Jerusalem. But he takes Goliath’s sword into ‘his’ tent. Whose tent? The Lord’s tent. We know he puts it in the Lord’s tent — the tabernacle — because in chapter 21, when fleeing from Saul, David is at the tabernacle with the priests at Nob and he asks them, “Do you have any weapons?” And they say, “We have no weapons except the sword of Goliath.” He brought the sword into the tabernacle because you take war booty and put it where it belongs as tribute to the one who won the battle. David wants the glory to go to God. He sees this is God’s victory and not his own.

He doesn’t take Goliath’s head into the Lord’s tent because it’s unclean and that would be disgusting. He takes the head to Jerusalem which is not in Israelite hands at this point. And here is where your imagination ties a lasso around the story and lets it take you away to another place, to the New Testament where we read about David’s greater son.

In Mark’s Gospel we read that the Roman soldiers taking Jesus to the site of his crucifixion brought him to a place called Golgotha which means “the place of a skull.” Golgotha is based on the Aramaic. (Calvary is the Latin for skull.) What’s this “place of a skull”? A Bible dictionary will list 4 or 5 suggestions every one of them unconvincing. It usually starts off with the assumption that there must be a hill that’s shaped like a skull, and indeed if you go on a holy land tour they’ll show you a hill that has in it what looks like a skull with two eye sockets. I know. I’ve seen it. What they don’t mention is that it looks this way due to quarrying work in the middle ages.

There’s no hill that looks like a skull. Josephus describes in meticulous detail the topography of Jerusalem in the first century and there’s no place that resembles a skull. Maybe it’s as Jerome suggested, that there were skulls lying around the place. The problem is that would mean it should have been called the place of the skulls. Anyway that’s not hinted at before the fourth century. It’s not an early tradition. Origen thinks it’s because the skull of Adam was there. I think Origen was high on something. He comes up with the strangest interpretations.

I think the reason Mark tells us the meaning of Golgotha is so the alert reader will know what story is being echoed in the combat Jesus will do on the cross. There’s only one skull in the whole of the biblical narrative that had anything to do with Jerusalem. It’s the skull of Goliath. David fights Goliath. Goliath is defeated. What’s the outcome of the battle? The enemy is made subject. Everyone loses on the Philistine side. It’s one against one, a battle of champions, David fighting a battle on behalf of all the people of God, winning it on behalf of all the people of God.

The Israelites could not possibly defeat Goliath but for one young man, a na’ar. And fighting on their behalf, David becomes their champion and their redeemer. They get to enjoy the fruit of his victory as if they fought the battle themselves.

The meal we eat here at this altar celebrates the victory of David’s greater son. Jesus is our redeemer who fought in a battle of champions, one against one, against the prince of darkness in that combat stupendous on the cross. He defeated the enemy in a way that then brings victory to all those who belong to him. Does he follow that Benaiah principle? You bet he does. From Satan’s perspective it must have seemed like Satan’s finest hour when Jesus died on the cross. He must have thought, “Yes! I’ve won!” Here’s his terrible weapon, death, used to defeat the Lord’s messiah. And what does the Lord’s messiah do with death? He turns the weapon around and runs the enemy through with it to show that it was God’s victory from the start, vindicating his own, bringing on the judgment that was deserved by the enemy for having ever come against the Savior in the first place. Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

I have heard a number of different speakers at graduation exercises and most if not all have made the point that commencement is not so much the end of something as the beginning of something: the beginning of the real business of life, they are apt to say, of the moment when you start putting into practice the ancient truths and pieties that education has been trying to instill in you all these years.

But this is a baccalaureate sermon so I am not bound by any of the conventions and can start out by saying that tomorrow’s commencement is also the end of something — Thanks be to God! — that the month of June is not only the threshold of a new summer, a new beginning, but that it is also a time of goodbyes. For underclassmen it is just goodbye until September of course, but the goodbyes that you seventy-five seniors say can be goodbyes for years to come or maybe even forever. And for the benefit of any jaded seniors who think forever is not half long enough, let me remind you that in the end there is something a little sad and a little fateful about the end of anything, even something that you are fed up with and eager to leave, because deep down any goodbye there is something of the last goodbye of all.

