Author: George Glazier

Ash Wednesday; March 5, 2025

2 Corinthians 5:20b – 6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

I want to speak about two words and an experience.  Reconcile, piety and confession.

Reconcile

Paul speaks of encouraging people to be reconciled with God.  Reconcile right now!  Don’t wait, don’t delay, come to the table!  This is not about “negotiating” a truce.  The truce has already been announced by God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  God is not waiting on us to get better at being human beings, God welcomes us now, just as we are.  There is no reason for us to wait to say YES.

Lent is about saying YES for the first time or as a reminder that we said YES long ago.

Justice

Jesus speaks of “ beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them …”. Piety is a strange word and to me has always invokes images of church services, methods of prayer, and so on.  What is interesting is that this word is elsewhere translated as either “justice” or “righteousness.”  In my mind, I have to immediately translate righteousness into “right action.”  Doing the things we think are right.

So Jesus says:  Pay attention to how we go about doing justice/doing what is right because if we do it in order to be seen by others it will benefit us not one bit.  It is about our intention that lies under our action. In modern terms Jesus is being very psychological.  Why?  Writing a check to help the Food Pantry will certainly help the food pantry.  Writing a check to help the Food Pantry and publicizing it on Facebook may get others to give.  But at what cost to us?  “Doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with our God” is its own reward.  It transforms the community but, even more, it transforms us the givers.  Jesus does not want us to lose that.

The culture around Jesus believed that the best practitioners of Judaism were the rich and powerful who had the time and ability to follow the dictates of religion – offer all the sacrifices, give large sums to the poor or the temple and to announce it to the people.  Jesus prefers the widow who gives two small coins and nobody notices her giving it but Jesus and his disciples.  

In this particular teaching there is laid open the corrosive effect of attention and what motivates us to seek it.

Maureen Dowd has noted that the men who control American communication – our eyeballs – got the choicest seats at the Inauguration.  She goes on to say that these are the same men who have warped Americans with social media and may destroy it with Artificial Intelligence.  They are, in the words of another New York Times writer:  Attention merchants/attention capitalists.  They turn our attention into money and into content which is instantly disposable.

Living in the 21st century, human beings seem to be transforming into people for whom attention to their actions is more important than the actions themselves.  And those who choose to be anonymous are few and far between.  Jesus’ words about paying attention to our need for attention were never more prophetic.

Confession

Yesterday as I went into a hospital, I met a woman who sat at the Information Desk and gave me the room number.  She had a nice smile and said to me, “Aren’t you excited about tomorrow.”  Now I had forgotten I had a collar on.  I thought she might be talking about Shrove Tuesday and pancakes.  When I said that she frowned a bit and said, “No, I mean the ashes, the chance to confess and be forgiven again, to have our slate wiped clean.”  She said that she so looks forward to it that it is, for her, the best day of the Christian year.

I felt shamed a bit by her insight and enthusiasm.  Confession, to me and to us, is old hat.  We do it a lot.  But she was right and I was wrong, letting  my familiarity with confession blind me to how radically wonderful it really is.  Every confession is a chance to start over, to have all the sin and short-comings, and getting attention to make us feel good wiped away.  How wonderful.

Though we are dust, we are reconciled dust that claims the grace and love of God; dust that is renewed every time we confess, every time we hear the words of absolution.  Then we are ready to go out and practice our justice in the world with those who need it and to really not give a care about who is watching or what others think.  That really speaks to me of freedom.  Galatians 5:1 … “for freedom God has set us free.”

The Rev. Dr. George Glazier

Vicar, Trinity Church, London

 

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany; March 2, 2025

Exodus 34: 29-25; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3: 12-4: 2; Luke 9: 28-43

In the reading from Exodus we hear that when Moses came down from Mt. Sinai the skin of his face shone.  He had been on the mountain talking with God and receiving the Ten Commandments.  The reaction of the people was to be frightened, scared to come near him.  Such was the change in his face.  It became necessary for Moses to veil his face so that the people could interact with him.  Literally Moses had a mountain-top experience and it scared the hell out the people around him.

I remember listening to the director of a soup kitchen speak about the people who came to her for food and sometimes counseling.  One of the regular guests spoke to her about wanting a job but he didn’t know how to find one.  By chance, she was able to get him some part-time work raking leaves.  She saw him the next day and he was grinning from ear to ear, glowing you might say.  “Anne,” he said, “the lady you sent me to said I did a good job raking her leaves.”  In this midst of skepticism about the poor wanting to work, here was a man who did and had a positive encounter that enhanced his self-esteem.

One Friday night, Trinity Church’s volleyball team took to the court.  This is Trinity, Alliance not Trinity, London.  To the surprise of the opposing church league team – and to the surprise of the people of Trinity – we won.  It was the first game we had ever one after about 10 losses.  The church league was a “just for fun venture” and none of us from the Episcopal Church were in great shape.  There would be a second game after that first one and we all felt confident.

