I love that we’re reading the qualifications of a bishop to a group of seminarians. Like, “Aim high, kids!”
I told one of the faculty that I would just stand up here and make a whole bunch of bishop jokes. But really, you’ll have to catch me in the lunch room to hear those. Bishops are kind of an easy target, right? They stand up there, in front of everyone, wearing that tall, pointy-hat that makes you want to get up there and knock it right off.

But instead of bishop jokes, what I want to do is talk a little bit about landscape. Our passage today from Deuteronomy, from when Moses is old and getting a little salty, predicts what happens a few generations after the promised land. Moses imagines what the landscape looks like a few generations in. Where once it was all wholesomeness and good, all milk and honey, now idols have been built all over, their hulking forms in metal and wood crowding the skyline, littering the earth.

I work in one of the most typical Episcopal churches out there, which means this sounds really familiar. There are many people in my church today who are looking around and realizing that what they thought was a secure position a generation ago - our particular patch of promised land - these days isn’t looking so hot. Churches like mine are realizing that the things we put in the midst of our life together as an assembly - the things we built our worshipping communities around - have turned out to be mute idols that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell. Episcopalians are scattered among the peoples - with, in many parts of our country, only a few left among the nations of megachurch goers; Sunday morning yoga practitioners; and my particular tribe (because I am neither pious nor peaceful), the Crossfitters.

Unless you are in a church plant, and sometimes even if you are, there are folks in your worshipping communities who remember how sweet the old days were: When the Sunday school was full and you had to get to the 10am service early to get a good pew. (If you have retired clergy in your church, they remember a time when a good pew was in the front, not the back.)

It’s become very easy, and very trendy, to point to the things that we made into idols. We’re at a reckoning, at a stage when we are seeing many things for what they are: Dumb, lifeless idols which we let obscure our view of God and divert attention from true worship. Things we now know we sacrificed too much to, gave far too much power to. Big heavy solid things made of wood and metal, which we now know lack the flexibility to help us meet what is to come.

You can name some of these, right? Buildings that we have sacrificed time and money to. Ministries that we hung our churches’ identities on that have little to do with the Gospel. Maybe even … orders of ministry, and all the rules about what they can and can’t do, who can wear what and who gets a tall, pointy hat.

There’s this great book that I recommend to you called Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power,by Andy Crouch of Christianity Today - I KNOW. Andy and I would not get along very well, but this is a good book. We gotta go to the evangelicals sometimes for their exegesis.

Anyway, Crouch does this great exegesis of old Testament texts. Through a reading of Genesis 1, he describes how human beings are gifted by God, from the very beginning - from the garden, when God asks the earth-creature to name the animals - human beings are gifted with this amazing ability to make meaning the world. This is our shared ministry with God. We are made in God’s image, and so we are called to be creators. Creating, making objects and making meaning from them, is how we enter into the community of love that is the Triune God and the creator of our world.

But it is also how we mess it all up.

We make so much meaning of the world that sometimes we come to worship those products - be they products of our hands or our intellectual products. These are the “other gods”, the idols, that scripture warns us against. Crouch goes on to say that idols can be known by the fact that they make really wild, really amazing, magical promises. The tell us: I can make it rain! I can get the young families back to church! I can double your ASA! …But an idol demands more and more of us, until it sucks from us all that we have, leaving us with less than we started with.

An idol will take everything you lay at its feet and still, never be satisfied . Because it has no power in itself, it takes all you will give it and returns nothing.

But you know, it’s become pretty fashionable these days, very very easy to talk about how the old idols have no power, how we will cast them each from their thrones … so easy in fact that I actually wonder if we are paying enough attention to the power that idols have. We must not pay them homage, but we must pay them heed.

The old idols are still with us because they are powerful things. Moses doesn’t talk for his health - scripture doesn’t warn us time and again about false gods because they were easy to avoid falling to your knees in front of them. No, the power of idolatry is far more than we give those idols credit for.

Better watch where you swing that axe when you set out to take down one of these things.

You can get a lot of heads nodding at vestry about how we gotta do something about this old building, but God forbid you try to get rid of the pews in the sanctuary. We can all agree the liturgy should be changed, just not to THAT! Or that - good grief!

These old idols are powerful things - and you would be a wise and wary preacher and prophet to pay them not homage, but heed. They mark the places in the religious landscape where others have laid down their lives and their vocations, and lost them. They’re at the center of some worshipping communities like tent poles holding the roof up - and some might be sat on top of a sinkhole that will swallow you. Get an old-timer to draw you a map before you go out with your axe to chop one down.