What I am saying about graduating can also be said about any given moment of our lives because every new moment we come to no matter how trivial it may look is the end, the goal, to which all of our earlier moments have been leading. The sermon that I am preaching to you this evening is the product of everything that I have said and done and been up to this point, just as your reaction to it is the product of everything that you have said and done and been. From moment to moment we are constantly creating ourselves, you and I, and we are also creating our future, our destinies. We are responsible for who we are and for who we are becoming, and life will hold us responsible, so be careful. Be careful.

I don’t suppose a parent has ever put someone they love on a train without saying, just before the whistle blows and the cars start to move out, “Take care of yourself, take care.” This is part of the language of goodbyes. And since in some measure I’ve been given the privilege at this moment to speak to you on behalf of the Saint Andrew’s family, this address is a goodbye to you. So I say to you now, Take care of yourselves, and in just this sense: know, recognize the terrible and wonderful freedom you have to become almost any kind of person you want to become. And then, once you recognize this freedom, be careful not to give it away too unthinkingly.

What I mean is that when you choose to become a certain kind of person, to follow a certain way of life, to enter a certain profession, by that very choice you cancel out a number of other possible choices. In other words, if you choose to become a surgeon, say, you pretty much give up the possibility of becoming a concert pianist because you have only so much time and energy, and you cannot be in two places at once. You have to choose between them, and the price that you pay for one is the giving up of the other. This is inevitable and it is also obvious, but sometimes the price that your choice costs is just as inevitable but not so obvious, and this is where you have to be so careful with your life.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Suppose that you decide in your freedom that what you want to become most is a successful businessman. First of all, on the same obvious level, that decision immediately limits your freedom to become lots of other things, an actor, for instance, or a psychiatrist. But that is all right, because you are not keen on acting or psychiatry anyway, so this is a price you’re willing to pay for your choice.

All right. But suppose you want to become a successful businessman in a community that, like all communities, has some very definite ideas about the way people are supposed to behave. It is equally obvious that in order to succeed in this place you are going to have to adapt yourself to this code of behavior. And what does that involve?

First of all, there is the whole realm of the relatively trivial — the way you speak, the way you dress, the kind of house you live in, the car you drive and so forth. If your ambition is to become a partner in a conservative law firm, for example, you do not show up for work wearing a nose-ring and a poncho, and you do not speak like a character out of Jack Kerouac. But after all, you do not really care that much about what kind of clothes you wear, and you would not know how to speak like a character out of Jack Kerouac even if you wanted to, so here is another price, another limitation of your freedom, that is certainly fair enough.

But then suppose that the community which you have chosen to succeed in has some rather strong prejudices in matters a good deal less trivial than dress. The chances are that they are kept discreetly out of sight, but it is nonetheless very apparent indeed that if you really want to get ahead here, you just do not try to sell your house to a devout Muslim when you move into a bigger place yourself.

Here of course the problem can become a little stickier, especially if the Muslim you would like to sell your house to is a good man and a good friend who really needs that house. Or even if he is not, to succeed in this community means that you have just got to shut yourself off to a whole world of potential friends, people who are interested in the same kinds of things that you are, who laugh at the same kind of nonsense, who are hurt by the same kind of callousness and are different only ideologically. You may not like it very much, but if success here is what you are after more than anything else, then this is another part of the price that you have to pay: the giving up of the freedom to choose your own friends.

And if success at any cost is what you are really after, it can get even more expensive than that. Because what does it actually mean if you choose as your primary goal in life to advance yourself, whether in business, medicine, music or what have you? It means that to the degree to which you are dedicated to that goal — and there is not one of us who is not dedicated to it in some measure — you use anything that comes your way as a means of achieving it, and that includes other human beings.

