Of the prophets Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the one easiest to identify is Jeremiah. If you’re thinking of going to Rome, let me tell you where this Jeremiah is. Were our ceiling at Saint Francis like that of the Sistine Chapel, the weeping prophet would be up here directly above the pulpit. It is a potent psychological portrait of weakness, weariness and despair. His sitting posture, his crossed legs, his downcast eyes, his right hand covering his mouth, Jeremiah is a picture of anguish and inner suffering. Michelangelo uses every angle to convey his pain. Everything in the scene points down; his head, the fingers of his left hand. His right hand covers his mouth as if he’s weary of his own complaints, a prophet who has nothing more to say.

The book of Jeremiah is about the crisis of the last days of Judah, a crisis culminating with the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 587 BC. We read about it in the last chapter of Jeremiah (52: 12 – 14): “Now in the fifth month, on the tenth day of the month — that was the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon — Nebuzaradan the captain of the bodyguard who served the king of Babylon, entered Jerusalem. And he burned the house of the LORD, and the king’s house; and all the houses of Jerusalem; every great house he burned down. And all the army of the Chaldeans, who were with the captain of the guard, broke down all the walls around Jerusalem.”

Jeremiah was the son of a priest named Hilkiah. He was raised about three miles northeast of Jerusalem in Anata, a town halfway from Jerusalem to Jericho. He spent much of his life denouncing things which is why denunciations are called jeremiads. Recreational sex. The rich for exploiting the poor. The poor for having it coming to them. His own people for batting her eyelashes and winking at every new god who came riding in someone’s saddlebags into town. He stood at the gate of the Temple and told people as they walked in that if they believed God was touched by the highjinks that went on in there they should have their heads examined. When some took to indulging in a little human sacrifice on the side, Jeremiah showed up with a clay pot which he smashed to smithereens to show them what God was going to do to them when the time came.

At the beginning of the book we hear the voice of the Lord say to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” It sounds like a nice appointment but it isn’t long before the work of being God’s mouth, of trying to reform Judah, makes Jeremiah more pitiable and exasperated than any curate in the novels of Anthony Trollope, so that by the fifteenth chapter Jeremiah laments not just the work but the One who saddled him with it. Taking his complaint directly to God he asks him, “Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Will you be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail?” To this last question there isn’t any doubt that Jeremiah thinks the answer is Yes. A little later he says, “Cursed be the day I was born. Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, ‘A son is born to you,’ making him glad. Let that man be like the cities that the Lord overthrew without pity. Why did I come out from the womb to see toil and sorrow and spend my days in shame?”

To understand his anguish, you have to remember that in the Jerusalem of Jeremiah the heart of the city was the Temple, and the heart of the Temple was the kapporeth or mercy seat — the empty space above the Ark of the Covenant between the two golden cherubim. It was the most potent sign of Israel’s repudiation of idols, the great speaking absence between the images. What the people of Israel lost above all when Jerusalem fell was the empty space between the cherubim, the place that was the center of their life as the covenant people, the space behind the curtained holy place where God is, the place where all the mercy comes from, what the psalmist refers to as “help from the sanctuary” and the “answer from heaven”.

The crisis that the burning of the Temple presented for Jeremiah was about the destruction of that empty space between the cherubim. If that seems strange to you just think of the crisis of having someone you cherish taken away. If you’ve lost someone you love you know a bit of what it is to live as Jeremiah had to, in exile. You have to live every day with what’s missing. When Jeremiah and the people of Israel lost the empty space between the cherubim, the place where all the mercy comes from, they lost everything. God himself was in the empty space, and the empty space was gone.

Today’s Gospel story takes place six miles up the road from Jeremiah’s hometown and six centuries after the destruction of the Temple. The silence between the cherubim, the silence from that empty space where God speaks becomes a God who has stepped into the world, becomes for a little while a physical hand outstretched as it were to Bartimaeus. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” he says. It’s the first time Jesus is called the Son of David in Mark’s gospel. Jesus stood still, and Bartimaeus came to him. “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus said, “Let me see again.” Jesus said, “Go; your faith has made you well.” He could see again but Bartimaeus didn’t go. Instead he followed Jesus.

