Just before Advent, Donald Schell and Amber Evans sent us some reflections from their preaching group. We published the first of these on Thursday, and the second today.

By Donald Schell

From the beginning Christians, even those who gathered Jesus’ sayings and wrote the Gospels, were puzzled to make sense of just HOW he was a ‘friend of sinners.’ They seemed to be as frightened as we are sometimes that someone might get the idea that Jesus condoned sin (or unjust or unrighteous behavior). How often, reading John 8 together, (the woman taken in adultery) do we find ourselves discussing (or even arguing) whether the story reaches its resolution when Jesus says, “Where are your accusers? Neither do I condemn you.” It seems as though there’s always someone to insist that the moment of not condemning is only prelude to Jesus’ real conclusion, “Go and sin no more.” But doesn’t that line contradict the story? Could it be an early editorial ‘fix?’

To my ear “sin no more” in this story echoes of catch-phrases most of us heard growing up like, “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” “a man is known by the company he keeps,” or “birds of a feather flock together.” Such folk “wisdom” poses a problem for us – though Jesus made himself of ‘no reputation,’ we, his followers, teach one another that reputation is everything. In effect we caution each other NOT to follow Jesus’ example.

Any of us who preach on such parables as the Unjust Judge, the Dishonest Steward, the Talents, and even favorites like the ‘Good’ Samaritan, and the Prodigal Son gets caught in this bind, and those of us who listen attentively to sermons will hear preachers doing exegetical handstands and somersaults to find ‘the moral’ of these quirky stories, or otherwise explain why Jesus would offer such contradictory and downright unsavory characters as some kind of likeness to God. Whatever we say between the reading and the conclusion, we seem to know we’ve got to reach the point of exhorting people to try harder to be “good.”

Unfortunately (or maybe by the Grace of God) if we stick close reading these parables patiently or come back to them again and again, finding their “moral” seems harder and harder. Gospel scholars tell us this preaching dilemma is even older than the written Gospels. Our bewilderment at the little sayings tacked on to the end of these problematic stories pushes us to accept that we may be hearing a saying of Jesus on another subject and from another context, and sometimes we’re hearing the Gospel editor and compiler putting someone else’s (troubled) explanation of the parable in Jesus’ mouth.

For almost thirty years I’ve guided volunteers through improvised Gospel enactments, sometimes of stories of Jesus, but also, sometimes of these parables. Working with groups as diverse as a family camp, 8-12 year olds at a kids’ camp, and associates of one of our church’s women’s religious orders away on retreat, I’ve found some of these stories demand a playful, comic telling as we get close to their stark tension and danger. Comedy reassures us until Jesus’ unsavory protagonist does something wholly unexpected.

Jesus draws people by surprise because his stories are of characters his listeners wouldn’t want to hear about. But my hunch as a writer, storyteller, and ‘theater director’ in these improvisations I’ve seen is that Jesus crafted stories about characters he liked.

The ‘good’ Samaritan offers a stark example of this. For Jesus’ listeners (far more immediately than for us), someone they would identify with lies near death by the roadside. The listeners know how dangerous the roads can be and they know the road from Jerusalem to Jericho is particularly dangerous. They also know that trouble is coming when Jesus introduces their Samaritan enemy coming down the road. Even in a story it’s a moment to catch your breath. What outrage would this hated enemy perpetrate on you or me if we lay helpless by the roadside? But then our Storyteller has the hated Samaritan quite inexplicably (and against the listeners’ inevitable ethnic profiling) do an expensive, hands-on, time-consuming act of mercy.

“The Samaritans - - - helps him? Jesus! We don’t get it!”

In this year’s lectionary run of these parables, while I was preparing to preach on the Unjust Judge, the guy who finally gives the stubborn suppliant widow what she says the law and justice owe her - - - because she just won’t stop hassling him - I remembered Belai the Cannibal.

The grotesque figure of Belai shows up regularly in Ethiopian churches, a nightmare character with a knife in his hand eating a large slice of raw flesh. The contrast with the warmth and folk art eloquence of surrounding icon scenes of Mary holding the infant Jesus, Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, and other Biblical stories couldn’t be greater.