In the Gospel, Jesus with Peter, James and John go up on the mountain to pray.  During this time of prayer, the appearance of Jesus changes.  His clothes become dazzling white.  He shone.  Then the disciples see two men talking with him whom they sense are Moses and Elijah.

This is a lot to take in.  Even today the meaning of such an event is open to interpretation.  You could that Jesus, who will be the savior of his people, stands with Elijah, the pre-eminent prophet, and Moses, the one who started it all and brought the law (the 10 commandments) down from Mt. Sinai. Maybe this explains why Peter wants to build three dwelling for Jesus, Elijah and Moses.  He wants to stay in this mountain-top aura, preserve it, enjoy it, make the most of it.

We all can understand this.  We have had these experiences in which time itself seemed suspended, each and every event was important and welling up inside of us the desire to “feed” on that experience for ever.  A special summer camp.  Your first love.  A graduation day.  A wedding, a birth, a vacation, the day of your first job.  In our lifetime we climb many mountains to the top and we realize that we shine in so many ways because of that experience.  Just a glimpse, or a look back, is enough to give any of us a radiance.

Yet we cannot stay on the mountain-top forever.  Shelters or booths are just pipe dreams.  Mountain-tops beg for a descent into the valleys below.  This is where life at its best and worst lies.  And time in the valleys of life alert us to the need to rest and refresh ourselves on the mountain.  Life is lived mostly in the valleys, in the mundane, in the often ho-hum existence of paying bills, cleaning out the refrigerator, moping the floor.

Mountain-top experiences get translated into everyday life in the valley.  Or, they really don’t transfigure our lives or the lives of anyone else.

As the Gospel relates, the next day Jesus with Peter, James and John came down from the mountain and were met by a large crowd.  Then there is the father whose son is sick.  

All the people began to wash around Jesus and the disciples like an ocean of need.

Moses down from the mountain still had to deal with a stubborn group of people who questioned whether being free in the desert was really better than being slaves in Egypt with enough food to eat rather than the tasteless manna.  The man from the Soup Kitchen, who found some worth in short-term work, was back in the valley of being homeless where he was seen as a bum and people turned their faces away from him and saw no radiance in his countenance.  

Trinity’s volleyball team turned that one victory into a gigantic defeat.  The other church that had lost the first game asked for a time out.  They gathered in a circle and prayed out loud that God would give them the victory in the next game.  Now they did not say anything bad about Trinity or Episcopalians but it unnerved Trinity’s team.  One parishioner looked at me and said:  “Can they do that?  Can they pray to win?”  All I could say was that it was bad form to do so in what was supposed to be a game for fun.  Trinity’s volleyball team was so unnerved we could only score one point in that game.

We could look at every Sunday as a mountain-top and the rest of the week as a kind of valley in which we seek to incorporate into our weekday lives our Sunday values.  We could look at the transition from Epiphany to Lent as the same movement up into a place where discern the light of Christ shining through our own lives.  We could look at our lives as movement from mountain-top to valley over and over again until we come to our end.  

There are patterns that scripture presents to us and we miss the point if we think they are just stories of Moses, Elijah or Jesus.  They are our stories.  Those patterns repeat themselves in our lives and we can trust them.  Both wisdom and hope come to us when we see them.  Mountaintop and valley is just one of these patterns. All this movement in our lives has meaning and leads us on to our final transfiguration.

The Rev. Dr. George Glazier

Vicar, Trinity Church, London

The Seventh Sunday after the Epiphany; February 23, 2025

Genesis 45: 3-11, 15; Psalm 37: 1-12, 41-42; 1 Corinthians 15: 35-38, 42-50; Luke 6: 27-38

Pilates

About 15 years ago, Pam and I did Pilates.  For those unfamiliar with this training program, it seeks to increase strength, flexibility and balance by building up the core of your body – low back, hips and abdomen.  It can be done without “machinery” but there are Pilates machines which make the workout more effective:  the Reformer, the Cadillac, the Wunda Chair, the Ladder Barrel, and the Spine Corrector not to be mistaken for the medieval Rack, to name a few.  I had problems with my lower back so I was eager to try anything that would help.

Eagerness quickly turned into an inner attitude of “I can’t do this!”  The program requires monitoring your breathing as you exercise and focusing on the form you repeat movements.  I quickly began to resent the whole process as the teacher critiqued my breathing or my form or my focus.  I was doing it all wrong it seemed.  I thought about stopping but Pam was doing much better and I could stick it out or so I thought.

The one day we were put on the machine called the Wunda Chair.  We sorted of laid over it with our feet in a particular position and our hands down sort of like a push-up and then we were to move our bodies just so but not used our arm strength.  Quickly I began to to think of the Wunda Chair as “I-Wonder-Why-I-Am-Here” chair.  Pam had trouble with it to.  Finally I said to the instructor:  “I can’t do this.  This is not how my body works.”

