SPEAKER_01: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_01: All do you all see this?
SPEAKER_03: The Lord be with you.
SPEAKER_03: And also with you, let us pray.
SPEAKER_03: Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly.
SPEAKER_03: Even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure.
SPEAKER_03: Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever.
SPEAKER_03: As you be exceeded, our children are invited to God before the Father shall be at the back of this for children in grade great and reading from Zechariah.
SPEAKER_00: And it also said the word of the just one came to Zechariah saying, Thus says the ruler of the multitudes of heaven, true justice, shall you all administer just loving kindness and mother love?
SPEAKER_00: Shall you all offer one to another?
SPEAKER_00: And the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, and the one made poor through oppression.
SPEAKER_00: You all must not oppress another.
SPEAKER_00: And wickedness of one person against another do not see in your heart.
SPEAKER_00: Yet they refused to listen, and turned a stubborn shoulder, and clocked up their ears so as not to hear the law, so as not to hear.
SPEAKER_00: Thus a great wrath came from the sovereign of the vanguard of heaven.
SPEAKER_00: And it was just as when God called, they would not hear.
SPEAKER_00: So when they called, I would not hear, said the sovereign commander of the winged warriors, and I scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations who may knew or not know.
SPEAKER_00: Psalm ten, one to fourteen, we will read responsibly by the heart of earth.
SPEAKER_00: Why compassionate one do you stand apart?
SPEAKER_00: In arrogance the wicked harass the poor.
SPEAKER_00: The wicked to turn up their nose and do not see God.
SPEAKER_00: Their ways prosper all the time.
SPEAKER_00: Your judgments are on high beyond them.
SPEAKER_00: All their foods beyond them.
SPEAKER_00: They say in their heart, We shall not be shaken.
SPEAKER_00: Cursing fills their mouths along with and deceit and oppression.
SPEAKER_00: They sit in ambush in the villages, in hiding places, they murder the innocent.
SPEAKER_00: They lie in wait in secret, like a lion in its dead.
SPEAKER_00: They lie in wait that they may snatch the four.
SPEAKER_00: They say in their heart, God has forgotten.
SPEAKER_00: Why do the wicked despise God?
SPEAKER_00: Upon you the vulnerable and trust in themselves.
SPEAKER_02: Is faith able to say, if a sister or a brother is naked and lacks neighborhood, and one of you says to them, Go in peace, warm yourself, and eat your fill, and you all do not provide what is necessary for the body, what is the benefit of that?
SPEAKER_02: And thus faith, if it has no works, is dead by itself.
SPEAKER_02: Yet someone will say, Faith you have, faith and works I have.
SPEAKER_02: Show me your faith separately from your works, and I through my works will show you my faith.
SPEAKER_02: You believe that God is one, you do well.
SPEAKER_02: Even the demons believe and they tremble.
SPEAKER_02: You see that by works is a woman or a man shown to be righteous, and not by faith alone.
SPEAKER_02: And likewise was not Rahab the prostitute by works also shown to be righteous when she welcomed the messengers and sent them out by another road.
SPEAKER_02: For just as a body without the spirit is dead, so then faith without works is also dead.
SPEAKER_02: The word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_03: Jesus said to the women and men gathered around him at the temple, Truly, truly, I tell you all, the hour is coming and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.
SPEAKER_03: For just as a living God has life within, just so God has granted the Son to have life with him.
SPEAKER_03: And God has given the Son authority to render justice, because he is the Son of woman.
SPEAKER_03: Now be astonished at this, for the hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and will come out those who have done good for the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil and the resurrection of judgment.
SPEAKER_03: The gospel of the Lord.
SPEAKER_03: One of the things that's different about the women's lectionary for the whole church we're in year C, and one of the way that's different from the revised lectionary is that we're doing this back and forth business between Luke and John.
unknown: And normally we would only really read John during Easter tide, and then we would hear stories about Jesus from Luke's gospel throughout the rest of the year.
SPEAKER_03: I suspect, I haven't interviewed Wilka Afty who put this together, is that she's trying to get us to think about narrative stories.
SPEAKER_03: Last year we heard the story of Zacchaeus, right, which has characters and it unfolds.
SPEAKER_03: And then we're going to John and hearing Jesus, I don't want to say pontificate, but use theological language that sort of says, here's what underpins some of these stories.
SPEAKER_03: John is arguably the most theological of the four Gospelers.
SPEAKER_03: Jesus speaks in big blocks about what it all means, whereas in the other first three Gospels, the synoptics, usually Jesus does a thing and moves on.