I also want to make sure you realize that there are many new idols gaining in power. The truth is that the religious landscape right now looks like wilderness to just about everyone. No one knows where the hell we’re going, which is great for you all, because you probably know as much as I do about the future of the church. We’re all on equal footing, at least, as we wander about in what looks like the desert.

But. We are not in exile. We are in the promised land, where God got us.

And we have messed it up.

We took what we created with own hands and brains and let these dumb things distract us from the creator of all. We littered the landscape with idols, and we forgot why and how we came here in the first place. And in moments of uncertainty, we seem all the more tempted to make some new idols to fill the gaps in our understanding, to help us make sense of this new landscape.  
Just think of all the magical things that you learned about in seminary. Or heard about at diocesan convention. The thing your bishop or your dean told you is going to make it rain, bring the young families back to the church, double your ASA.  I warn you now: hold that stuff up to the light, and it if didn’t sound like Jesus, you better watch out.

Pay heed, not homage. There are idols all around.

And you know what? You’re about to join their number. All of you getting out of seminary - you smart, action-oriented, self-propelled people. I mean this really and truly - it says something great about you that you gave up the first week of summer to come here so I can yell at you and you can share a room with a stranger and some strange bugs. You all got that great new-clergy smell to you. Your faculty just love to smell you.  

And someday soon you will hear that someone got your congregation a shiny new thing. There’s a sense of new energy in this old church. Someone is going to come in and extol the virtues of the shiny new thing. They’ll say in a sweet voice that will sound so good: This is gonna make it rain. This is gonna bring the young families back to church. This is gonna double our ASA in one year.

And you’re gonna be like “Yesssssss, show me this miracle object!” But then you look around and there’s nothing there. Nother there but …. You. “Oh wait,” you say, “did you mean me?”

You will be IDOLIZED by the church, I’m telling you. I am saying this out of personal experience - I really thought, I’m young, I’m female, I’m a little obnoxious, I clearly do not know what I am doing. But. True story: I’m trying to get my parish to figure out how to be innovative, to do things differently. To adhere to our tradition, but to innovate within it. Really groovy missional church stuff. And you know what they said? Well we did innovate - we hired you.

And I was like we are all screwed.

Being idolized sounds great, but it robs me of the chance to be human. I hope you were all listening when one of my colleagues told us a few days ago in a plenary that failure should be a part of ministry.

Let me be clear: I do not wish for you high-stakes failure, but I do wish you room to fail. All of us have to be willing to fail in small matters, and to let each other fail, because the mistakes are where you’ll learn the most. That’s why we’re here at Roslyn, after all! To learn from our own homiletic mistakes, from other people’s mistakes.

Even failing in front of people publicly, even as you lead liturgy - well, if you can do that with grace and humility you can become an outward and visible sign of the redeeming love of God. You can trip over many things in this wilderness - but if you can stand up and laugh at yourself, you become an example of the abounding grace of God.  

Thing about being idolized - It might feel a little seductive, but it sucks.

For a lot of us, too, being idolized is being fetishized. You got some melanin? You can bring in all the people who look like you! You’re queer? You can bring in all the people who love like you. You have a family? Well, this certainly will bring the young families back!

I don’t want my church to have hired me because I’m young and female.  I want them to have hired me because I was, by far, the best candidate with the strongest resume who came in and impressed them.
I don’t want to be an idol … I want to be able to see, hear, eat and smell.

But I know I need to pay heed to that instinct people have to make me into an idol. Because people will ascribe a lot of power to me, even power I didn’t not ask for. And paying attention to that power is pretty important, lest it be abused. Lest respect turn to homage. Lest the prophet in the pulpit become an idol on the shelf. 

This what your CPE supervisor called pastoral authority - when you take the power people give you and give juuuuuuuu-st enough of it back. I hope you have developed some of that - you will have need for it.

And in fact, our ministry requires that we plant ourselves in the middle of the assembly. Church work requires that we root ourselves into the spiritual landscape, that we take on the solidity of wood and stone. That we always be there, so people can depend on us as they make their way.

It behooves you to do that - to be solid and to be planted, to be that kind of a witness that marks the landscape.

But I beg of you - do not be an idol - be a signpost.

Signposts get rooted too. They get planted in a landscape, get down in there firmly… and then they point somewhere else.

