In I read the Gospel this morning using a translation by Eugene Peterson to mitigate the libelous language in the penultimate chapters from Matthew with regard to scribes and Pharisees. It’s not that Jesus didn’t have complaints about the hypocrisy and pride of religious leaders – I mean, who doesn’t? But his critique was intramural – with the community. Matthew, we think, was also involved in an intramural squabble when he was writing his Gospel several generations after the death of Jesus, probably in opposition to the Pharisaic academy that moved to Javneh after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. Matthew was engaging in a “what would Jesus say and do” discussion with his community about how to move forward in the crises of Roman occupation exacerbated by the destruction of the spiritual center. For Matthew, it had come down to his community versus the community down the road. He’s using a Pharisaic or rabbinic argument and we hear one side of it in the voice of Jesus. The Talmud teaches that one must not say, “I will study so as to be called wise or “teacher” or an elder, or to have a seat in the Academny, but one must study out of love and the honor will come of itself.” The Talmud also teaches, “He who humbles himself God will exalt, he who exalts himself God will humble.”

It’s not unlike intramural Christian arguments that go on today. Who is really being true to the Gospel and who isn’t? What is the right way to worship? Who really missed the boat? Who places heavy burdens on people and doesn’t lift a finger to help, seeming to love fancy vestments and fancy prayers more than anything or any one? It’s tempting – very tempting – to use this passage from Matthew today to decry the heavy burdens of doctrine that other Christian leaders place on people – from the Roman Catholic hierarchy to right wing Christian fundamentalist rhetoric, or even to compare ourselves with the Episcopal parishes to the west and to the north. It’s all low hanging fruit.

Unfortunately, it’s also rotten fruit. The good fruit has our own names on it and it’s much harder to reach.  The good fruit comes from stretching to imagine Jesus speaking to us. According to Matthew, he has turned to address his followers and the crowd. If we understand ourselves to be followers or folks just listening in, the question is what is our hypocrisy? I don’t know about you, but there is a gap between what I teach and what I do. I try to keep it small, but sometimes it yawns! What is our pridefulness (or its evil twin, shame)? How does it deaden us? It is deadly. Where are we called to serve so as to lighten the burdens of others? What is genuine humility?

My seminary professor, Carter Heyward, defined genuine humility as “a gift from God which has nothing to do with downcast eyes, a misty voice and noble stories of sacrifice. Humility is, rather, living courageously in a spirit of radical connectedness with others, which enables us to see ourselves as God sees us: sisters and brothers, each as deeply valued and worthy of respect as every other. (1) How courageous would you have to be to imagine that you are of no more value and no less value than every other?  What would it look like for us to understand that we are as worthy but are not any more worthy than any other community of faith – not another parish in this diocese, not another congregation of a different denomination, not another religion? How would that understanding free us up to do what really matters, which is the work of justice and compassion, of faithfulness.

It seems worth saying something about faith on this Protestant Reformation Sunday – honoring the many Lutherans (and Methodists and Presbyterians) in this congregation and my own German Protestant upbringing. Bruce Epperly, my mother’s seminary professor (it’s a family business I’m in), teaches that faith is not about believing things we know to be untrue scientifically or ethically. Faith…is a lively confidence in the grace of God. Faith involves trust and relationship. It’s grounded in experience, study and community. Faith is not “strict adherence to doctrine, with death and damnation awaiting all who [drift or] doubt or disbelieve; rather, faith involves openness to experiencing the divine in all its manifestations, even [and especially] in the unfamiliar and the unexpected. (2)

The idea of experiencing the Divine in the unfamiliar and the unexpected makes me want to say something about the Book of Joshua, from which Joy read this morning. Joshua is the first book in Hebrew Scripture after the Torah. We don’t hear much from the book of Joshua in our lectionary. Some people might know that Joshua was Moses’ successor. You might know that Jesus is the Hellenized version of exactly the same name – Joshua/Yeshua/Jesus are all the same name and the name means “the one who saves.” You might have thought when you heard the reading this morning, “that sounds like the story of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea on dry ground.” Well I hope you thought that, because it’s essentially the same story – the same language -- another miraculous crossing of a body of water, forty years after the last one. It’s miraculous because the body of water would have been impassable -- in this case, the Jordan River, at harvest time, when it overflowed its banks. Geographers estimate that at Jericho, at flood stage, the Jordan River would have been ten to twelve feet deep and one hundred forty feet wide. The mighty Jordan was turbid and fast with dangerous currents.

The thing you wouldn’t know from our small portion of the Book of Joshua today is that the Jordan River is mentioned seventy times in this short book. Crossing the Jordan is referred to twenty-one times just in chapters three and four. The intense repetition is a literary device – and probably a liturgical device – which inspires communal awe for the greatness of the Divine. The story is a retrospective of course, not a trip diary. It’s a reminder of the promise and the power of God Who has made the impassable passable, Who has made the impossible possible. And it was written down and read aloud to inspire and encourage hope that if the Source of All Being has already liberated and transformed and created a way where there was no way, it will happen again.

When I visited the River Jordan five years ago, I filled my water bottle with that holy river’s water. I brought it home (boiled it) and every time I baptize someone I pour a little in to the font. It’s not magic of course, but it is a tangible and poignant reminder to me of the promise and power of God to repeatedly liberate and transform. It’s the promise and power of God that I read in scripture and I read when I look back at the impassable and the impossible situations in my own life, or when I look back at the impassable and impossible situations of the life of this parish, or the life of the wider church. You know, one minute any of us, all of us, were standing at an impassable or impossible place about to be overwhelmed or swept away, and the next thing we knew we were walking across on dry land with heaps of roiling water on either side.
Well maybe we knew it. But often we don’t pick up our heads enough to see the heaps of roiling water on either side. We tend keep our heads down, murmuring that the path is really not that dry, muttering that mud is getting on our feet, that sure, we’re moving forward but it probably won’t last. Do you know what I mean? It seems to me, to go back to the idea of the good fruit that’s a little harder to reach – the good fruit has to do with closing up the gap between talking a good game and actually serving others with genuine humility – of living courageously in a spirit of radical connectedness and in picking up our heads to look around and give thanks to God for both the promise and the deliverance of bringing us to a place of liberation and transformation again and again.

When we get to the Eucharistic Prayer today -- our Great Thanksgiving to God for liberation and transformation—and I sing “lift up your hearts,” do that. Lift them up. And lift up your heads also to look around and give thanks to the Eternal One our God, sovereign of the world, who gives us life, who has sustained us, and who has brought us to this time. (3)

Rabbi Mark Newton completed this homily but his text is unavailable.