Now don’t bother to check a concordance - Belai isn’t in the Bible. He’s a character from a religious folktale, the story of a VERY BAD man. Belai was a voracious cannibal. When Belai appeared at the gates of heaven, the deeds for which he’d be judged included the deaths of seventy-two people he’d killed and eaten - including members of his own family. St. Peter seems to know what the outcome will be, but for justice sake, he puts what remained of the corpses of the seventy-two on one side of the scale and asks Belai if he brings any good deeds at all. Belai can only offer one good deed. Once, as he was looking around for someone to eat, an unappetizing leper begged him, “in the name of God” for a cup of water. Belai protested that he neither knew nor honored that name. So then the leper implored him in the name of Saint Mary, and in some dark corner of his memory Belai remembered that name, and impatient to get on with looking for an appetizing victim, he gave the leper a cup of water.

“All right,” St. Peter says, and puts Belai’s ONLY good deed in his whole life, the cup of water, on the other side of the balance. St. Mary watches as the scale the weight of Belai’s seventy-two victims lifts the cup high in the balance, and she asks St. Peter if the good deed done in her name counts for so little. “Just look at the scale,” St. Peter replies. So St. Mary leans forward and lets her shadow fall on the side of the cup of water, and the glorious weight of her holy shadow tips the scale the other way. “All right,” St. Peter says with astonishment, “It appears Belai must receive God’s mercy.”

Dostoyevsky has Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov tell a similar story. A very wicked old peasant woman dies and her guardian angel intervenes with God. The only good deed the angel can offer is the one time the old woman gave a poor beggar an onion. “All right,” God tells the guardian angel, “lower the onion down to the burning lake and tell the old woman to grab hold. If the onion is strong enough for you to pull her out, she’s free to come to Paradise.”

And the angel lifts, and draws the old woman slowly from the lake of fire. As everyone else in the lake sees what’s happening, they seize the woman’s legs and ankles, and the angel is drawing everyone out of hell by the one onion. And still the onion holds until the wicked woman panics and screams, “It’s MY onion!” and as she writhes and kicks her feet to break free of those about to escape with her, her writhing and struggling breaks the onion and all fall back into the fiery lake.

Grushenka’s story and the Ethiopian folk-tale of Belai shouldn’t startle Anglicans too much, at least not if we remember from Rite I and the old Book of Common Prayer that God’s “property is always to have mercy.” We sort of get it. But we also may not like it too well. Something in us protests - Belai is so NOT like us! Who cares about his single cup of water or that old woman giving a beggar an onion? An onion? So what! Anyone could do that!

Unintended, trivial kindness? Except when we need it ourselves, God’s mercy is just t-o-o much.

So this year preparing to preach on the Unjust Judge, I remembered Belai’s and the old peasant woman’s accidental good deeds. The Judge responds to the woman’s pleas because he’s annoyed. He gives the mercy he’d always had the power to give and he gives it quite reluctantly.

In fact Jesus’ selfish, opportunistic, wicked heroes in his parables all act like that. They do something kind or helpful or even life saving for no evident good reason at all. Or they do the right thing for a bad reason. The Unjust Judge, like the Samaritan, like the Unjust Steward, acts mercifully for no good reason. In fact the judge’s reason, to spare himself further annoyance, makes clear that he cares not a whit for justice. Unless you hassle him without rest, he never gives “justice” without a bribe.

Now, as a writer and storyteller and lover of fiction, I’m going to offer something I feel strongly but can’t prove. Jesus seems to genuinely like the bad characters in his troubling stories. Like the reputation he had for keeping bad table company, Jesus’ parables show his affection for people that ‘good people’ like us ought not like at all. And he repeatedly tells stories where his protagonists do good despite themselves, with no evident motivation, as often Jesus even declares that they’re doing it for the WRONG reason.

Moralizing these parables silences our teacher’s voice. His stories don’t tell us how to be good. They push us over the edge toward Godly mercy-practice. He’s inviting us into a kind of deliciously guilty pleasure celebrating people whom we don’t think we ought to or even want to like.

Here’s what I mean by mercy practice - “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give and it will be given to you.” (Luke 6:36-37) And yes, Jesus wants people just like us for his friends, not good people, flawed people who stumble into goodness and mercy even for the wrong reasons.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is
President of All Saints Company.

Just before Advent, Donald Schell and Amber Evans sent us some reflections from their preaching group. We publish the first of these today, and will publish the second on Saturday.

By Amber Evans and Donald Schell

Donald: For the past three years we’ve met monthly to talk and think together about the work of preaching. We’ve been four or five priests, and two lay preachers. I guess I’m the oldest in the group. The youngest, Amber Evans, was in seminary with my son.

