In the Name of Love

God is Love. That's it.

Proper 17a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Let love be genuine… hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection… Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Have you ever faced a task beyond your ability? Have you ever been given a job that made you feel totally inadequate, one you couldn’t get out of no matter how hard you tried? Well, if you have — welcome to the Moses Club. Our Old Testament reading this morning gives us the beginning of the call and ministry of Moses — and you can see him wriggling with those same feelings of inadequacy that we do, feelings that would follow him throughout his long career as shepherd to the wearisome flock of Israel.

But what this scripture also shows us is that God has an answer for those feelings of inadequacy, those moments — or years! — of weakness and incapacity like Moses; those times of getting it just completely wrong like Peter in our Gospel today: the realization that you can’t do it alone, but you also don’t have to do it alone. Sometimes all you have to do is get out of the way and let God be God!

Now, most of us are well aware of how almost nothing we do is truly done by ourselves alone: that we all depend upon each other for virtually every aspect of our lives. As the old saying goes, If you see a turtle on the top of a fence-post, you know he didn’t get there by himself!

It is in part the joy of Christian community, as Saint Paul encourages the Romans: its members support each other with genuine love, with mutual affection, with zeal and ardent spirit serving God in each other, outdoing each other in showing honor to each other. But a big part of the good news is that it isn’t just each other we depend on — ultimately all of us and each of us depend on God, who helps and supports all of us. He does it by his presence with us, his teaching to guide us, his patience to give us time to complete the work, and the nourishment to bear the fruit God desires. And all of this is because of the love of God.

“Let love be genuine,” Saint Paul said to the Romans. We catch a glimpse of the most genuine love there is in today’s reading from the book of Exodus, when Moses encounters God in that bush that burns but is not consumed: the love of God that is an eternal flame that does not consume the inexhaustible being of God.

Love is eternal because it is reborn in every instant. Love — God’s love — is always now. This is especially true when you compare love to the other two theological virtues, as they are called, faith and hope. remember what St Paul said? “...these three, faith hope and love; but the greatest of these is love.” Faith looks to the past, and gives thanks for all that God has done. Hope looks to the future and trusts that God will provide. But love lives in the present, if it lives at all.

After all, it is no good telling someone you loved them once, or that you’ll love them some day — who wants to hear that? And even hearing someone say, “I have always loved you” or “I will always love you” wouldn’t mean anything unless the one saying it loves you now. Love, true love, is eternal because it is alive in every moment. Love is a fire that burns, but does not consume.

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Moses confronted that love that day he was keeping his father-in-law’s sheep, living as a stranger in a strange land. The God of love chose to reveal himself to Moses for one reason: he had heard the cry of his people in Egypt, and would deliver them, because he loved them, because they were his. The eternal love of God became, in that particular time and place, (as it always does in every time and place) the present love of God in action. The God of faith that was past, the faith of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, their faith in God; the God of the hope for the future, that God would visit his people and take them and deliver them out of Egypt; the eternal and everlasting love of God would be revealed on that mountain — as God reveals himself as the God who is love, burning but not consuming: the one who was, and who is, and who is to come — is always Love. As Saint John would affirm many centuries later, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

Some theologians have focused on this story of the burning bush, and the Name that God tells Moses to call him by, as a way of emphasizing God as pure Being, He Who Is, or “Being itself.” I would like to suggest that Saint John’s description is more apt — rather than get involved in the debate about the nature of being, simply declare that God is love. And that when we love we are most like God.

When Moses complains to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” God responds, “I will be with you.” In other words, God is assuring Moses that he isn’t going this alone. God will be with him. And as a sign of his presence, God — after a little bit of needling from Moses — tells Moses his name, which is I AM , or in Hebrew Ehyeh.

