Worthy Disciples

 “You Are Worthy Disciples”

A Sermon Given at St. Luke (Renton) Episcopal Church, July 20, 2025:

Baruch 2:11-15, 19-23; Luke 12:4-7

“Inside every woman and man is a place of knowing.”  So I invite you to touch base with this place of knowing within yourself and let’s just rest here for a short peaceful moment to get ahold of that.

Admittedly, it is a bit of a rarity for me to be here in the flesh and blood. More often for me, I’m a virtual being on Zoom at our Morning Prayer.  So if you don’t know me, let me share a few things. I love theology. I love church history. I love medicine –all kinds: Chinese 5-element, homeopathy, folk, herbal, and even conventional Western.  I don’t believe there’s a place for violence ever. I enjoy dreaming about unlikely possibilities – like walking on water.

I believe: Spirit is the mesh that holds life and all creation together in one big beautiful overwhelming place. I believe sharing is a societal superpower and that kindness, decency, and providing humanity with the basics of what each one of us needs makes for peace.

The latest editions of me have come to appreciate the questions and cherish the mystery rather than being hellbent for an answer. So I hope I spark some of your own ponderings.

I have many questions.  The first is why is Scripture – these ancient writings – some of them like Baruch this morning might be nearly 3000 years old – still being looked to for inspiration and spiritual food?  Is there no expiration date? I’ve found these dusty tomes to be MOST helpful in the mere wondering about what the spiritual or life problems were that folks of old were struggling to understand/resolve. Cynically, I might suggest scripture still has its holding power because humanity hasn’t fundamentally changed in all this time. We keep playing the same record and keep hoping to receive an easy solution to complicated dilemmas.  Dilemmas like the clear existence of Evil, or why a loving God permits ICE, or the seeming impossibility of eliminating racism, sexism or war? Are these things God permits?  Or, do they arise out of the darkness inherent in the human heart?  Yet, I don’t feel the darkness in my heart so what causes it seemingly to be deeply embedded in others’?

Carl Barth was a pretty well-known 20^th century theologian rising out of a Swiss/German Lutheran background stuck in the time of Hitler’s rise to power.  He and his colleagues in the Confessing Church in Europe got together in 1934 to write and adopt the Barman Declaration setting the Church against the dark powers of fascism beginning to boil.  He is one of several who encouraged doing theology with “a newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other.”  I invite you to that technique now.

First the Bible.  Baruch is not part of the Protestant canon of scripture.  It is, however, still held in regard especially in the other church branches.  Baruch was like a traveling secretary for the prophet Jeremiah.  Jeremiah and the other OT prophets railed against the wealthy admonishing them to pay attention to the poor or they’d be sorry.  And sure enough. When Babylon swept into Palestine and Galilee in 687 BCE, the Babylonians deported the rich, the artisans, craftsmen, and leaders (in other words the Elite) off to Babylon.  Where they then sat by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers whining about how God had left them even though they were probably much better off than the “dregs of society” Babylonians left behind. Not having experienced it of course, their whining seems odd as they did suddenly find themselves living in a City known for being one of the 7 Wonders of the World.  Jeremiah’s advice to these Elite ones – we read it last week or the week before: it was to, “Get over it.  This is the penalty for years of sin.  So marry, have children, make families and just cope.”  I can feel how that might have been a hard pill to swallow!  But the Book of Baruch we have here, the scholars believe it may have been written several centuries later – around 100 BCE – so obviously it’s a ghost writer who took the scribe’s name, and the passage we read this morning is from chapter 2 that’s in the book’s section believed to be a confessional prayer for use in the rebuilt Temple back in Jerusalem.  So the elite did eventually get returned (by the Assyrians), and they soon rejoined their ancestor’s ways doing what rich people do and as long as they gave their fealty to each passing Emperor their lives were minimally impacted.  Meanwhile, as a later Biblical character put it – “the poor you will have with you always.”     