SPEAKER_03: So that's my sense.
SPEAKER_03: And there's something really interesting today about this bit that I'd like to.
SPEAKER_03: It's very John, right?
SPEAKER_03: This is very gospel of John.
SPEAKER_03: The dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.
SPEAKER_03: And I think what John might be trying to communicate to the earliest Christians, that if we would just take our, for lack of a better word, I'll fly away, glasses off for a minute.
SPEAKER_03: Do you know that's all?
SPEAKER_03: One glad morning when this life is over, I'll fly away.
SPEAKER_03: It embraces the idea that this physical world is a trap to the spirit, and one day we'll get out of the trap.
SPEAKER_03: If we could take this off for one second, we might be hearing what it is that John, I think, advised us to consider.
SPEAKER_03: There are people who are dead right now.
SPEAKER_03: Figuratively.
SPEAKER_03: Dead in their shame, in their regret.
SPEAKER_03: There are people who are socially dead to us.
SPEAKER_03: And resurrection is about having life now, as much as it is when our bodies are gone.
SPEAKER_03: Consider.
SPEAKER_03: Ah, here I go with the social justice talk again.
SPEAKER_03: Consider somebody who's on Megan's list because when they were 18, they had an intimate relationship with someone who was 17.
SPEAKER_03: They'll be on that list for the rest of their life.
SPEAKER_03: They cannot live within half a mile of a school.
SPEAKER_03: They have to live in on every job application.
SPEAKER_03: Would you hire that person?
SPEAKER_03: Without knowing their story, would you hire them?
SPEAKER_03: And would you dare ask them for their story because that's embarrassing?
SPEAKER_03: Sometimes I think we'd rather just wait till we're dead, and then God can resurrect us.
SPEAKER_03: But if you make a mistake and you betray what we consider social norms, well, you can suffer till you die.
SPEAKER_03: You consider committing a felony when you're 18, and how validly on your job application for the rest of your life, even after you've served your time.
SPEAKER_03: Consider.
SPEAKER_03: I don't know what your story is.
SPEAKER_03: I don't know how you in your family has suffered.
SPEAKER_03: Because they did something when they were young or unadvisably, or they just happened to be the one who got caught that one time, or something was done to them that has put them in the realm of death until they die.
SPEAKER_03: I trust that you know somebody like this.
SPEAKER_03: You might even be that person.
SPEAKER_03: And here we have Jesus saying something really bold, like something embodied theologically.
SPEAKER_03: There's meant to be resurrection now and later.
SPEAKER_03: Resurrection is when those who are dead in their shame or their PTSD or their trauma have this chance to have life now.
SPEAKER_03: And this is really so interesting, isn't it?
SPEAKER_03: Why has God given Jesus the opportunity to render justice?
SPEAKER_03: Because he is the son of a woman.
SPEAKER_03: How many of you were born by a woman?
SPEAKER_03: Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_03: So I'd like you to consider that John might actually be asking us to consider that you and me.
SPEAKER_03: We have been called to render justice in this world because we were born into the human family, like Jesus and everybody else.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, but geez might, you know.
SPEAKER_03: Look, there's this resurrection at the end, resurrection of life for those who have done good and to those who have done evil, resurrection of judgment.
SPEAKER_03: Yep, that's right.
SPEAKER_03: Remember that heaven and hell were not on the line at this time.
SPEAKER_03: They weren't.
SPEAKER_03: And I'd like you to consider something else we say every week of an IC creed.
SPEAKER_03: He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
SPEAKER_03: And God's kingdom will have no end.
SPEAKER_03: I think we're used to inglorious judgment, in which there are definitive ends to our kingdom.
SPEAKER_03: You're not in my borders, and they stop here.
SPEAKER_03: The difference between inglorious judgment and glorious judgment is that God's kingdom will have no end, and ours has lots of ends.
SPEAKER_03: My kingdom ends because you have a felony.
SPEAKER_03: My kingdom ends because you don't have a job right now and you should.
SPEAKER_03: My kingdom ends because we all have this list.
SPEAKER_03: And if I can hear the difference between glorious judgment and inglorious judgment, which frankly we often resort to, because our kingdoms end very close to us.
SPEAKER_03: Very close.
SPEAKER_03: And if you've been to a funeral, I think this is the heart of our faith is that there are things we get to partner with God in doing.
unknown: These are things called love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control.
SPEAKER_03: Against such things, there is no law, nor limit, nor end of life.
SPEAKER_03: Those things out with us.
SPEAKER_03: That is the glorious resurrection of faith.
SPEAKER_03: And here's the good news about every funeral you've ever been to.
