THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

​ “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you.” These are not easy words to hear for those who have lost everything and have been forced to move far away from their home. They want more of what we heard at the end of last Sunday’s Psalm: 

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy the one who pays you back for what you have done to us! Happy shall he be who takes your little ones, and dashes them against the rock! 

That is where unredeemed anger leads us—desiring revenge, even destruction upon those whom we judge have wronged us, or even pose a possible threat against us. It is where wars begin. But wars have their foundation in an event long before there were enough folks around to fight them. 

For that, we have to go back to near the beginning. 

Did you know that you can commit what can be called “original sin” by standing upright, fully clothed and buttoned up? The sin—separation from God—occurred in the garden and continues now when human beings attempt to be God, usually by replacing any idea of who God is with ourselves. 

Perhaps that’s so easily done because we have changed our ideas of who God is and the signs of God’s presence with us. 
Genesis tells us humankind is created “in God’s image,” male and female, not just the first male. If we could take a picture of God it would require the gathering together of every human being who ever lived, who now lives, and who will ever live in one composite photo. For starters. 

And yet, when we dare to gaze into the eyes of a child of God who looks and sounds differently from us, we often find ourselves looking into the presence of our Creator. 

I have some friends who have learned how to write icons. Not paint or draw, but write icons. Tradition holds that when we look into the eyes of an icon, we look into eternity itself. Consider the possibility, then, that when we look into the eyes of another human being, all of us descendants of those first ones created “in God’s image,” then we gaze into living icons, catching a glimpse of the eternal captured in human form. 

The prophets tell us that the Babylonian exile, along with the utter destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel, came about when God’s people forgot that the image of their creator is found in the poor and needy, the widow and the orphan, the sick and destitute. In fact, God’s image is more readily found in those folks than in our own mirrors when we tout ourselves as being blessed because of the size of our homes and 401K accounts.

A huge battle of the Protestant Reformation came about over whether the words of Holy Scripture should be translated into the various languages of the people. In our tradition, a large printed version of the Bible must be placed in the public space of the parish so that anyone who wants to can read it at will. Arguments were made over whether the average person could rightly interpret the meaning of the words long before there was much consideration of how they might be taught to read them in the first place. At that time, many of the clergy were also illiterate and could not read the words, either.

When we read these words for ourselves, we might question whether what we’ve always heard they mean is actually true. I think this is one big reason why church membership and attendance has fallen away over the past several decades. Many of the loudest voices claiming belief in God use sections of scripture to support their own biases and opinions while ignoring the less convenient writings.

This became more evident when The Reverend Jerry Falwell sold the soul of the evangelical movement to Ronald Reagan during the 1980 presidential campaign. Both wanted to stand close to power. One result has been that the evangelical movement has become less about faith and more about control of political life. Many have heard its voice and found it wanting of any notion of the work and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth they read in scripture. So, they ask, why would we want to be part of that?

The evidence supporting those who question is found in the lack of faith that God is a living presence in our own time, and that we must enact our own will through legislation and force, if necessary. After all, it is up to us, many say, to make our way into heaven by living pure, and often isolated lives so that we arrive unstained at the pearly gates.

Such teaching doesn’t have room for healing the sick, feeding the poor, seeing the foreigner as our neighbor. It also doesn’t have room for the emptying of ourselves in service, or of Christ and the cross. So, it doesn’t seem to have room for a God who choses that as the way of saving the world.

When we ignore the cross, make sure we remain filled with whatever substitute for faith we might find, and continue to pass by on the other side, we find it all too easy to ignore the welfare of the city where God has sent us. To justify ourselves, we point at them and call them hellscapes, war zones, crime-infested pools of squalor. And those things might come true because they are what we have created by our isolation from them. We accept systems of inequality and injustice, so long as they serve us well.

When faith gets replaced by fear or becomes self-serving, we find ourselves in exile from God. Faith is what gives us courage to answer last week’s Psalm with the words “we must sing our songs by the rivers of a foreign land. We must play our harps ​and let others hear our tunes. We must care for those who would threaten us, for if we don’t, how will they learn of the ‘peace that passes all understanding?’”