Sometimes we read or listen to a sermon one of us has preached. Sometimes we talk about a reading that’s coming up or someone will raise an issue in mission or Christian formation and wonder how to explore it in preaching. I love the give and take of the group, the way we work to hold one another accountable for real, honest experience, the way we keep asking how we’re hearing Good News ourselves even when texts are difficult.

Recently the lectionary had us, like a lot of preachers, struggling with some of Jesus’ most challenging parables, difficult parables like the corrupt steward and the unjust judge. Our passionate, energetic conversations kept taking us deeper into uneasiness and uncertainty. And we kept preaching and reporting back to the group what we were learning.

I’d nearly completed a piece on those parables for the Café when I read Amber describing some powerful discoveries she’d made about these parables in her work with kids. Amber and I traded our explorations back and forth, both intrigued at how our discoveries flowed from recent conversations in the group and, beyond that, from ways the group has shaped us both over some years now. What each of us was beginning to see interpreted and enlarged the other’s discoveries.

We’re offering both of our voices here, Amber’s first, and mine in the piece that follows. We hope that preachers and anyone listening to this recent string of difficult parables will be inspired to join us wrestling with these parables. Do comment and speak up!

Amber asks the question these parables leave hanging, “Why even bother being good?” My piece that follows wonders why Jesus evidently enjoyed telling stories about such unsavory characters and whether he really wants good people like us for friends.

Here’s Amber - - -

As chaplain in an Episcopal Day School, I’m responsible for teaching religion to Preschoolers through Eighth graders. Right now I’m teaching parables with my fourth grade class, and they are really bothered by the injustice of God’s love and mercy. It makes them crazy to contemplate that even though they try to be good, God loves someone bad just as much. Fairness is the highest value to kids that age, and to imagine that God isn’t fair—that’s just too much. They begin to wonder, “why even bother being good?”

Teachers who applied parable-style justice in a classroom or parents to a conflict between siblings would have mutiny on their hands. It makes sense to us that our children’s world is structured around consistency, fairness, and incentives to be good, because we hope that they will learn through that structure to want to be good, that it’s its own reward. But fourth grade is a good age to pierce the bubble a little bit. Some of them have thoroughly embraced a “good guys/bad guys” view of the universe. And maybe that has to happen before they can consider the complex idea that though they try to be good, they still make mistakes, so if they want God’s mercy, mercy must also be available to people who have made even more mistakes.

Jesus uses the parables to shock and challenge US out of good guys/bad guys thinking—especially out of our presumption that we are the good guys. Through his parables, Jesus is revealing a deeper structure to the world than the provisional one we create for children (and ourselves). As adults we know how inconsistent and unfair the world can be, and we don’t expect to see good behavior rewarded. Through his parables, Jesus shows us this is actually good news: The world God made is not divided up between good and evil. Before there was ever good and evil, there was God’s unconditional love for all of creation.

With my first graders, I have been using Godly Play to teach the first stories in the Bible. Godly Play is a Montessori-style Sunday School curriculum created by Jerome Berryman. Teachers tell a bible story they’ve memorized by heart, using beautiful, tactile figures to illustrate the story. We’ve done the Seven Days of Creation; Adam, Eve and The Snake; Noah’s Ark and last week we did the Tower of Babel. Now the students are very proud that they know all the stories at the beginning of the Bible. Even though the youngest can’t read, they can look at the Bibles in the classroom and recognize the story through the pictures.

The children are fascinated by the darkness and the gravity of the stories. These are stories about the beginning of everything, why the world is the way it is, human disobedience of God and it’s consequences. It’s serious stuff and the kids feel taken seriously when you talk about it with them.

The Godly Play story about Adam and Eve is a new story and it’s not actually recommended for kids as young as first grade. That’s probably because you could do a Ph.D. dissertation analyzing the postmodern influences in this narrative. I think Jacques Derrida, the great French deconstructionist, might have secretly written this story before he died. The Godly Play version reveals some of the deep theology to the story and I think my first graders get it, or at least, like us, they partly get it.

There are two trees in the Garden of Eden. There is the Forever Tree, whose fruit holds eternal life. And there is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, or as the Godly Play story says, “The Tree of Differences.” The sneaky snake tricks Eve and Adam into eating fruit from that tree. At first, everything in the garden was unified—people, and God and creation were all together without differences. But when they eat the fruit, suddenly it all comes apart at the seams, creation falls apart.