Get yourself rooted in, planted real deep and solid, and then be a signpost. Plant, root yourself in the middle of that assembly, and point them onward. Point them somewhere else. Point to what really can save them, save the church, save the world.Point them to what has already saved them, created the church, redeemed the world. Point them to the horizon and then show them how to expand their thinking beyond that.

Point them to Jesus.

People are going to come, and they’re going to gather around you, but if they come to you, you don’t have to leave them there. You can point them onward, outwards, further. You can send them out, even as you stay behind to lock up. You can point them onward to a God who is merciful, who neither abandons nor destroys, above all a God who has not forgotten us, even if we have forgotten her.

In whatever landscape your ministry places you, be a signpost. Be a great big arrow pointing to the enormity of God and the greatness of God’s power.

Keep on pointing, outwards and upwards, and maybe someday you’ll deserve to be turned into a giant arrow too - maybe you really will get to be a bishop and wear a big pointy tall pointy hat, so you look like an arrow pointing up towards where we are to lift our hearts and thoughts. But let that hat just be the ornament, the final finishing on a life that points ever to Jesus.

…That way you’ll be less mad if I ever do work up the courage to come knock that tall pointy hat off your head.
​
AMEN. 

I want you to think about the best teacher you ever had.
Maybe it was someone you had in the classroom – maybe it was your beloved grandmother or uncle.  
I say often that parents are the primary Christian educators of their children,
So maybe you were lucky enough to have parents who were wonderful teachers to you.
 
Remember, now, how that teacher made you feel
How excited you were to learn, to grow,
to be trusted with a task and encouraged to take on something new.
What a wonderful glow those memories impart to tonight’s Christmas Eve!
 
My friend John Ohmer, who some of you have met,
Tells a wonderful story about his first and best teacher – his father.
Over his father’s desk hung a sign that said, “Children need models, not critics.”
And John remembers that his father truly lived into that saying –
He tells the story of being in the basement woodshop with his father one weekend.
John was very young, but was trying to help his dad build something.
Now John was doing it all wrong – was cutting the wood with the wrong tool,
Abiding by a measure-once-cut-twice kind of technique that we all know just won’t do.
 
And his father probably sucked in a breath - he had a choice to make:

• He could be completely indifferent – passively stand by, pretend there were no standards, and that a poorly-cut wrong-sized piece of wood was good enough. There are times when this might be the most appropriate course of action, when the child is too young or the project not important.  

• OR John’s father had another choice – he could criticize and belittle John, take the project away from him or scrap it entirely. He could be a harsh critic – as sometimes, even the best of human parents tend to be.

Neither of those are what his father did.
John’s father sucked and breath and remembered – children need models, not critics.
 
And so instead he came alongside of John and said
– Here, let me show you.
Let me show you how I would do it, and how I think it might work for you.
He trusted John, and wanted him to learn and grow.
 
Many, too many children, really,
Grow up with teachers and parents who make one of the first two choices.
And even more adults – far too many! –
live with images of God just like those first two choices.
 
Some believe that God is far-off, indifferent, uncaring.
That’s a God who who creates the world,
Then goes out for cigarettes and never comes back.
 
Other live with an image of a God who is a constant critic –
Demeaning and belittling, always yelling from somewhere up above,
A harsh disciplinarian whose love is taken away for the slightest offense.
 
But isn’t it just like God to choose the third or two options?
Every year Christmas comes along to show us that there is another way,
That our God is neither indifferent nor overly critical,
But a teacher, a model, a parent, who comes alongside us to say, “Here, let me show you.”
“Here, let me show you –
What it looks like to be vulnerable and open.
To live a life of love and of justice –
To live, and eat and drink, to be born of human parents and live in human relationship,
To live and grow… and even to die.
Here, let me show you how I would do it. How I think it might work for you.”
 
God trusts us, and wants us to grown and learn, and so -
God comes alongside us and shows us a new way.
 
That kind of a God, that kind of a leader, teacher, and parent,
Is exactly what God’s children, what the world, most needs.
Not a God who is far-off and inaccessible, hidden away in realms of glory,
Not a God of non-stop thunderbolt and rage –
 
But a God born poor in a little village to an unwed teenage mother
A God who was a refugee at a young age,
And who suffered and and was hurt – but through it all was a man of peace and goodwill,
Offering himself to those around him, healing with his touch and with his presence.
 
Humankind is always getting trapped in these cycles of extremes,
Living only in a binary reality –
Either too permissive or too harsh – or sometimes both at the same time.
And God is constantly showing us that there IS another way.
God is always taking the disruptive action that will upset our calculus,
That will tear down our walls of binary extremes, and make a new path visible.
 