To take a hint from this morning’s Gospel, seeking the welfare of the city means being the place where those seeking healing find a place to go, just as the Samaritan leper who didn’t have a priest who could verify his healing, instead of the place where only those who belong can enter. Jesus never had tenure or a letter of agreement with the Temple. He became the Temple, and passes on the position to his disciples. He doesn't ask us to build structures where we all too often hide from the city. Instead he calls us to be walking, talking, serving temples of flesh and blood and Spirit who reveal the image of their Creator and Redeemer as they seek the welfare of those around them.

Seek the welfare of the city where God has placed us. Dare to look into its eyes, seeking a glimpse of the eternal living within. If you can’t see it, then help it find its way to the Creator of life itself, where the image of a New Jerusalem (a word translated as “City of Peace,” or, better yet, “Rain of Peace”) begins to take shape all around us. That’s “rain” as in precipitation falling from the sky. We’ll talk about that in relation to baptism another time. Remember that it is in the welfare of the city where we find ourselves that we find our own well-being. That’s just as true today as it was for Jeremiah more than 2,500 years ago.
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THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

​ Let me begin by saying that if anyone wants to try out Jesus’ example of even the smallest amount of faith, the Property Committee has a dogwood tree they’d like to show you. 

Today’s Gospel lesson has a parallel in Matthew; there it comes in response to the disciples’ inability to heal a man’s epileptic son. That event comes earlier in Luke, and today the disciples’ request seems to come out of the blue. It follows a teaching about forgiveness, something to be given when asked for, no matter how many times the sin is repeated. 

It’s no wonder the disciples want more faith. It’s gonna take a lot of faith to forgive the same sin as much as seven times in one day! But it needs more than faith. It needs living faithfully, which means how we live in relationship to others and not just something we think we possess. 

You might be wondering what today’s lessons have to do with Francis of Assisi, whom we commemorate this day one day after his appointed feast day. If we could we might choose the lessons for that day and remember Francis’ story about giving up all worldly possessions and walking naked out on the street to the embarrassment of his bishop. 

Given that option, perhaps it’s best we dive more deeply into faithfulness. 

Francis, or at least stories about him, can help us with that. 

It was on his feast day several years ago that I got a reminder about faithfulness. I made a quick trip to pick up a few groceries before a scheduled pet blessing service. I pulled into my driveway, and as I got my items from the car, a still, small voice spoke to me. It said, “meow.” 

I turned and saw a gray tabby cat sitting at the end of my driveway. I later learned that the neighbors had named him “Bob.” Bob repeated his request as I walked up the steps and into my house. I had nothing suitable for a cat to eat, so I tore a slice of bread into small pieces, placed it on a plate, and took it out to the front porch. 

I set it down, whereupon it was sniffed and rejected. Bob looked up at me and again said, “meow.” This one had a slight inflection which I interpreted to say “cat does not live by bread alone." I had to get back to the appointed service, but returned to that grocery store and bought a bag of cat food. 

Some of you may have noticed how quickly word about certain parish events spreads from mouth to ear. Cats invented that process, and they’re still better at it than any of us try to be. To make a long story somewhat shorter, I probably was known as the strange cat guy on my block, with a small herd of them appearing each evening for sustenance. They did learn to space themselves out, for if a disagreement among them necessitated my intervention, food and water disappeared. My experience as a social worker providing in-home behavioral management to families has seen many interpretations.

All that, and more happened despite my lease forbidding pets inside or outside. And, I'm allergic to cats.

The point of all this is that I believe we are given companions of the four-legged, two-winged, swimming and slithering varieties to remind us of our capacity for faithful relationships. Sometimes the faith is ours, sometimes it is the pet’s.

The same goes for other human beings in our relationships. Sometimes they remind us of our need to be faithful and the wealth of real life found in it. Sometimes they help us remember that, yes, we are taught to forgive as often as it takes. And sometimes we might need to just say that it’s difficult to forgive because the repeated sin endangers our ability to remain in faithful relationship together. That helps us understand that faithfulness often means speaking the truth in love, and not being an enabler.

And maybe God puts us all together so that we remember the act of faithful forgiveness that gives us life as God’s children. So, as we offer blessings, we remember that we are at first blessed. That is, after all, part of our purpose. Blessed to be a blessing. It’s not ours to possess, and cannot live unless it is shared.
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You see, our faith is increased by living faithfully. With each other, with creation, with God. That's how faith works, and how it grows.