If someone stands in the way of my self-advancement, if he wants the same job that I want, I eliminate him by fair means if I am able but by foul if I am not. If someone is a Muslim whose friendship becomes a handicap to me in the world where I am trying to get ahead, I drop him as a friend. If someone is in a position to give me the power that I want, then I disguise myself to look and act and speak as much like the kind of person whom I think they will find endearing as I can. In other words, I use them for my own ends. But there is one thing that always happens when you use other people. There is an inevitable price for using them: you lose your freedom to be yourself with them.

I should make something clear here by the way. Up to here I have been speaking about using other people to advance yourself in your profession or your status in the community because that is one of the most obvious forms it takes. But of course there are a great many less obvious forms as well. Take the matter of sex, for instance. On the one hand the sexual relationship between man and woman can be the ultimately creative expression of a love in which each loses yet at the same time finds themselves in the other. Yet it is also true that human sexuality more than perhaps any other aspect of our nature can lead someone to use another person for his own self-gratification. And instead of being creative this is extremely destructive both for the one who is used and for the one who uses because it is an inexorable law of human nature that you cannot dehumanize another person without at the same time dehumanizing yourself.

And if sex can be a form of using people in the interests of self, so can a parent’s love for a child — and this is possibly more dangerous because it is much more apt to be considered respectable and much less apt to be fully conscious. I mean a mother’s clasping her child so closely to her in order to ease the pain of her own loneliness that the child’s emotional growth is retarded, or a father’s loving his son not for the sake of his son but as an extension of his own ego.

But the one thing that is always to one degree or another involved in using people, whatever form it takes, is that you can never afford to open your heart to the person whom you are using. You can never risk letting that person know you fully, because the moment you do so the game is up. And yet you want to be known; you want to be known and accepted for what you really are more, perhaps, than you want anything else in the world.

So your dedication to your own self-advancement separates you from the people you exploit just as decisively as it does from the people you alienate and the friends you drop. And, mark this: it also separates you from yourself. It separates you from yourself in just the sense that with the people you use, you can never be fully yourself but have to pretend to be someone else, and the more people you are using the more places this is so until finally you are not really yourself anywhere.

And then one of two things happens. One possibility is that you lose track of who you really are. One of the trademarks of our age is the person who has lost his identity — who for the sake of success or maybe just for the sake of security has spent so much time trying to become like what he believes people want that he can no longer be sure who he really is. Or the other possibility (and maybe this is worse): you do not lose track of your real identity, but behind the mask you wear, you grow lonely and stunted and anxious in your own isolation.

In both cases, one crucial paradox emerges. The more zealously you are dedicated to the cause of advancing yourself, the less self you have to advance. The more people you use, the less people you can love, because to love a person for herself is exactly the opposite of using her for yourself. Yet to love and be loved is a yearning even more profound than the yearning to advance, to gratify, to secure the self. As Jesus said, “He who seeks to save his soul will lose it.”

So be careful with your precious lives. Be careful not to give away your terrible and wonderful freedom unthinkingly. Be careful especially not to give away your freedom to be yourselves, to see yourselves fulfilled as the human beings God wants you to be. Be careful when you choose the road that you will follow to be aware of all the other roads you will no longer be able to follow.

Henry James is remembered as a great writer, but it was something he said to his nephew Billy, the son of his brother William, as he was putting Billy on a train at Penn Station in New York that Billy would spend the rest of his life remembering him by. “Billy,” he said, kissing the boy on the forehead and holding his face in his hands, “there are three things most important in life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” Of all the words to ever come from this most labyrinthine of writers these are the ones Billy always remembered.

Be kind. That is another way of saying Be careful. Be kind to yourself. Be kind to others. Do not live just for yourself, not simply because to do so is wrong but because to do so is death. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself not simply because to do so is right but because to do so is life.