Skip ahead to Jesus’ time. True Christians, worthy of being called by that label, view Jesus as a rare, exquisite diamond of sparkling humanity and insightful divinity.  He had a radical notion of what life might be like if we allowed the Spirit to rule our lives. He was a visionary for an upside-down social order where the privileged served “the least.”  The human way, the Godly way, is to notice the downtrodden.  To SEE the lame, the sick, the struggling and not just look at them and walk away but REALLY notice!  To take their hands, LIFT them up, heal and bless, fight for them, and turn over the tables of the capitalists who had infiltrated the Holiest spaces of their communal life.  To NOT shame them & shut them out of the liturgy because they couldn’t afford 2 coppers for a sparrow to sacrifice.  Paraphrasing, he said, “EVEN the lowliest hairs of the heads on the least of these is counted, SEEN, LOVED, and worthy!”

So turning to our daily news how do we apply Spirit and Bible lessons to our modern-day Babylonian Capture?  First off, we have a flipped Babylonian Conquest – instead of our elite getting deported, they’re cruelly deporting our laborers, our workers, our most vulnerable… cutting them off from healthcare and food with indications they might take to purging all of us from OUR soil who do not worship White Wealth and Power. Our long struggle to build an inclusive multicultural society, to teach how to SEE each other without all the degrading labels and biases, to notice who is not thriving as Jesus modeled is all quickly becoming illegal.  Worst of all, the spirituality of love – our very life net – that I spoke of that holds creation together is tearing – what would Jesus advise?

I think he would say, DOES SAY, “Don’t hide your eyes.  Don’t go to sleep but stay awake with me in the Garden.”  The garden of prayer, the garden of courage, the garden of watching.  Put on your prophet pants: to Speak up, to Speak out, and call out the evil wherever we see the Powerful misusing it against us and especially against the most vulnerable.  Trust that the Holy Spirit will honorably be with you to use your words, the Constitution, and the power of shame to somehow impact these moments. But maybe we should use a different lens.

There are so many ways we each can defend the boundaries of the Realm of God and undergird our common life liturgy.  First, we all can pray.  I hold tightly to the belief that SPIRIT outlasts, overpowers, outperforms our physicality.  The Spirit busted down Paul and Silas’ prison doors and converted their jailers – that’s a seeming impossibility that the Biblical story of old testifies to. Why can’t it happen again? The Spirit is bigger than cultic power, as early Christian martyrs defiantly demonstrated in the Roman arena.  They are our ancestors!  Drink deeply from their Spirit River and nurture the spirit power within you & stand true!

Reframe how you define yourself.  We’re not helpless mere US residents.  We are disciples of the one true God.  We’re the construction crew intent on building the Realm of God.  We are crucial!  We are the guardians of Christly decency, vocal advocates for justice, stalwart companions of mercy.  So there is no need for shyness or apology.

Don’t be afraid to be obnoxiously outspoken with old-time powers of guilt and shame in the faces of those doing wrong.  Appeal to everyone’s higher angels.  Ask questions about what virtues people are upholding for the children, our children, the future of all.  If words fail you: Use your body language – adopt a prayerful pose – the Spirit understands sign language, your body understands Spirit language!  But also remember importantly, that a powerful flip side to speaking out is being a silent witness. To wit: those silent witnesses standing at the foot of the Cross transformed Christ’s life into a Power that has reverberated for millions even to us here.

In my Native American Meditation book this past week Charles Alexander Eastman – one of the first Native Americans licensed to be a Western Medicine physician, a member of the Santee Sioux said, “Silence is the cornerstone of character… It takes a warrior to be silent.  Silence is powerful.  Silence can be loving.” Silent watchful eyes can transform the world.

And so, my friends, I wind this up the way I began – Inside every woman or man is a place of knowing.  Know who you are -- you are a worthy powerful disciple!  Trust your discernment.  Then take to the path laid before us.