Then Adam and Eve know they are different from God and they feel ashamed, and they hide and cover themselves up. And then they’ve left the garden to live in a world where there is good and evil. And so do we… They can’t go back, and they have to find a new way of living and a new way of being with God.

It makes me wonder…what was the world like before there was good and evil?

The Godly Play story describes a kind of unity and intimacy between God and creation. I imagine, not that nothing bad ever happened, but that when it did, it was a matter of grief rather than moral judgment. Death, loss and sadness still happened, but were experienced in a context of total, universal love.

In the hardest times, when we face frightening obstacles, impossible decisions, suffering that feels like it won’t end, when we are reminded that the world is not really the world we create for children …we sometimes get a glimpse of the world that is deeper than good and evil. I have, haven’t you? I’ve been consoled by the image of the Garden of Eden, of an intimate love of God that precedes good and evil. God’s love in that unity isn’t lost to us, just harder to see because now that we know about good and evil; we can’t help but see divisions everywhere, we can’t help but compare ourselves and measure our goodness, and wonder if we somehow deserve the bad things that happen to us.

The parables we’ve been hearing read and preached on in church for many weeks are the antidote to the falling apart in Eden, they’re the remedy that Jesus offers to help us see deeper than good and evil. They tell the story of God’s universal love, they tell us that God loves the righteous and unrighteous, that God loves the good and the bad alike, and there is no reason to hide from God no matter how naked we feel.

God loves the tax collector as much as the faithful observer of the law, the Prodigal Son as much as the responsible son, The Good Shepherd knows all his sheep by name and would give his life to protect any of the sheep (not just the good ones). The parables are good news for bad guys and good guys alike, although if we are too invested in our goodness, they don’t really feel like good news.

Seminary was kind of a competitive place. We’d been told jobs were scarce, so we eyed each other trying to measure up who was smart, who was charismatic, and who was good. Not exactly the Garden of Eden! When I went to work as a priest at The Church of the Epiphany, Gail, the rector, mentored me in a way that freed me from the need to prove myself. She never compared herself to me, but just supported me when my work went well and when I screwed up. Pastorally, she felt love and compassion for the most difficult people in the parish perhaps more than the easy ones—although she could be firm if she needed to be. In three short years of working with Gail, I was practically cured of my competitiveness (at least at work—my husband still won’t play board games with me). Now I am free to do my best, without worrying “is it good enough?”

Parables don’t tell us not to bother being good, they just tell us it doesn’t make us more lovable than others. It’s still true what we teach children: Being Good is it’s own reward. But deeper than that—We can live guided by God’s universal love. Love that doesn’t judge us and doesn’t judge others. We don’t have to compare ourselves to others. And when we face something difficult--frightening obstacles, impossible decisions, suffering that feels like it won’t end-- we are freer if we remember that deeper than good and evil, deeper than “good guys and bad guys” is the love God feels for all of creation without judgment.

The Rev. Amber Evans is a priest serving as Chaplain at St. Matthew's Episcopal Day School in San Mateo, California.

By Peter M. Carey

“Preach the Gospel at all times, if necessary, use words.”
~attributed to St. Francis

“A preacher should preach holding the Holy Scriptures in one hand and the newspaper in the other.”
~attributed to Karl Barth

As a kid, there were two things that most intimidated me about what priests did, what they did at the altar, and what they did in the pulpit. Growing up before the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, I remember well the “high church leaning” congregations of my youth and the reverence, mystery, hand motions way up there at the altar – often with the priest facing away from the congregation. As I grew older, I served as an acolyte, so I saw some of this up close, but the sacredness of it remained for me (and still remains today, thankfully!)

The preaching task seemed nearly as mysterious and puzzling. I wondered how the priests would be able to come up with something to say each week, some anecdote to connect the readings with the life of the people in the pews, some example or metaphor to connect the Holy Scriptures with the pastoral needs of the congregation. How did they do it every week?

In seminary, and before seminary, I heard the two quotes listed above quite often. I doubt whether St. Francis or Karl Barth actually said them. We have no way to know about the St. Francis quote, and at least two Barth scholars assure me that even if Barth said that second quote, it doesn’t seem to be consistent with his theology and practice of preaching. In any event, it seems that these two quotes are quite helpful for the practicing Christian.