SPEAKER_03: There is an ending to all the Other things like shame and fear and pettiness and lust, they die with us.
SPEAKER_03: That's the resurrection of judgment.
SPEAKER_03: Those deserve to die with our bodies.
SPEAKER_03: And God will do that.
SPEAKER_03: And the invitation I wonder about this in life is we can do that now.
SPEAKER_03: We can do that now.
SPEAKER_03: What about the other scriptures?
SPEAKER_03: I think they're asking us to really consider frankly what kind of faith we have in who it's working for.
SPEAKER_03: Now I'm going to do something called gobam offering.
SPEAKER_03: This is a hodgepodge pell bell because I rarely have a point.
SPEAKER_03: And you know that, you've been there before.
SPEAKER_03: So I invite you to three different considerations.
SPEAKER_03: And hey, if the first one gets you, check the box and you're done.
SPEAKER_03: The first one goes like this: faith without works is dead.
SPEAKER_03: So if you need to hear that you could do more.
SPEAKER_03: And that's a valuable message sometimes.
SPEAKER_03: Faith without works is dead.
SPEAKER_03: If you need to hear that mission accomplished, you've heard it in the scriptures.
SPEAKER_03: I don't even have to explain it, right?
SPEAKER_03: It's one thing to say I believe, and the question is, what difference does my belief make in the life of the world?
SPEAKER_03: Now, the way I heard this as a youth, and this is why I want to give you a couple more, right?
SPEAKER_03: Is that it was meant to manipulate me into shame and fear.
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if that's what my Sunday school teachers thought they were doing, but I'll tell you that's what it was doing in me.
SPEAKER_03: Twifting a nice in me because I said I was Christian.
SPEAKER_03: And I was unchristianism.
SPEAKER_03: And cognitive participants, it was like I had the faith of a demon because I wasn't doing anything.
SPEAKER_03: I'm not even going to ask for a share of hands to see if you've heard that message before.
SPEAKER_03: I don't like it because I don't think that God approaches us through shame or fear or judgment.
SPEAKER_03: I think that's how we approach each other.
SPEAKER_03: But I don't think it's very holy.
SPEAKER_03: We don't.
SPEAKER_03: But if you need to hear, the question I was asking is if you were tried in court over whether or not you were a Christian, would there be evidence to convict you?
SPEAKER_03: Hear that question.
SPEAKER_03: Just hear.
SPEAKER_03: Would there be evidence to convict?
SPEAKER_03: Gosh, isn't that rough?
SPEAKER_03: That's a rough question.
SPEAKER_03: But it might serve.
SPEAKER_03: It might.
SPEAKER_03: Second piece.
SPEAKER_03: I know it's hard to about faith and works.
SPEAKER_03: See, I think we usually say this faith and there's works and there's the secret things.
SPEAKER_03: Instead of asking, do we have faith that works?
SPEAKER_03: And who does our faith work for?
SPEAKER_03: And I'm afraid, friends, more often than not, our faith works really well for us.
SPEAKER_03: By which I mean people who are educated like us, people who confess like us.
SPEAKER_03: I'm not taking this to task, but I hope you hear this.
SPEAKER_03: People who speak like us, pray like us, present like us.
SPEAKER_03: We have faith that works for us.
SPEAKER_03: And here I'm going to be even more political, but I hope you're going to hear me say something non-political in just a second.
SPEAKER_03: Zechariah says, true justice shall you administer justly for the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, and the one made poor through repression.
SPEAKER_03: Now, this is not my liberal bias because I don't want to be liberal at the end of my life.
SPEAKER_03: I want to have been a good neighbor.
SPEAKER_03: I don't want to have been conservative.
SPEAKER_03: I want to have been a good neighbor.
SPEAKER_03: And the scriptures say you're a good neighbor based on how you treat people who have no power.
unknown: Widows, orphans, immigrants, and people may pour through oppression.
unknown: So I hope you don't mind me saying this political thing.
SPEAKER_03: You know, we used to believe, at least I grew up hearing, that in the United States we believe in a separation of church and state.
SPEAKER_03: I grew up hearing that.
SPEAKER_03: And therefore I wish we would embrace it.
SPEAKER_03: I wish we would stop saying that we're Christian politicians.
SPEAKER_03: Because I'm an elding politician on either side that is doing things for widows, orphans, immigrants, and those who are oppressive.
unknown: Do you?
SPEAKER_03: Why not?
SPEAKER_03: Because it's not politically expedient.
