Loving, Liberating, Life-Giving

Proper 10B
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I bring you greetings from the nearly 10,000 Episcopalians who have gathered in Austin Texas for the past two weeks, for the 79^th General Convention of the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church has an historic relationship with the Anglican Church of Mexico, as we were partners in its birth in the 1860’s. And now our churches are both members of the Anglican Communion, a fellowship that connects all of us who share in the tradition of Common Prayer, in common language, that is the legacy of the English Reformation.

I was at General Convention to serve as a logistics volunteer, which was a head-spinning and body aching experience of running between hotels and a vast convention center, making sure that people felt welcomed and had the resources they needed to do the legislative work of the church. With lots of prayer and worship mixed in. Of course it helped that Presiding Bishop Michael Curry was all over the place too, preaching and praying and exhorting us to be our best selves.

Even if you don’t happen to follow the leadership of the Episcopal Church—which I certainly don’t expect you to—you might still remember Bishop Curry from the Royal wedding. He was something of a breakout star even among the many celebrities who attended actress Meghan Markle’s recent marriage to Prince Harry of Windsor. “Love is the way,” he preached insistently to a sometimes-bemused congregation of reserved Brits.

He’s a master of rhetorical repetition and simplicity, but Bishop Curry is so deeply grounded in scripture and the Christian tradition that his message is never simple. So when he refers to God as Loving, Liberating and Life-Giving—something he does all the time, so remember those words—he wants is to remember the Love that birthed creation and all humankind, the Liberation of the Jews from Egypt and their return from exile in Babylon, and the Life that was given in Jesus’ Incarnation and Resurrection. Deep, powerful expressions of good news, running from beginning to end of our scripture, reminding us of who God is and what God does.

So what then do we make of today’s readings, which appear to be about the exact opposite of Loving, Liberating and Life-Giving? Recall that In Second Samuel we meet Michal, who despised her husband David in her heart. And Mark tells us a story that begins with John the Baptist imprisoned—hardly a vision of the freedom Bishop Curry was preaching about—and then executed in what appears to be a show of royal ego. These are some troubling Bible stories. And

That’s a question I suspect we’ve all asked ourselves. I know I’ve asked it of myself a lot recently, and—spoiler alert—it’s not a question that any 15 minute sermon will answer. To state the obvious, hating, imprisoning and killing are not just things that people did in ancient Bible times.

But in these stories, in the spaces between the terribly bad choices that people made, runs an invitationto grace that compels our attention. Those characters who practiced hatred, oppression and murder might have made other choices. They didn’t, and God didn’t prevent them from doing evil. But people’s bad decisions rarely happen in a vacuum. And in both of the stories I just mentioned, the haters and instigators of murder were women trapped in terrible marriages

Which doesn’t excuse their malevolence, but since woman are so rarely given agency or even names in the Bible, I think it’s worth paying attention to these two and their motives. Michal was the first of David’s several wives. She thanklessly protected David from her father Saul, and then was bartered between David and Saul amidst various shifting political loyalties. Little wonder she was not delighted by his dancing. More ominously, Herodius, wife of Herod II, was  shamed by John the Baptist, but could find no better way to express her anger than to implicate her daughter in his execution.

These were, to put it mildly, some ugly family dynamics. And while the woman in them made bad decisions. they were also people with very little power in a patriarchal system wherein women’s very survival depended on being married. The more powerful the man they married, the better. But notice this: when power is unequal and partnership is coerced, love is corrupted.

In the two millennia or so since Herodias manipulated Herod into executing John the Baptist, marriage laws have changed considerably in the west. It is no longer the only way for women to survive.  For the most part, women cannot be coerced into marriage, and we have financial and legal protections that would allow us to avoid or leave a bad marriage. That’s a social policy—a choice people have made—that allows for the better angels in our nature to flourish.

Which brings me back to General Convention. One of the many topics generating debate in Austin was access to marriage rites in the Episcopal Church, which have been available to same sex couples on a trial basis for the past three years. The proposal to make them permanently available to everyone suffered from the theological objection of a few bishops, and the compromise solution probably wasn’t exactly what anyone wanted. But the final resolution does provide access to marriage for all, with a provision for alternative episcopal oversight in the case of a local bishop’s refusal.

As communities—as church, as families, as neighborhoods, as cities and states and nations—we actually can make choices for good. We can create cultures and make laws that increase the likelihood of sustainable love, freedom, and abundance of life. Marriage equality is just one of the many ways our church polity encourages people to create healthy families. A much-needed corrective to the kinds of situations Michal and Herodius found themselves in.

But is that the Good News of our Loving, Liberating and Life-Giving God? In part, yes. Our prayerful and hopeful choices do matter, and we can and should do everything we can to foster households and communities in which freedom to love is the norm. But sandwiched between the stories of David and Michal, Herod and Herodius, our lectionary does a curious thing. It offers us an entirely more radical vision of family.

Remember that Paul wrote that God “destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ… [and] this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people.” Adoption wasn’t especially  common in the highly stratified context of Roman colonial culture. It upset the carefully-policed categories of who had power, access and ability to inherit wealth. Listening with first century ears, we can better understand what Paul was saying to the church in Ephesus. Paul was effectively telling them that the patriarchal family was not the model for God’s family.

If God’s plan for us is adoption, then there really is—as Paul wrote to the church in Galatia—“no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” God adopted us—chose us—for God’s pleasure and for our good. As God’s own children, we don’t have to get our way through hatred or manipulation because all of us are equipped and empowered to love is the self-giving way of God. All of us—male and female, gay and straight, brown and black and white—have full rights to inherit the riches of grace and of creation, God’s first gift of love.

We have been adopted into the family of the loving, liberating and life-giving parent, who longs to grow us up in the way of love. I’m not going to say that’s easy, but there is a way; Jesus shows us the way. It takes some practice, it takes some policy, it tolerates some compromise, and it takes a whole lot of grace. But “when love is the way, we actually treat each other, well” Bishop Michael Curry once preached to a young couple marrying across a chasm of class and color and privilege. Our difference are no harder to surmount, nor any easier. “We treat each other well,” Bishop Curry said, “like we are actually a family.”