The first quote, of course, points out that the Christian Life is more than just words; that we need to live out our faith, to “walk the talk” so to speak. However, there are times, of course, to use words. It is NOT merely ok to live well; it IS our calling to share the hope and Faith that we have in Christ Jesus. The fact is that people will see what we do, but they will also hear what we say. I read today that the Episcopal Church has cut its entire Evangelism budget, and without getting into a debate about why this line item was vetoed, I began to think about the need for grass roots Evangelism. To share our Faith with others, we need to live ethically, and we also need to speak with passion about the tenets of our Faith, to speak about God’s work in our lives. In essence, I believe, we need to recapture the ministry of preaching, and not solely for the seminary-trained clergy among us.

As our beloved Episcopal Church declines nationally in numbers, it will be essential for those of us who even have a bit of a spark of interest in preaching to PREACH IT! This means we need to “preach the Gospel at all times,” and it means we need to “use words.” It also means we need to hold our iPhone iBible application in one hand and our Kindle New York Times in the other hand as we connect our Faith with the life of the world and the lives of everyday folks.

Now that the focus of the Episcopal Church (and the Café) can turn away from General Convention, perhaps we can take on the challenge of preaching, teaching, practicing, and living our Faith, and having the courage to share it with a world in need. PREACH IT!

The Rev. Peter M. Carey is associate rector at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Greenwood, Virginia. He blogs at Santos Woodcarving Popsicles.

By Roger Ferlo

For years I have thought about rifling through old sermon files to see whether there is a book lurking there somewhere. I suppose that publishing a book of sermons is every priest’s fantasy, after preaching week in and week out year after year. Surely there must be something valuable and permanent to make up for all that Saturday night angst and sweat. But sermons are by their nature ephemeral, or at least they ought to be. Permanence and preaching have always seemed to me contradictions in terms. Besides, it’s hard to imagine a vast reading public out there waiting to snap up a full volume of published sermons. For most people outside the churches (and not a few in them), the very word “sermon” smacks of pedantry and sanctimoniousness. Hey, don’t preach to me!

Preaching is by its nature of the moment. That’s perhaps its saving grace. When a sermon is good, it’s closely attached to a specific text, a specific time, a specific place, and most of all to a specific and particular group of people with whom the preacher is in some kind of continuing relationship, rocky as that relationship sometimes can be. It’s been years since I wrote out my sermons word for word. I am always a little shamefaced to admit that I preach from notes, and sometimes even without them. I tend to be at a loss about how to respond to requests for printed copies of a sermon I’ve preached, or even worse, requests for a tape. It usually means I have to go home and reconstruct what I said, which sometimes varies considerably from the notes I’d prepared in advance. It’s what my wife calls chewing your cabbage twice. I’m daunted by that character in Marilynn Robinson’s novel Gilead, old Reverend Ames, who estimates that in a lifetime of preaching to people week after week in the same little country church, he has accumulated thousands of sermon manuscripts, now stowed away in crates in the attic. What I’ve got is three thick manila files stuffed with piles of notes, carefully sorted into Year A, Year B and Year C—that odd preaching calendar of scripture readings that Episcopalians and like-minded liturgical Christians have long held dear. Not a very promising start for assembling a best-selling book.

Nonetheless, now that I no longer preach regularly, having left parish ministry after almost twenty years to teach in an Episcopal seminary, I’ve decided it’s time to take a second look. There won’t be any sort of systematic theology emerging from this material any time soon, which should come as a relief to a worried public. If there is a book submerged in this stuff, it won’t be the book I imagined when—earnest and naïve—I started preaching two decades ago, writing out every paragraph, reading the manuscript aloud word for word. Thank God that obsessive behavior didn’t last. But the upshot is that my surviving notes provide less a well-worked out theology or a consistent scriptural hermeneutic (a word I would try never to use in a sermon), than an oddly inadvertent and sometimes comic record of my life as a parish priest, and of the three or four congregations that have patiently put up with me.

That’s what happens when you preach in the moment—the moments come back to haunt you. There are the baptism sermons, where I seem to have taken great pains to incorporate the names of the about-to-be-baptized-babies into the text, only to discover that now, twenty years later, I have only the vaguest memory of who those children are or what their parents looked like. Then there’s the sermons about money—I know they’re about money because the notes tend never to mention the topic directly, an occupational hazard for Episcopal clergy in my generation. I served for several years in a tiny progressive parish in Pittsburgh, a diocese both then and now notorious as a hotbed of evangelical schism. There’s some censorious attention paid in these sermon notes to Episcopal church fights, again mentioned obliquely, but I suppose the message was clear as day to those who knew the score. And I find more than a few sermons that begin by describing incidents from my Italian Catholic working class childhood—memories of candles burning in grottoes in front of a whole line of life-size plaster statues, or of that cleverly wired confessional box where a green light over the door signaled that the coast was clear to enter. The light turned red when you knelt down inside, and then turned green again when you got up to leave—shriven, forgiven, green light good to go. My memory is that people enjoyed stories like these, which crop up often in my notes, but to listeners who had not grown up Catholic themselves I must have come across like a messenger from an alien planet.