SPEAKER_03: So I wish we'd just tell the truth and say, I have private Christian faith, but I choose to live politically in a way that makes sense for people who are born in this country.
SPEAKER_03: And I wish we wouldn't blame the two, because when we do it, I'm sorry, friends, we're lying.
SPEAKER_03: Me lying too.
SPEAKER_03: Me lying.
SPEAKER_03: It's okay to say we want you to have a baby, but we're not going to support it in any way.
SPEAKER_03: But don't say that's Christian because it's a lie.
SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry, friends, I've been lying too.
SPEAKER_03: I've been lying too.
SPEAKER_03: My politics are sometimes very different from Zechariah.
SPEAKER_03: Sometimes very different.
SPEAKER_03: Because I know what it is to be shrewd, and I know what it is to have a family with limited resources.
SPEAKER_03: But let's just stop doing this.
SPEAKER_03: Let's stop saying we do Christian politics when we're not doing Christian politics.
unknown: I know there's all kinds of myths that look, for every anecdote, there's an anecdote, but I just want you to hear, as somebody who adopted a kid out of foster care, what that's like.
SPEAKER_03: I want you to hear what Medicaid was like for me.
SPEAKER_03: When I was making$40,000 a year, and that was the only income, and I had an extra child with a lot of needs.
unknown: Here's the glory of Medicaid.
unknown: You ready?
SPEAKER_03: We could see a psychologist from a pre-approved place.
SPEAKER_03: We got four to pick from.
SPEAKER_03: Two of them were dead.
SPEAKER_03: One of them had moved and had his credentials stripped.
SPEAKER_03: So we could pick any one of the four, but there was only one alive.
SPEAKER_03: Let me tell you what that was like.
SPEAKER_03: An appointment lasted less than a minute.
SPEAKER_03: As somebody wrote a prescription and said see in a month.
SPEAKER_03: Didn't even ask if it was working.
SPEAKER_03: Oh, all this glorious social support.
unknown: And my child had a tooth that was growing sideways.
unknown: And not just the dentist, the doctor said it's medically necessary to extract that tooth so it doesn't destroy his mouth.
SPEAKER_03: Medicaid doesn't cover orthodontics in the state of Texas.
SPEAKER_03: So I look to you, either we're politicians or we're Christian, but I don't see anybody doing it.
SPEAKER_03: It's gotten worse since I did it 20 years ago, by the way.
SPEAKER_03: It's gotten worse.
SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying anything partisan.
SPEAKER_03: I'm saying we live in a political system where whether people call themselves Christian or not, this is the reality for our kids.
SPEAKER_03: So interesting this week that I was talking to somebody and through this out left heel, they said to me, Oh, you know so-and-so, an artist.
SPEAKER_03: She is the best Christian I know, even though she has no Christian faith at all.
SPEAKER_03: Because of what she does.
SPEAKER_03: And not something.
SPEAKER_03: Have you ever met somebody Christian who wasn't Christian?
SPEAKER_01: Because they loved justice and they need mercy.
SPEAKER_03: And they were humble.
SPEAKER_03: Who does our faith work for?
SPEAKER_03: Here's a third option.
SPEAKER_03: Maybe I've already checked your box, or maybe you're already mad at me.
SPEAKER_03: Listen, I've got something today that I can offend everybody in the room with.
SPEAKER_03: And maybe this is it.
SPEAKER_03: I think part of the thing that is concerning about widows and orphans and immigrants and people who are already oppressed and thinking about what our faith, how it works for them, is because if we're honest, we've got all of those parts within us already.
SPEAKER_03: We have utterly powerless voices in ourselves.
SPEAKER_03: What am I talking about?
SPEAKER_03: Look, terrible story.
SPEAKER_03: Sorry.
SPEAKER_03: And look, I hope you're not better to defend you with the story, but it's true and near and dear to my heart, which is that my father was drafted on purpose by his own father to go to the Vietnam War because in his family it was understood that military service was what we did.
SPEAKER_03: So even though my father had been married for a few months and was still in college, his father pulled his draft number, which was like 275.
SPEAKER_03: That number was not going to be called.
SPEAKER_03: My dad went to Vietnam.
SPEAKER_03: And he followed his orders because that's what you did.
SPEAKER_03: And in fact, I was really lucky to hear faithful Christians in Coronado tell me that when they did their orders, they didn't ask for God to forgive them because they knew they were going to give the same orders the next day.
SPEAKER_03: You don't ask for forgiveness when you know you're going to do it again.
SPEAKER_03: They asked for God to give them the strength to do what they felt like they were compelled to do.
SPEAKER_03: So my dad went and he circuited the front.