The way Mark tells the story, here’s the next thing he writes: “Now when they drew near to Jerusalem, Jesus sent two of his disciples and said to them, “Go into the village of Bethany and you will find a colt tied….” And riding that colt Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the Temple.

I picture Bartimaeus watching Jesus ride into Jerusalem where he’s brought to trial, following Jesus as he is led by the Praetorian guard outside the walls of Jerusalem to Golgotha, named for the skull of Goliath whom David defeated to win victory on behalf of all the people of God. It was at Golgotha that they crucified him. According to Mark, Jesus’ last words were, “’My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ … And with a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.”

There is that silence again, the silence between the cherubim from which God spoke becomes the silence culminating in the death of the Beloved Son; the silence where God has nothing more to say.

You and I live between the Old Jerusalem and the New. Jesus is our altar and our sanctuary, our kapporeth or mercy seat. He’s the One I trust, the One you trust. He knows what it is to experience God’s absence, the empty space, the empty space being gone. And when he breathed his last the curtain of the Temple was torn in two from top to bottom. Why? Because the God of Jeremiah, the God of the Temple, the God of that empty space between the golden cherubim had come out from behind the curtain to hang between two thieves.

Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob,
and raise shouts for the chief of the nations;
proclaim, give praise, and say,
“Save, O LORD, your people,
the remnant of Israel.”
See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north,
and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth,
among them the blind and the lame, those with child and
those in labor, together;
a great company, they shall return here.
With weeping they shall come,
and with consolations I will lead them back,
I will let them walk by brooks of water,
in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.

— Jeremiah 31: 7 – 9

When King David brought the ark of God up to the shrine he had prepared for it in Jerusalem, we read that the procession was enlivened with songs and dancing. I want to speak to you about David and how to the horror of his young wife and in a blare of strange, wild music the ancient king got the rhythm of God under his skin and danced away himself with all his might and became what he became.

I want to set David dancing before you now, and in your mind’s eye I want you to try to see him dancing way off through the dimness of three thousand years. The music he’s dancing to, if we could hear it, would be an offense to our ears I suppose — the harps and castanets, the tambourines and cymbals — but we can’t hear it, of course. We can only see that he hears it, or hears something through it, beyond it, because it is plain even at the distance of thirty centuries that more than just his body is caught up in more than just the music, his whole being is caught up and he abandons himself to the dancing. That is why his wife, who is the daughter of a king as well as the wife of a king, is so horrified, because the king her husband has forgotten himself. He has forgotten himself and his kingly dignity, and to make matters worse he has done it in the presence of the servants. That is why the queen, who in no sense forgets herself, despises him in her heart.

She wants him to be a king not so much for his sake as for her own sake, so she can be a queen. But instead he becomes a dancer, and his body glistens with the fury and the joy of it, and his bare feet beat the wild rhythms of it into the earth in front of the Holy Ark where Yahweh the King of Glory dwells. David is not interested in being what Michal wants him to be, and when she berates him afterwards he answers her out of the fury that is still upon him with, “I will make myself more contemptible than this and I will be abased in your eyes.” David isn’t primarily interested in the music the musicians are playing. What really interests him, what he is really dancing to, comes out when he says, “I will make merry before the Lord.”

He is not dancing simply to the music that comes from without. He is dancing to the music of his wild gladness that wells up from within him in the presence of the ark. He is dancing his religion. He forgets himself, forgets to be a king, forgets to live up to the image that his wife has of him or his servants have of him. But in forgetting himself, he happens also to become himself.

I don’t know what it’s like to be inside your skin, but I am the world’s leading authority on what it’s like to be inside my skin, so let me generalize from my experience and if it doesn’t match yours there’s no great harm done.

I think that for people like us, it can be hard to forget ourselves and to be ourselves at a dance. And of course it’s especially hard to be yourself if you’re not quite sure who you are. This explains why you and I were uncomfortable at the middle school dances and at the prom. A young person, and to some extent, every person, is a person who is still looking for a self to be. When you are looking for a self to be, the temptation is always very great to be a self that you think other people are going to like.