“here, let me show you,” Jesus is always saying,
And he shows us a new way to be and to live.
 
In the person of Jesus Christ, in the incarnation, God says to us “here, let me show you.”
Let me show you the kind of miracle that can illuminate one of the darkest nights of the year,
The kind of love that can conquer death and destruction,
The kind of love worth imitating and learning from.
“Here, let me show you,” God says,
Because God trusts you and wants you to grow.
 
“Here, let me show you,” Jesus is always saying,
Beginning with this night, this night of nights,
When he is born into the world in human flesh.
“here, let me show you,” God says,
Let me show you all the divine goodness hidden away in every human life.
 
Here, let me show you - Tonight in the city of David, still poor and occupied territory, even today.
Yes, even tonight is born to us a child, a Savior –
authority rests upon his shoulders – but he will not use it to demean, coerce, or criticize,
for he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
He is Jesus the Christ, and in him God bids us to come and see,
“Here, let me show you.” 

So.There’s a thief who wants to rob a house. He’s a professional, see, and so he carefully stakes out a big nice house in a quiet little town. He watches all day, until the family he has seen coming in and going out all day come out together, dressed up for a nice dinner or night out. He watches them all leave, and assumes they will be out for some time.

So the thief walks up to the house, and knocks –“Hello?” No answer. He tries the door and, because this is a nice quiet town just like ours, he finds it unlocked. “Hello?” he calls again, from the foyer. And this time he hears a voice from far away say faintly, “Shame on you – I see you, and Jesus sees you.”
He’s more confused than scared, and so the thief walks down the hallway towards the back of the house. Again, a voice says, a little louder now, “I see you, and Jesus sees you.”

The light in the kitchen is on. Maybe, he thinks, there’s an invalid grandparent who’s bene left behind as the rest of the family goes out for a nice night. He walks to the back of the kitchen, turns a corner, and there he sees ….
… a parrot in a cage. The parrot looks at him and says, “I see you, and Jesus sees you.”

And the thief is not afraid, but amused. In fact, he smacks the side of the bird’s cage the tosses it from its perch. “You silly creature,” he says, “I’m not afraid of you.”

The bird, ruffled, gets up, and looks the man straight in the eye – “I see you, and Jesus sees you!” And then the
bird looks behind the intruder.

The thief turns, following the parrot’s gaze, just in time to see a giant, slobbering Doberman launch itself off the bottom of the back stairwell. “Sic ‘em, Jesus!” the parrot screams.

…Good one, no?

This was a joke told to me by a Roman Catholic priest in the middle of Lent.  And the two of us, along with our local Methodist pastor, have been joking about it in a group text since then, in part because there’s nothing tired clergy need more at this point of the year than humor.

But Bill, my Roman Catholic stand-up friend did tell me that there’s a tradition in the church of telling a joke on Easter Sunday – because today is the day that God plays a divine joke on all of us!

Today, God plays the ultimate joke on death and evil – you may think you’ve won, God chuckles to herself, but have I got a punchline for you. Today, against all the forces of darkness and evil, God has the last laugh.

At the risk of exposing myself as the pompous jackass you all suspect me to be, let me say that my favorite book for many years now has been Moby Dick. I’ve read it now quite a few times, and each time it seems like a different story. That’s what great literature is, it’s something we can come back to again and again, finding new depth of meaning each time.

So, first time I read Moby Dick, it’s a about humanity’s fight with nature. Second time … maybe it’s about goodness struggling mightily with evil, a work of process theology. Third time: very boring book about whaling.

Now the fourth time I read Moby Dick I knew the story well. And through the beginning chapters I was waiting for chapter 49. Here, Melville writes in the voice of his narrator, Ishmael:
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.

I read Moby Dick again this winter. And this time… this time I let this this quote become the lens through which I read the entire book. I read it as Melville’s great big joke on me, the reader: Moby Dick as a parody of all the Great American Novel is supposed to be.

At the very least, reading Moby Dick as comedy makes it much more entertaining. Reading those long digressions on whaling practices in an ironic faux-scholarly tone makes them much more tolerable. The text becomes fresher, looser, easier.

What I want to ask you to do today is to do the same with the Gospel.

Consider Easter – the very miracle of the resurrection – as a great joke. God’s joke on our expectations and fears. A parody of the story of salvation we might be expecting.

I bet that the moment where Jesus revealed himself to Mary, she felt exactly like Melville’s Ishmael – that the whole of the world, the whole of her life, was one big long joke – and herself the butt of it.