Now Hebrew, unlike English, doesn’t have tenses, at least not in the way English does. (I hope you’ll pardon this Hebrew grammar lesson, because it is important if we are to understand God’s Name; because it doesn’t translate very easily into English, and I can hardly think of anything more important, given this reading!) Instead of past, present and future, Hebrew verbs have only two forms called perfect and imperfect: the perfect describes an action that is completed and finished. It’s the “been there and done that” of language. The imperfect, on the other hand, describes an action either that was repeated or continuous in the past, or something that is happening now that hasn’t yet finished, or that is going to happen in the future. It might seem odd to think of God referring to himself using the imperfect. After all, we always think of God as perfect! But the difference in language is that perfect is dead — it’s the past, it’s done; it’s finished. What God is saying to Moses is that he is without end — there is always more to God. We can plumb the depths and think we’ve understood God, but we’ve only touched the surface, the outer edges of God’s being. God is without end; never finished.

This imperfect form of the language is what God uses when he says I AM WHO I AM: in Hebrew, Ehyeh asher ehyeh. This not only means “I am who I am,” but, “I have always been what I have always been,” and “I will be what I will be” or “I am now what I have always been and will be.” All of this is summed up in this name: and what a wonderful way to know the name of the eternal that has always been, is now, and ever shall be.

This is God’s Name, and it assures us of the kind of presence we can rely on in our weakness or our inadequacy. Not just someone who “is there for you” but someone who has always been there for you and always will be there — for you, and with you now: whose very name means Eternal Being Present. Truly, our help is in the Name of the Lord: the eternally present helper.

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My brother in Christ Thomas Bushnell made a fine observation about this not too long ago, in relation to what I said about those three virtues of faith, hope, and love. He pointed out that while we are called to have all three — faith, hope and love — there is a reason for love being the greatest, and being an attribute of God’s own Being. We have faith, but God does not need to have faith — God is the object of our faith. We have hope, but God doesn’t need hope; God knows what is to come better than we do! Faith and hope belong to us relate us to God, because we have faith in God and hope for God’s plans for us; but love is the means by which we reflect God’s own being, as mirrors or likenesses of God, made in God’s image; and this responding love joins us to God; for God not only has love, the love we have for God, the genuine love that we have for each other and for God, joins us to God. For God not only has love, but as Saint John says, God is Love; and whoever loves abides in God, and God abides in them.

After all, as St Paul assures us in his Letter to the Corinthians, in that famous passage so often heard at both weddings and funerals (and what better places are there to be reminded of the power of God who is love!): Love believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love believes all things; it has faith. Love hopes all things — it includes both faith and hope — but love endures because it is embodied in the eternal nature of God, and it is through love that we are joined to one another and to God. That love of God is eternal — it burns forever, and never consumes the source of its flame.

When you feel week, when you feel inadequate, when you feel you’ve been given a task you can’t possibly even begin to undertake, trust in that love, my friends in Christ; the love that God shows to you and through each of you to each other. It will raise you up from being a member of the Moses Club to being an eternal life-long member of the communion of God: in whose name we pray, Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.+

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Unlikely Heroes

Some have greatness thrust upon them...

Proper 16a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birth stool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live.

One of my favorite television programs is a British program that is broadcast on PBS — no it’s not Downton Abbey, though I enjoy that one too. No, my real favorite — in fact one I have to number among one of the best TV programs I’ve ever seen — is the series Call the Midwife. If you haven’t seen it, I commend it to you as it is well worth viewing. Just remember to have the box of Kleenex handy. It is powerful and moves me, every episode. The series tells the story of a group of Anglican religious sisters and the lay midwives who work in the impoverished east end of London in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Watching the program has been made all the more poignant to me as I learned that our own dear Monica Stewart — God rest her soul — served as a midwife in London during just that time. I had always known her as a registered nurse working in Harlem at Metropolitan Hospital until she retired, but I didn’t know of her earlier career as a midwife working in London until I read her obituary. She delivered over 8,000 children in her career. Who they are and where, now— who knows? But that’s 8,000 world-changing possibilities in whose coming to be Monica played an important part. Blessings be upon her!

Back to the television series: the thing that moves me most about it is the basic goodness of the characters; none of them are great or famous — although Princess Margaret does appear in one episode — and all of them have their foibles — probably including Princess Margaret — but there is a deep and prevailing goodness about them, a goodness that forms their lives as they go about their work of bringing life and saving lives. Their lives are framed towards the good, even if they sometimes falter; and sometimes they reach greatness. They are unlikely heroes.