David had his Queen Michal with her own ideas of what a king should be and at a dance you have someone like her too, the partner you’re dancing with and the friends who are there dancing, and they all have their ideas of the kind of person you should be. So very often that’s the person you try to be. You put on the face you think they will find admissible and dance their way not only because you want their approval and want to be popular with them but because in a real way you need their approval as something to give you security in a world where God knows there is much cause to be insecure, just as they need your approval and are wearing a face to please you.

When I say you I mean me too because to some degree for all of us life is a masked ball. To some degree for all of us life consists of trying on many masks until at last, by God’s grace, we find the one that fits who we really are and it becomes our face so that the whole process turns out to have been a process of self-discovery. But unfortunately it can also be a process of self-concealment and self-deceit and eventual self-loss whereby in our efforts to endear ourselves to each other we wear masks so foreign to our natures that when we meet, we meet not on the basis of who we are but instead we meet solely on the basis of who we want others to think that we are. And when that is true we don’t really meet each other at all.

The sound of a dance, the sound of our society in general, is often the sound not of human beings meeting other human beings, but the sound of masks clattering up against masks. And this is so because just as we were afraid at dances when we were young, we’re afraid still. You’re afraid to open yourself to another’s knowing for fear that in knowing you the other will reject you. You don’t speak your mind truly for fear that you’ll sound like a fool, and beneath that fear is the darker fear that maybe you are a fool. You’re afraid the world will dish out more to you than you are able to take. You’re afraid that someone very important will ask more of you than you feel you have in you to give.

Not all of the truth, thank God, and not all of the time, but part of the truth at least part of the time is that we are afraid of each other, you and I, and afraid of our lives. A sadder truth still is that the way this world works, part of the time our fears are not unwarranted. So it is that the dance we end up going to with our lives is not really a dance after all, but a masquerade.

But Christ calls us to the Dance, as the poet T. S. Eliot called it. At the still point of the turning world / There the Dance is / And there is only the Dance. It is why Saint John’s has been here for 126 years, and why you are here this morning. You believe it. Some Christians do not associate Christ with dancing, but the primitive Christians, Christians of the earliest Christian centuries, in the clumsy art of the catacombs, depicted Christ as Orpheus, the fabulous musician of Greek mythology whose rhythm none could resist, who danced the fawns out of the forest and the fir trees down from the hills. And they had warrant for it, after all, for what else did Jesus say of himself? Speaking of the unresponsiveness of the Jews to his mission, and to that of John the Baptist before him, “You are like children,” he said, “sitting in the street complaining to one another: we have piped to you and you have not danced, we have mourned and you have not lamented.” Mourned, that was John calling to repentance. Piped, that was Jesus dancing them into the kingdom of God with the music of everlasting joy.

A little over a year ago at the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles, there was great merriment and dancing for the wedding reception of Evan and Kristin Ellsworth. What is it that released us — that set us off? Music played by The Cowling Band, one of the best bands in the City of Angels. That is what released us: songs to dance to. But what was it that controlled us? The same thing: we danced to the music. The control is the release. The music held us. The music let us go.

This is why the lyres and cymbals that David dances to in our text and writes about in the Psalms are illuminating parables of true religion. For the whole mystery of Christian faith comes down to a phrase of one of the great collects in the Book of Common Prayer: “whose service is perfect freedom.” God our control and God our release. Listen to what John Milton says of his Lycidas in heaven: “There entertain him all the saints above / in solemn troops and sweet societies / that sing, and singing in their glory move / and wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.”

Let me end where I began, with the young King David dancing. For as long at least as the moment lasted he was not afraid to be himself no matter what the queen might think or the servants or all Israel. The reason he wasn’t afraid to be himself was that he was dancing in the presence of the Most High by whom he found himself not rejected but accepted, not threatened but blessed. David wasn’t afraid to be himself because he found himself in the presence of the King of Glory with whom he felt not fear finally but a gladness and oneness that rose up in him like music. He wasn’t afraid of life because the source of life itself had gotten under his skin, calling forth his true self in all its nakedness, setting it free to be made whole and real.