The notes I am most interested in are the most recent ones, though, the notes of sermons I preached in New York in the months and years following the attacks on the World Trade Center, just twenty short blocks from the parish where I served. Like many of my colleagues in New York, in the immediate aftermath I found it hard to find words equal to my own deep sense of loss and fear and anger, and then, in the months that followed, equal to the mounting sense of frustration at the growing vindictiveness and xenophobia that have since proved so toxic in our public culture. I was out of the country, on a long sabbatical, on the day of the attacks. For complicated reasons, my wife and I didn’t return to New York until Halloween. My first sermon was at a parish baptism on the feast of All Saints. As I look at these notes, I realize that I was functioning in two worlds at once. In the pulpit, I was trying to shape the complexities of people’s pain to the promise of the Gospel; in my own inner life, I was trying to make the Gospel somehow answer to my sense of loss and fear. I suppose that any energy that preaching had derived from the struggle between my preacher’s vocation to let the Gospel speak to people’s hearts and my own heart’s deep sense of anger at my own inadequacies.

I always meant to reconstruct those notes, but discovered one Sunday morning, while I was browsing in a Washington bookstore, that someone else had beat me to it. It turns out that one of the authors of Killing the Buddha, a kind of po-mo anthology of post-Christian writing, had been in my church that All Saints Day in New York. Without identifying the preacher, he had reported my sermon almost verbatim in the first chapter of the book. Coming across the book by chance, I felt angry and violated, as if someone had eavesdropped on an intimate family occasion and blabbed about it to the world. I’ve calmed down since then, and am even grateful to that writer (whose account of the sermon, I had to admit, was both accurate and sympathetic) for doing what I never really have had the wit or courage to do—to share with others that remarkable moment of grace that allowed me to reconnect to my parish in those dark days in late 2001, a moment of grace that offered room to those of us gathered there on Hudson Street to reconnect, however tentatively and skeptically, to the hope of Christ that was in us.

Maybe reconstructing those twenty years of sermons is not such a bad idea after all.

The Rev. Dr. Roger Felo is Professor of Religion and Culture, Associate Dean and director of the Institute for Christian Formation and Leadership at Virginia Theological Seminary.

By Greg Jones

"Remember Jesus Christ – raised from the dead – a descendant of David – that is my Gospel for which I suffer hardship."

Paul wrote these words to remind the faithful that the Gospel is for real. That Jesus is for real. That God's power to give life, even to the dead, is for real. Paul wrote these very real words of life while he himself was in chains a prisoner of the Romans. Do you think Paul knew when he wrote this letter that he would suffer an even harder fate than mere chains? Do you think Paul knew he would also suffer death for his witness to the love of God in Christ?

Of course he did. Paul knew that witnessing for Christ can get you hurt – and even killed. He knew it, because he used to track Christians down in his former life, and we know he helped to kill at least one.

Paul knew that testifying for Christ was costly, but he knew it was worth it. He tasted the fruit of New Life that the Resurrected Jesus gave to him, and he knew it was worth giving his life in witness.

In Greek the word for 'Witness' is actually the word "martyr." For centuries the word 'martyr' literally just meant somebody who bore witness – like in a courtroom. Jesus used the word to commission his disciples – he said, "You will be my witnesses." He said, "You will bear witness to my love, to my cross, to my resurrection." Jesus commanded his disciples to be his witnesses – and he gave them the power of God to do it well. And they did. And they spread that Gospel all over the Roman world with a rapidity and tenacity that is still astonishing.

And the price the apostles paid was death. The most powerful witnesses to Christ faced crosses, fires and swords – and by doing so changed the lives of thousands who were made strong by their sacrifice. Because of the way they served God as witnesses to Christ, the word 'martyr' changed meanings also. Over time the word martyr took on the connotation of someone willing to pay the price for the sake of their witness.