And with what joy must Mary have greeted her Lord – her friend – who was lost but now was found, who was dead but now was risen, who was gone forever but suddenly there in the flesh to show her – her - that God would get the last laugh.

I’d like to imagine the moment right before that moment too, the moment in the garden where the Holy Trinity are giggling together behind Mary’s back. They know just how shocked Mary will be when this silly gardener turns out to be none other than the beloved teacher she thought utterly gone. God rubs her hands together because she is so tickled this all worked out so perfectly. The Holy Spirit throws an elbow into Jesus’s side (maybe the Christ winces, the mirth of Easter doesn’t mean Good Friday didn’t leave a mark).

Sic ‘em, Jesus, I can hear the Spirit saying – Go show her that there are no tears to be cried, unless they are tears of joy and mirth. 

That’s not a good joke -  That is a GREAT joke!

A great joke that God is playing on us – and on all the powers, principalities, and pharaohs of this world.

A joke played on death – and everything else – that pretends that it is greater than God’s love for us. A joke played on doubt, and hurt, and sin – and all those thieving fears that make us wonder if God’s promises ever really will be fulfilled, or if anyone is ever coming back to save us.  A joke played on everything – even our very worst selves - that would set itself up as if it could come between us and God.

Joke’s on us! April Fools! (NB: Easter really was April Fool's Day this year.)

Now you know a good joke takes time to develop. Maybe even three days in a tomb. A good joke holds us in suspense… we know that something is coming, but we don’t know when to expect it, or what form it will take. A good joke makes us chuckle – but a great joke … ah, a great joke has a punchline that changes everything before and after. We have to rethink the whole story that we just heard. We might have to rethink the whole of our world, or at least how we’ve been reading it.

A great joke makes us see everything differently, reconsider what we know. And that’s exactly what Easter should do. That’s what Easter can do, if we are willing to get in on the joke with Jesus and laugh a little.

And I’m talking about a good, clean, liberating laugh – a laugh that is tinged with relief. Not a laugh from a dirty pun or at someone else’s hurt. A laugh that comes from the world being exposed for just as silly, just as paper thin, as we have always suspected it to be.

I think that’s how Mary might have laughed – with joy, delight, relief - when she realized who she was speaking to in the Garden that day.

It’s a laugh God wills for us today – yes, even in church! Today you get to giggle, chortle, chuckle, even snort a little in church. Because today we celebrate that God chose what seems weak and foolish to us to be our source of strength, and the salvation of us all!

Joke’s on us – we are the fools!

May we all be fools for Christ.

For being fools for Christ means we recognize that the same sad story this old world tells us is merely the set-up to God’s most famous punchline –
Oh death, where is thy sting?
Oh tomb, where is your victory?

Those powers of death and sin – those thieves of joy and hope – are vanity of vanities, nothing more than God’s cosmic set-up.

Being fools for Christ may make us act in ways the world deems foolish: Loving more radically, more freely than any rational person would. Raising kids to value themselves for who they are and not what they do. Giving away our wealth instead of hoarding it. Turning the other cheek and being peacemakers in our homes and in our streets.

Fools for Christ will share, care, preach and teach in ways this old world is not ready for. And when they tell us “you can’t do that!” or, “that’s not how that works!”  We fools will just laugh to ourselves, and pray they someday get in on the joke too.

There are so many times when this old world seems bleak and hopeless. Times when a knowing, dark humor is the very thing called for, the very thing that will save us from the pit of despair. This day we should all be foolish - not just for April, but for Christ! For the resurrection is a brilliant, wonderful joke! A masterpiece of timing and upheaval that forces us to read the rest of the story differently.

So many thieves DO sneak in during the night. They wait until it is dark - when our defenses are down, when our best selves have gone out to dinner and left the door open. So many thieves break in to steal what hope we have tried to shore up for ourselves. We have no power in ourselves to save ourselves, which means that we are entirely reliant on God’s grace and power - things that seem foolish entirely at first reading.

At times like that, it is as if we find ourselves alone in that dark tomb, not sure of how or whether we will make it out – and if so, what the point could even be. Beset by thieving doubt… by temptation… by evil… by fear - it would seems we are trapped in the same old story.

But suddenly there comes a voice  – I see you, and Jesus sees you.

And then the light bursts forth, with the luminosity of a thousand suns, and a voice seeming as if from heaven proclaims the words that will roll the stone away and set us free –

​ Sic ‘em, Jesus!