When you come right down to it, what I stand here in the name of the King of Glory to do is to invite you to join this strange dance, to invite you to listen to the music that Jesus of Nazareth heard who in this sense was indeed the Son of David. In the rhythm and pattern of Jesus’ life you can see what human life was made to be, a life where we meet one another not as strangers of whom we are afraid, but as friends in whom we delight. A life where we meet God not as an unappeasable tyrant but as the leader of the Dance, the Lord in whose service is the freedom to become fully human and fully alive. Amen.

In Peculiar Treasures, Frederick Buechner writes:

“Sermonettes make Christianettes,” the saying goes, so Saint Paul kept talking till midnight to make sure they all got the word. Then he thought of a few things he’d left out and went on a while longer. He was so caught up in his own eloquence that he didn’t hear the bumblebee sounds that were emerging from a young man with his eyes more or less closed and his mouth more or less open who sat slumped over in the third story window. It was only a woman’s scream that alerted him to the fact that the boy had fallen asleep, and out, more or less simultaneously. When Paul asked his name, they told him it was Eutychus.

Everybody thought Eutychus was dead, but Paul said he’d see about that. Then he went back upstairs where, after a snack, he ran over his major points once more just to make sure. When he finally left on the early bus, they found Eutychus sitting up in bed asking for two over light and a toasted English.

This miraculous recovery, plus the fact that by then the saint was already well on his way to the next county, made them decide to throw a double celebration. Presumably somebody had the sense to suggest that this time they use the ground floor.

(Acts 20: 9 – 12)

On January 29, 1626 at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, John Donne preached a sermon on Psalm 63: 7, “Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.” It is surely one of the greatest sermons ever preached on a psalm in the English language. There are ample reasons for thinking so. Here’s one. Donne gets his congregation to see themselves as enemies of God.

It may be said that God’s enemies is not all that we are. What too often is left unsaid is what makes possible that subjunctive. We lack, too many of us preachers, a biblical theology of God as destroyer, what it cost God for us to get involved with him. That we are at enmity with God is indeed but one aspect of our relation to him, but that there is more to knowing God than resisting him, that there are other aspects of our involvement with God including our loving him, depends utterly on the mercy of the Most High, the mercy that makes possible our hope of receiving it.

Imagine yourself sitting in the nave of St. Paul’s in 1626 as the Dean mounts the pulpit steps. Donne is a man who for all his inimitable talent, for all his genius with words, knew on good authority dejection and death. By 1626, he had lost his beloved wife Ann and five of the twelve children he had with her. Imagine yourself hearing — don’t read but hear them — these words. What you hear is a man preaching to his congregation, but what falls on your ear also is the sound made by a man praying, a man whose emotional skills have been subjected to and shaped not merely by his subjective experience willy-nilly but by the psalms. And therein lay his sermon’s lyric power; Donne speaks as the psalmist does, taking his grief directly to the Most High.

When I shall need peace — because there is none but thou, O Lord, that should stand for me — and then shall find that all the wounds that I have come from thy hand, all the arrows that stick in me, from thy quiver; when I shall see that because I have given myself to my corrupt nature, thou hast changed thine, and because I am all evil towards thee, therefore thou hast given over being good towards me; when it comes to this height, that … mine enemy is not an imaginary enemy, fortune, nor a transitory enemy, malice in great persons, but a real and an irresistable and an inexorable and an everlasting enemy, the Lord of Hosts himself, the Almighty God himself — the Almighty God himself only knows the weight of this affliction, and except he put in that pondus gloriae, that exceeding weight of an eternal glory, with his own hand into the other scale, we are weighed down, we are swallowed up, irreparably, irrevocably, irrecoverably, irremediably.

[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.

Every profession possesses its own unique temptations — mirror images of what that profession professes to be. In their zeal to uphold right and wrong, police are tempted towards petty corruption. In the service of justice, lawyers are tempted to subvert the mechanisms of justice. In order to thrill an audience, an opera singer is tempted to reach for a note which is false. To commend his subject, a teacher is tempted to become an entertainer.

