Before, During, and After – Twenty-Third Sunday After Pentecost (Hebrews 7: 23-28)
Growing up my parents introduced me to the British television that aired on our local PBS station. One show that we would watch together was called The Vicar of Dibley. This was a comedy series about a woman who is assigned to be the pastor, or Vicar as they sometimes called in the Church of England, of a small church in rural England. It was the type of place that had never, and would probably never call, a woman to be the leader of their church. Much of the series revolves around this fish-out-of-water story. The first scene of the first episode of the series sets up the story right way. We see the church on a Sunday morning. There are six people in the church. They finish singing a hymn and the vicar, who is an old, frail man, sits down and leads the church in prayer. Once he finishes the prayer, his eyes remain closed, and the congregants soon realize that he has died. Right there on a Sunday morning. And so, the Bishop sends this little village their new, woman priest. Right there we see one of the drawbacks of the mortal priesthood. Eventually it will end, whether by death or some other reason. This makes the job of leading, and of following, in this world very precarious. Faith itself can feel like a precarious way to live at times. In that episode of television this precariousness was portrayed through the example of a church in decline. The people stopped coming, the priest died. What were they to do next?
The author of Hebrews is speaking to an audience of Gentiles, who follow and are familiar with Jewish customs. They are living in a difficult time, as well. This audience has faced persecution and the like. They are still relatively new to the faith that will one day be called Christianity, and some have begun to drift. They have fallen out of the new habits they had developed and are beginning to resort back to old ones. Or they are looking for new answers to difficult problems. When confronted with the hard realities of the world, our life of faith can seem precarious. So, the author is trying to bring the people’s attention back to Jesus. To remind them that what has been promised in and through Jesus goes beyond what they had in the past. To remind them of the one who is not precarious.
For this purpose, Jesus is compared to the Levites, who were the priestly tribe of Israel, named after Jacob’s son, Levi. They were the ones who led the faithful, by tending to the covenant between God and the people. Doing the work of a priest, which at that time meant, primarily, attending to traditions and rituals. Some of these are touched on in the text that we heard today, such as making sacrifices to atone for sins. As Hebrews notes, a priest must do this twice, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people. Whereas Jesus did not have to do this. Partly because he had no sin, and partly because the sacrifice he did make, on the cross, was for all time. There are, of course, other ways that Jesus is different from the priests of the past, and the first one that comes up in our reading today was the issue of mortality. Namely, there will be many priests because they will eventually all pass away. Perhaps not in the middle of prayer, but still, all our time is finite. However, there is only one Jesus, because he is eternal, and he is with God for all of time. So, while we don’t know exactly what was going on in the community that first heard the book of Hebrews, from the context we might be able to guess that they were dealing with the same things we all struggle with, things like conflict, sin, and death. Issues that hang over faith communities even to this day. The things that make even faith precarious.
So, how do we deal with that? How do we navigate the precarious path of life and faith? Well, in The Vicar of Dibley, after the old pastor dies, the new vicar arrives on a dark, stormy night to meet the church council. Jaws drop in shock at this unexpected arrival. The rest of the episode is about the new vicar getting to know the wacky residents of the village, all while some members of the congregation try to force her out. The episode ends on the vicar’s first Sunday morning, where she leads worship in a packed sanctuary. The whole town has shown up, curious to see this new woman vicar. The series goes on from there, with all the ups and downs you might expect. There continues to be conflict between the vicar and those powerful people invested in the old ways, as well as with some of the well-meaning members of the parish, who are simply having trouble adjusting to a new reality. In the series, the character of the vicar is portrayed as competent and effective, but she also has flaws that get in her way. We also see several episodes that revolve around the ministry successes of this fictional congregation.
Fiction or not, such is the nature of the ministry of humans. What came before passes away, and something new takes its place after. There are successes and failures. Flawed people can still do great things. The story of the vicar and her small village church presents an idealized vision of this reality. A scenario where the right flawed people found each other, and they did big things together. And while that is absolutely the type of vision our human communities and institutions should strive for, we can still recognize that putting our faith in flawed people to do big things in a broken world is still precarious. (Even if, miraculously, it does happen quite often.) We look for those people who can lead us in a less precarious direction, because presumably, it is in those less precarious spaces, the places of certainty where those big things are happening. So, we look to other people to help provide that certainty. And if they can’t do that, and they can’t because we are all flawed human beings, we decide we’ll settle for something like relatability.
Now, I did warn you, in a previous sermon, that the upcoming election has been on my mind. It is, of course, unavoidable. Over this past week, one of the big stories out of the election cycle, was that one of the candidates for president spent some time working in a McDonald’s drive-thru. A lot of people spent a lot of time talking about this, partly because of the shocking revelation that was made. The revelation that this event was staged. The McDonald’s was closed for the day, the customers who drove through were screened beforehand, and the whole thing lasted only fifteen minutes. This week we discovered that politicians take part in pre-arranged photo ops and publicity stunts. Oh no. What will we do?