If you've been following the news, you've heard that the Congress is trying to pass a resolution about the Armenian genocide which happened some 90 years ago. Or perhaps you've heard tell of the Armenian taxi driver slain in her car by an Australian security company doing business in Iraq.

These stories remind me of my Great-Grandfather, the Rev. James Perry, who was a missionary over there – in the Near East – doing humanitarian work for the sick and suffering. He spent years in various parts of the old Ottoman Empire doing relief work. He had a young wife and two infants, but nonetheless he worked to bring help to the suffering in the name of Christ in the face of great danger.

In February of 1920 – as Turks were massacring thousands of Armenian Christians in the city of Marash – my great-grandfather, another American, and two Arab Christians drove toward the city in a relief truck filled with supplies to help the victims and survivors. They were slain by Turks with orders to kill any Christians on the road. The story was front page news in America – from the New York Times to small town papers everywhere.

I can't wait to meet my Great Grandfather. I know I will because he has died with Christ and now lives and reigns with Him. But, I'm not counting my days until then. Because Christ wants me – and you – to focus on today ... to live today ... to endure today ... to praise God and witness to his saving love to this hurting world today. Our work as Christians is not to sit still or to wait or to quibble over words or to serve ourselves – but to give our lives for Christ.

God wants to transform our lives into the life of Jesus Christ for ministry in this world.

I understand if folks don't want this transformation into Christ – witnessing is dangerous. It is costly. But if any want to live eternal lives, we must remember that eternal living starts in the here and now. And eternal living is birthed by doing one thing:

"Remember Jesus Christ – raised from the dead – a descendant of David."

The Rev. Samuel Gregory Jones ("Greg") became a member of Christ's Body at St. Columba's in Washington, D.C. He is husband of Melanie, father of Coco & Anna, rector of St. Michael's Raleigh, and author of Beyond Da Vinci (Seabury Books, 2004). He blogs at fatherjones.com.

By Roger Ferlo

About 50 new seminarians showed up here at Virginia Theological Seminary last week, three weeks before the start of the regular term. They’re here to get a head start on their required courses in Hebrew and Greek, and to undergo the time-honored training in the oral interpretation of Scripture that the seminary underground still refers to as “Read and Bleed.” Half of the newcomers seem to be in their twenties and early thirties, continuing the youthful swing we have experienced here in the past several years. (You have to admire these young people, committing themselves to a lifetime working in a church that too many people in my generation seem intent on tearing apart.) As to the other half of the class, a large number seem to be newly retired, in the way we baby boomers retire in our mid-fifties. There aren’t too many people in their 40s. My seat-of-the-pants demographic theory about this is that if you are going to go to seminary in these parlous times, you are more likely to try it either in your twenties (when you are still relatively free of commitments, except, of course, for that sizable college debt), or in your late fifties, after you’ve sort of completed the trajectory of your first career, maybe seen your kids through college, and sense that you now have permission to do with your life what you’ve always known you wanted to do.

I changed careers pretty dramatically in my early thirties, so maybe I’m projecting. To be fair, the best part of working in an Episcopal seminary is that you never really can predict where people might be coming from, or what brought them here. In their first session together last week, one guy introduced himself to the group by looking at his watch, and then declaring that it was now almost exactly 72 hours since he retired from the military. A woman of a certain age marveled that the student sitting next to her was young enough to be her daughter. Several people identified themselves as recovering lawyers. One of the youngest men wore a T-shirt that revealed an amazingly elaborate network of tattoos on his right arm—perhaps setting a new trend in clerical dress.

Whatever the case, here they are, part of our lives for the next three years, God bless them all. Their nametags dutifully hanging from their necks, they gathered yesterday with the rest of us for a Eucharist in the chapel at 8:10 in the morning. I suspect that they were too distracted by a looming pop quiz on Hebrew verbs to listen closely to the sermon, which might have been just as well, as I was the preacher, and it was St. Bartholomew’s Day, and St. Bartholomew does not provide you with the most inspiring of sermon texts even in the best of circumstances.