Clergy too have their unique temptation. And not the ones you think — not the ones trumpeted in the daily press. The abuse of power, the mismanagement of money, sexual indiscretions: these temptations are not unique to clergy, they are to be found in every other vocation as well. No, in a time when social roles and character slip and slide, clergy are confronted by the unique temptation to avoid behaving like clergy: having been ordained, set aside by God for a specific task, clergy are daily confronted by the glittering temptation to flee the very specificity of the task.

And what is this specific task? Jesus tells us, albeit indirectly, in today’s gospel: “He who is a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.” And lest we miss the point, he returns to the same metaphor at the conclusion of John’s gospel: “When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?’ He said to him, ‘Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.’ He said to him, ‘Feed my lambs.’”

What is the specific task into which clergy are ordained? Day in and day out, to feed God’s people with his Word. It’s that simple — and that difficult. Difficult, because of the abiding temptation to redefine the task, in order to avoid the task altogether.

The most obvious form of this temptation arises from the uncomfortable fact that clergy are different, and so we are tempted to want to be the same — like everyone else — in order to be liked by everyone else. We are not ordained to be politicians or social reformers, analysts or welfare workers, the managerial elite which now control society. Yet we are tempted for that very reason to want this elite to give us a hearing, to like us, to take us into the club. And so we are tempted to redefine Jesus’ command: Feed my sheep. We are tempted to mount the pulpit and speak of everything from the Federal Budget to Bosnia, and drag in some proof-text to prove what we wanted to say anyway. Remember, Phillip, every self-appointed prophet in the Old Testament was a false prophet.

There is another form of this temptation, not so obvious but therefore doubly pernicious. That is to give the sheep only the food they crave, not the food they need, not the Bread of Eternal Life. So we are tempted to mount the pulpit, open with a movie or book review, a witty story, a cultural reflection, and then pull in a bit of Scripture to round things off. And we will have achieved what we wanted to achieve: people will think we’re not so odd, at the church door they will thank us for a thoughtful and beautiful message. Remember well, Phillip, Jesus’s words: “Woe to you, when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”

_______________________________________________________

The Rev’d Fr. David Stokes, my friend and sponsoring rector, preaching at The Ordination of a Priest, Saint Bartholomew’s Church, the City of New York, January 6, 1996. It was David at his most characteristic, except that here the sermon was aimed at the one entering holy orders, at me — everybody else in St. Bart’s that day overheard it. David was at the time the rector of Saint Stephen’s Church, Providence, RI, an Anglo-Catholic parish, my sponsoring parish. The prayer that I pray before preaching — O, Lord, may thy Word be my word, and if my word is not thy Word, let thy people be cunning enough to see the same. — I learned from David Stokes.

That is why she didn’t let go of her life easily. She was the kind of person who got notes like the one from her student Max at Rock Creek Forest Elementary School. In some of the best lines in any literature, Max wrote: “Dear Ms. Wilson: You’re the best English teacher in the world. I want to flunk second grade in a good way, so you can be my English teacher again” [Max’s emphasis].

Heather’s life, the way she lived it as a coach and a teacher, made you disbelieve. She made you disbelieve the lie that you couldn’t swim, or couldn’t spell, or couldn’t write. And doing so, she made you disbelieve that favorite lie we tell ourselves: that life is neither good nor bad except as we make it so by the way that we live it. We may make a full life for ourselves or an empty life, but no matter what we make of it, the common view is that life itself does not care one way or another whether we sink or swim any more than the ocean cares, or any more than the water in the River Falls pool cares. In all honesty, one has to admit that a great deal of evidence supports such a view.

But this church, and other places like it, exists — and you come to it today — because you don’t believe that life doesn’t care. To say that God is Spirit is to say that life does care, that the life-giving power that life itself comes from is not indifferent to whether we sink or swim. It wants us to swim.

_______________________________________________________

At the Burial Office for Heather Joy Wilson, May 24, 1970 – December 11, 2003.