So, as you might be able to tell, I did not particularly care about this story, and I didn’t find it particularly shocking or offensive (at least not in any new or unexpected way). What I was thinking about though was the ‘why?’ of it all. As in, why even bother to stage this event? Well, to start with, the idea came about as a response to the other presidential candidate who has claimed on many occasions that she worked at McDonald’s when she was a teenager. Now, I have no reason to doubt that story, but apparently the issue is up for debate, and our other candidate decided he needed to make a point. Whatever that point was.
All of that is not even what I am talking about, though. The ‘why?’ I’m getting at is, why this was important at all. With all the issues and crises facing our country, why take time out of a busy campaign schedule to hand people bags of fast food? Maybe it would be worthwhile if the point of the exercise was to bring attention to the need for good working conditions and a higher wage for our service industry workers, but that’s not what was talked about. I apply this logic to the other candidate as well. Why would this accomplished woman, who has been a state prosecutor, a US Senator, and the Vice President of the United States, feel the need to list as one of her qualifications – “Worked at McDonalds?” (Which is no slight to those who have or do work in fast food places. It can be faced paced and demanding work. I couldn’t do it, and they should be compensated accordingly). And its not even limited to the two at the top of the ticket. One Vice Presidential candidate can’t stop telling us that he grew up in a small town and that he was a high school football coach. The other VP candidate became famous by publishing a book about how his extended family is from the poorest parts of Appalachia. Why should they think any of this will give them a leg up in applying for the most powerful, highest profile job in the world?
Well, I suppose it all comes down to that idea of relatability. We look for leaders that we feel can understand us. Who will work hard on our behalf because they know who we are and where we are coming from. They know our struggles because they have experienced them. We look for leaders who can advocate on our behalf because they have been where we have been, and experienced what we have experienced. Leaders who have stood where we are, and can now show us a better way forward. Which brings us back into our text for today from the book of Hebrews. Unlike some of the other epistles that surround it, Hebrews is thought to be not a letter, but a sermon that was written down. The sermon is making the case for Jesus as the one we should look to as the high priest because he is eternal, sinless, strong, and he has lived as one of us. He understands us, and so can better intercede with God on our behalf. Many of us who lead or seek to lead, and even those of us who look for someone to follow, will struggle to find this balance that Christ has between the relatable and the eternal.
Christ knows us because he has experienced the precariousness of our human predicament. Christ was raised by poor, human parents. In his ministry he walked from place to place, seeing and feeling the land of the people he sought to serve. He shared meals with the poor and the privileged. He got up close to people experiencing some of the worst life had to offer. He himself suffered. He experienced doubt and cried out to God. He was relatable. He came to bring new life in the Realm of God, but first he lived the life the people were living in that moment. So, because of this, because Christ knows us and knows God, he is better able to intercede, as Hebrews puts it, before God on our behalf. Christ’s enduring presence means that you can count on him in all times. His itinerant ministry among the people, the life he lived, means that he understands us. His work as the intercessor on our behalf means that Christ is active and at work in our lives right now. Even as we sit in our precariousness wondering and worrying about what is to come, Christ is at work. As he always has been, as he always will be, because he does not have to be interviewed, or assigned, or elected to be the one worthy of our high priest, or leader. That oath has already been taken. That appointment has already happened. The sacrifice has already been made. The work is being done. So, when we seek leadership in precarious times, we can simply follow the one who knows the way. The one who knows where we’ve been and knows where we’re going.
As I close this morning, now for the story of Mabel Lee, a real-life female pastor who unexpectedly came to lead a congregation in precarious times. Mabel Lee was an Asian American, born in China but she grew up in New York City in the early 1900s. Her father was a missionary and pastor to the Chinese immigrant population there. It was a precarious situation to live in. Mabel was an intelligent woman and accomplished much in the academic world. She had a PhD from Columbia University by age 25, and two years after that she was on a boat to Europe to continue her academic work in Paris. However, before she got there, she received word that her father had been killed trying to negotiate peace between two Chinatown gangs. The precariousness of life had touched her, and now she had a choice to make. Continue on, or go back to New York and become the new pastor of her father’s church.
She chose to return to New York and became the pastor of First Chinese Baptist Church. She ministered to mostly Chinese immigrant men who had come to America for work but had been forced to leave their families behind. She knew where her parishioners had been, because she had been there too, and she preached sermons about where she dreamt they would be going. Filled with messages about hope and liberation. She also created the Chinese Christian Center, a place where the community could come and take classes and learn practical skills that would help them to live better in the reality of their life as it was. She ministered to people in that precarious place between what happened in the past and hopes for the future. That place between the eternal and the relatable. That place where Christ is already busy working on our behalf. I pray that we will all seek to lead, and to be led, from this place.
Amen.