It was those nametags that set me going. I hate wearing nametags. Maybe that’s why I’m always attracted to the unnamed people in Scripture, like the anonymous woman who washes Jesus’ feet in Mark’s version of the story, or the unnamed young man who runs away naked to avoid being captured by the police who are arresting Jesus in the garden (did he too wear tattoos on his arm?). I think of St. Bartholomew as part of their company. He didn’t really have a name, at least any name the gospel writer cared to record. Roughly translated, Bartholomew just means “son of Tolmai.” No real claim to fame there, nothing really to put on a nametag. Matthew, Mark and Luke mention him only once or twice. John, on the other hand, seems never to have heard of him. As usual with mysterious figures like this, legends have accrued, the most persistent one being that he was flayed alive somewhere in Armenia (“read and bleed” with a vengeance), and that his body washed ashore on the Italian island of Lipari (a long way from landlocked Armenia), where a cathedral still stands in his honor. Colorful rumors, but not much to hang a sermon on.

This being the case, I decided to keep to that ancient principle of Episcopal homiletics--when in doubt, start with the collect. Whoever wrote it knew the score. The collect repeats all we know of Bartholomew—that he had the grace to believe and the courage to preach (and even the latter is only an inference from the scarcest of scriptural data). This being the case, we are made to ask not that we would love and venerate Bartholomew (it’s hard to love and venerate a relative cipher), but that we would “love what he believed and preach what he taught.” The feast of St. Bartholomew thus becomes a feast of holy anonymity.

I more or less said all this, and then looked out on that crowd of newly washed seminarians. I thought about my own ministry through the years, and realized that if what was said of Bartholomew could one day be said of us—that because of what we said or how we acted or who we were, others could be brought to love what we believed and to preach what we taught—well, then, maybe this priesthood thing would mean something in the end, long after our names were forgotten. The priestly life can be such an ego-trip—witness the clash of prelatial egos now bedeviling our common life. “I came among you as one who serves.” Bartholomew knew this about Jesus, and about himself, and acted accordingly. In spite of the occasional need for nametags, a little dose of this holy anonymity in love’s service might do all of us a world of good.

The Rev. Roger Ferlo is Director of the Center for Lifetime Theological Education at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where he also directs the Evening School of Theology. His books include Opening the Bible (Cowley 1997), Sensing God (Cowley 2001) and Heaven (Seabury 2007).

By Susan Fawcett

One of the worst sermons I've ever heard was in the seminary chapel. Several weeks before, the school administration had asked preachers at Morning Prayer to keep their sermons to five minutes or less, in the interest of getting everyone out in time to get their obligatory coffee before 9:00 classes started. And on this particular morning, it was not a student but a professor who ascended the pulpit to speak. The service itself had already run long, and he preached...and preached...and after twenty minutes of discourse on The Faith of Abraham, we were finally released, grumbling about being late to class and missing coffee.

The sermon wasn't bad because of the content, per se. It was bad mostly because it was long, and disrespected our time (not to mention the Dean's request of five minutes or less). The absolute length of it overrode its message.

I come back to that sermon when I'm thinking about writing my own (as I am today, Thursday, without a clue as to what I'll be preaching on Saturday evening). That preacher had written a sermon that made a great deal of sense to himself, and yet he failed to ask himself what kind of sense it would make to the listeners, or whether they'd be able to listen to him with charity. Where is the line between communicating a message that you feel called to speak-as that professor clearly did-and communicating well? And where does sympathy for the listener fall in there?

I myself am one of those people who tend to think in the abstract and have read far more theology than is good for the average person, and so my natural tendency in sermons is to wax theoretical about an idea, tying together words and images to make some sort of emotional and psychological sense of a biblical passage. I like to think that I have been disabused of that tendency over the past few years: my husband is an engineer, a concrete thinker, and a painfully honest critic. We have spent quite a few Saturday nights revising my sermons, and we've got a running list of his typical responses:

You're dancing around an idea but you haven't nailed it. What's your take-home point here?"

"I'm sorry, but I don't speak church. What are you talking about again?"

"I'm getting kind of bored. Can't you tell a story or something?"

"You aren't going to just stand in the pulpit and read that from the printout, are you?"

Far from being offended by these remarks (ok, most of the time), I appreciate someone being honest. Most of my parishioners are so kind that they'll tell me they loved a dead-boring, high-theory sermon when most of what they loved about it was the chance to drift off into daydream land. So this article here isn't really an article: It's a plea for comments about what makes a great sermon. If you preach, what makes you feel good about your sermons? And how do you gauge it for reception? If you regularly listen to sermons, what keeps you tied in? What engages your mind and your soul? And what is it that you wish you could find a kind and charitable way to tell your beloved preacher?

The Rev. Susan Fawcett keeps the blog This Passage. She serves a parish in the Diocese of Virginia, and supports the work of the General Convention publication The Center Aisle.