Sermon on the Mount is the Pilates of Christianity

I think Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount might as well be Pilates of Christianity. We can’t.  And we are not wrong about that.  Last week’s sermon, posted on the website, revolved around the radical nature of the Beatitudes which we tend to spiritualize at our peril.  Jesus is at home promising good things to the least, the last and the lost of this world while damning those who have it good.  If we really hear the Beatitudes then we wonder where we are in God’s vision for the kingdom.  And we should.

As Luke moves on with the Beatitudes the next par is the CANNOT.  You heard it this morning.  Let me summarize:  Love your enemies … Do good to them … Bless those who curse you … Pray for those who abuse you.  If someone strikes you across your face, offer them another shot.  If someone takes your coat, offer them the shirt off your back.  To anyone who asks anything of you that you have, give it to them.  Love your enemies, do good to them and expect nothing in return.

It’s is like we are being stretched across a Wunda Chair and told do things in a certain way but in a world that has no honor for such behavior.  Yet the enemy will take advantage of you.  Loving those who love is no stretch.  But it does not contribute much to your moral fitness.  Also, Jesus is saying:  All the previous wisdom is misguided and ineffective.

What is this previous wisdom?  

You can see it in the Psalm today, in many of the psalms and the Wisdom literature.  “Don’t fret over evildoers, don’t be jealous of them.  They shall soon wither like grass … But put your trust in the Lord and he will give you your heart’s desire.  God will bring to pass right actions in the world and evildoers will be cut off.”  God will take care of the enemies of the righteous.  Yet they persist.  Even the sages of old wondered about this.  Add to it that the righteous often suffer while the wicked prosper.

Qohelet, the sage who wrote the Book of Ecclesiastes, is not comfortable with this teaching.  He is sure that the evil prosper but is not so sure about the good people being exalted in the end by God.  He tells a story that he says “pains him deeply.”

There was once was a small and undefended town, sparsely populated.  A mighty king besieged it, surrounding it with towering battlements.  When he took the town, the king was planning on slaughtering the people who had opposed him.  That is when a penniless sage confronted him and negotiated the salvation of the people.  What pains Qohelet is this:  Did the people remember and applaud the sage?  Of course not, he writes.  Still:  “wisdom is superior to warfare, even if the wise are impoverished, derided, and ignored; for soft words from the wise can trump the war cry of kings and the shrieking rants of fools …” (1). Note the wicked king still triumphs.

Transforming enemies is the key to transforming the world

It is not a big jump to Jesus who is telling us that the only way to transform enemies into something else:  love.  Love your enemies, pray for those who hate you.  This is not intuitive.  We do not normally do this any more than I easily strengthened my body on the Wunda Chair.  But strengthen my body I did anyway.I never really got Pilates just right but my body was transformed because I stayed with it another three years.  

We may never get just right the Sermon on the Mount, with its impossible demands but we are transformed in the attempt.  These ethics of Jesus are beyond us but he urges us to own them, to bend ourselves to their performance and do them to the best our ability knowing that, like exercise, the more we do them the better we will get.

But this is no pie-in-the-sky solution in which the tables are turned and the good now prosper and the evil are thwarted.  There are some enemies that will take advantage of us that will refuse to be converted by our love toward them.  They will go on slaughtering towns-people just for being opposed to them.  They will go on promoting every wicked scheme that they can find with no regard for the damage done to others.  And, if we follow the path of Jesus extending our love to them, they will just think we are either naive or demented or a potential “mark.”

Like the response to the sage that averted a disaster, not many will acknowledge that love is more powerful than violence.  Yet hatred of the enemy is sure to breed only more hate. The foundation that works best is not the one built on money and power but on respect for God and love of neighbor.  This is God’s foundation of the kingdom so unlike this world that, if we are honest, even we look at it and think:  We cannot do this!  And then, if we want to follow Jesus, we proceed with doing it to the best of our ability.

1. 1. Ecclesiastes:  Annotated & Explained by Rabbi Rami Shapiro, chapter 9.

The Rev. Dr. George Glazier

Vicar, Trinity Church, London

 

The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany; February 16, 2025

Jeremiah 17: 5-10; Psalm 1; 1 Corinthians 15: 12-20; Luke 6: 17-26

Amy-Jill Levine, professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, in her book Short Stories by Jesus:  The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi,  writes about how religion is designed to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.  She says, we should think of the teaching of Jesus as doing the afflicting.  So, it may be less about what the teaching means and more about what it does:  remind, provoke, confront, disturb. (1)

Unless we want to read just half of today’s gospel – the blessings – or rush quickly over the “woes,” then today Jesus is not giving us a choice.  We are reminded, provoked, confronted and disturbed by this teaching.  And maybe that is a good thing; afflicting us who are comfortable while the blessings apply more to those who are afflicted.  Can we listen to the hard teaching in these beatitudes from Luke?  While the ones from Matthew’s Gospel which are much more spiritual, I think these from Luke may be more applicable to our time.