SPEAKER_03: And when my dad contracted Alzheimer's, he spent the last four years of his life living in what he described as hell.
SPEAKER_03: He was in Vietnam every night when he went to sleep, following his orders and watching men, women, and children die because he was ordered to do so and did it.
unknown: I'm not saying he did the wrong thing.
SPEAKER_03: What I want you to hear is he lived in this place perpetually in his dementia, where he went back to unmark graves in his life.
SPEAKER_03: We get this now.
SPEAKER_03: I hope you know the history of PTSD.
SPEAKER_03: We figured that word out after Vietnam.
SPEAKER_03: We didn't know why people came back with it.
SPEAKER_03: It's because they killed women, men, and children and then came back to their families.
SPEAKER_03: And there is such a thing as moral injury.
SPEAKER_03: I don't care why we do it.
SPEAKER_03: Moral injury is real.
SPEAKER_03: We know not to kill.
SPEAKER_03: There's times we go to war and we do it right, but I hope you hear that only a sociopath does not, this is the definition of a sociopath, does not feel guilt or shame having killed somebody else's children.
SPEAKER_03: That's how we're supposed to be.
SPEAKER_03: My dad did not talk about his military service with his family.
SPEAKER_03: I don't know if you've done Vietnam Vets and he seemed to only want to talk about it with each other.
SPEAKER_03: They won't talk about it with their spouse.
SPEAKER_03: Well, they sure won't talk about it with their kids.
SPEAKER_03: What are you going to tell your kid I killed children and now you're my child?
SPEAKER_03: The unmarked graves, the orphans, the widows, those who were oppressed, the immigrants in my father's life.
SPEAKER_03: They were the shame he experienced when he flew back after his twin sister died.
SPEAKER_03: Right after the Miley baby incident.
SPEAKER_03: And there he was in the airport in his statistics.
SPEAKER_03: And a concerned citizen came and spat in his face to show their protest against the U.S.
unknown: war in Vietnam.
SPEAKER_03: Spatted his face.
SPEAKER_03: Not the person who decided we were there, but his face.
SPEAKER_03: But I wonder if we're being asked, who does our faith work for?
unknown: Does it even work for us?
unknown: Or do we tell ourselves, stay dead and God will fix it later?
SPEAKER_03: And in so doing, the stench of death comes out of us over and over again.
SPEAKER_03: There are many places in my life I would rather consign to the tea and let God fix later.
SPEAKER_03: I just think really, along with the African proper, and you've heard me say this before, God created us because God hoped we would enjoy it.
SPEAKER_03: God created us because God hoped we would enjoy it.
SPEAKER_03: But some of the widows and the immigrants and the orphans, the things that are powerless in us where we've been hurt, are exactly some of the places where we're called to have something of life.
SPEAKER_03: A resurrection of life and a resurrection of judgment.
SPEAKER_03: I learned things when I was a kid about what it means to be a man and continue to corrupt and destroy the parenting I give my kids today.
SPEAKER_03: Did you not?
SPEAKER_03: Women don't get off the hook either, because if you're a Southern woman, you've been told what Southern womanhood looks like.
SPEAKER_03: You want to talk about living into an immigrant status, be a Southern woman.
SPEAKER_03: Not only do you have to bear the indignity, you've got to do it with a smile.
SPEAKER_03: Does our faith work for those parts of ourselves that have been crushed?
SPEAKER_03: I just invite you to consider that.
SPEAKER_03: Because I think the scriptures invite us to consider that.
SPEAKER_03: It's not that there's a difference between faith and works.
SPEAKER_03: I think the question really is: who does our faith work for?
SPEAKER_03: And my last thought that I want to give you in this whole Gala, I just read this book that King Charles read when he was the Crown Prince of Wright Wales.
unknown: It's called Harmony.
unknown: It's very interesting.
SPEAKER_03: Theologically sophisticated, frankly, from somebody who's not a clergy person.
SPEAKER_03: One of the things he wrote that I didn't realize was in the original book of God's prayer, that is the one written by Thomas Cranber.
SPEAKER_03: You know that part in the Lord's Prayer, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, uh, originally it was, Thy will be done in as it is in heaven.
SPEAKER_03: I wonder fourthly, if that true phrase makes any difference in who your faith works for, whether God works on the earth, whether God works on you, whether God works on us whether we work on other people we work here and we're and I think the good news of the gospel I think you I can actually find yourself thinking I've got a faith instead of faith.
SPEAKER_03: God can resurrect our faith.
SPEAKER_03: God can say, Let's have a second life.