So that we might hear this Gospel I am going to read it again but as a mash-up of various translations and renderings.  I will use certain words here:  Blessed are  . . . or happy is  . . . or congratulations to. Choices of words convey different levels of understanding.  As do the words: woe to … doomed are … damn you.  Yes, one translation of these beatitudes has Jesus saying the words:  Damn you! (2)

Blessed are you who are poor yours is the kingdom of God

Woe to you who are rich you have all that you’re going to get

Congratulations, you hungry!  you will have a feast.

Damn you who are well-fed now! you will know hunger.

Happy are you who weep you will laugh

Doomed are you who laugh now you will mourn and weep

Blessings to you when people hate you, rejoice in that day, jump for joy!

ostracize you and denounce you Your compensation will be great in heaven.

and call you evil

Damn you when everybody speaks Remember that your ancestors treated the 

well of you! phony prophets that way.

The woes are a point-by-point antithesis to the previous statements of blessing.  We hear them clearer when they are read in proximity to the blessings.  The promise of a reversal in the divine ordained future is made plain.  Now the crowd listening to Jesus is made up of the poor and marginalized and outcast,  the least, the last and the lost.  They are not the rich, not the ones feasting on fine food, not the ones laughing at how good their lives are, the ones receiving the accolades of the world.  They are the ones without enough money for roof over their heads, or bellies swollen from hunger or crying with grief over their pain and suffering or that of those they love but are powerless to help.  To truly hear these beatitudes this means consequences for those who contribute to the poverty of the poor or ignore the stranger or outsider.  

This Gospel, this Good News, is the foundation of God’s kingdom in the words of rabbi Jesus.  It is not that there is no place for the rich, the well-fed or those with an inside track to power and glory in the world.  There is a place but they must turn toward the ones in need.  This is Jesus’ definition of the neighbor.  They must see in order to understand the grace of God which does include everyone.

Last month in a Fox News interview, Vice President J. D. Vance, who is Roman Catholic, articulated his version of a Catholic doctrine called ordo amoris.  He put it this way:  “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country.  And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”

As you might imagine, I have a lot of difficulty with his interpretation, though Vice President Vance is certainly free to view Catholic teaching in his own way.  More importantly he had another person who disagreed – Pope Francis.  On Tuesday the Pope published a letter attacking the current policy of mass deportations in a way that appeared to directly address Vance’s argument.  The Pope wrote:  “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.  The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is love that builds a community open to all, without exceptions.” (3) I would say that as Christians we don’t get to pick and choose who our neighbor is.  Jesus identified our neighbor as the one in need, regardless that they may be a Samaritan or a starving child in the Sudan.

There is, outside the circles of the Episcopal Church and most of the mainline churches, several current efforts to “re-define” Christianity.  You could call it reinterpretation except that it minimizes things that are important the Gospel. The Prosperity Gospel that came out of the last century still has many adherents who entice people with the idea that God’s blessing will enrich them personally as long as they enrich their church. This is such a re-definition.  Now it isn’t that God does not bless those who love him and love their neighbors but they may not always get rich.  And the rich are not always rich because they are following the teachings of Jesus.  Drawing a straight line between those with riches and the blessings of God is an affront to what we heard in the beatitudes today.  I think it is not a re-definition but another gospel entirely.  And yet it is very popular.

Right now, in some parts of the wider Christian church there are voices speaking about toxic empathy or counterfeit compassion.  They speak of  Woke Christians (I think they mean me/us) who are trying to manipulate other Christians by pointing out people who are negatively harmed or who actually have died or will die because of the defunding of Christian organizations involved in helping the least, the last, and the lost or government programs that now have no money. The writer, David French, wonders when did food or medicine become “woke?” (3)

We need to be aware that this kind of re-definition is going on. I think it will be harder for us to ignore this as we rightly ignored the perversion that is called the Prosperity Gospel.  In contrast, we can recognize in the words and actions of Jesus a Gospel that is both life-changing and world-changing.  It clashes with mis-guided notions or self-protective philosophies.  Jesus has the courage to speak the truth of God’s kingdom.  We can still have the courage to listen, to be disturbed, to feel confronted, to struggle with the Gospel.  We can let it change us rather than us change it. We always have the choice to work for God’s kingdom or settle for something less.

1)  Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus, pp. 2-4

2)  The Complete Gospels, Robert J. Miller, editor, p. 130-131

3)  David French, “Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy,” New York Times,Feb. 13, 2025

The Rev. Dr. George Glazier

Vicar, Trinity Church, London