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So too are the midwives in today’s reading from the opening chapter of Exodus. Things have changed since Joseph served as Pharaoh’s right-hand man. A new Pharaoh has come along, one with a deep resentment towards the Israelites. For these aliens have prospered in Egypt as the Lord had promised Jacob and Joseph. And so the new Pharaoh institutes a wicked plan to keep their population in check — he orders the midwives to kill all the little boys as they come to birth.

This is a haunting foreshadowing of another order by another wicked king, Herod the Great, an order ironically evaded by another Joseph, with his wife Mary and the child Jesus, by escaping to Egypt rather than from it.

Pharaoh gives his horrifying command, and the midwives respond out of their fear of God; for they fear God more than they fear Pharaoh and they have the courage to disobey the king. These women, whose task in life was to assist in the most natural process possible — a woman giving birth to a child — become unlikely heroes. And as the story continues, more unlikely heroes appear: the Levite’s wife (Moses’ mother), who hides her baby for three months before turning him over to his older sister; and then that sister herself as she places him in the river, in that little ark made from a basket sealed with bitumen and pitch, placing him in the river there — and here’s the big surprise — Pharaoh’s own daughter finds the boy, and even recognizing that he is a Hebrew child whose death has been ordered by her father, she chooses to protect him and have him brought up in her own household — ironically giving him to his own mother to nurse — but also in the end giving him a name, a name that will resound through Jewish history and even up to our day, Moses.

Who would have thought that this unlikely cast of characters — and I hope you will note that all of them are women, young and old — who would have thought that they would be the means by which God’s chosen deliverer of his people would be himself delivered from certain death. Without these women, each and every one of them, the people of Israel would have remained in their slavery in Egypt. These women and their heroism is unexpected and unlikely, but marvelous.

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Perhaps, though, we shouldn’t be so surprised. Heroism is not always what you think it is going to be. Who, after all, turn out to be the real heroes? When it comes to warfare, the great heroes aren’t the generals with their famous names; the heroes are the privates and the corporals and sergeants out on the front line risking their lives in the thick of battle, sometimes losing their lives to save their comrades. And I’ve been around hospitals long enough to know — nothing against doctors, mind you — but many of the real heroes are nurses and EMTs and technicians, the anesthesiologists, the nurses aides — all those others who work, quietly, but sometimes find that they are the ones who end up saving a life.

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In the church as in the world there is plenty of room for heroism — there are, as Saint Paul pointed out to the Romans, many different gifts that differ according to the grace given to each. Not everyone is called to be a hero — yet, who knows when the opportunity for heroism might arise. Those Hebrew midwives studied the art of helping women give birth — a noble task in itself — but they never imagined that they would help save the future savior of Israel. They thought their job was birthing babies — not saving nations.

There is a line in Shakespeare’s play, Twelfth Night: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” It is the same with being a hero: most truly heroic acts are not performed by those who set out to become heroes, but by ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations in which a heroic act is required — and who then respond. Who knows when the gift that is given by God according to the grace of God for ministry, for teaching, for exhortation, for generosity, for diligence, or even for cheerfulness — who knows when such gifts might not, given the opportunity, blossom into heroism given the right place and time.

For there are ministers who serve in dangerous circumstances. Priests and ambulance drivers serve on the front line of battle; there are teachers who persist in teaching what they know to be right even when the authorities want to persecute or prosecute them for teaching science when what those authorities want is a dumbed-down refusal to teach what science offers; and there are students like Malala Yousafzai who persist in gaining an education even when there are some who would kill her — who tried to kill her — because they think girls are not supposed to go to school. Those who persist in doing what is right against such opposition are unlikely heroes, but heroes they are.

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One last unlikely hero appears in our readings today — Simon son of Jonah. Who would have thought that a simple fisherman would become one to whom the Lord of heaven would entrust the keys of heaven? Who would have thought that the man who just two weeks ago sank into the water instead of walking on it, when his fears outweighed his faith; that this man who would go on to deny his Lord three times before the rooster crows — who would have thought that this unlikely and wavering candidate could be a hero? Yet when the Spirit descended on that great day of Pentecost, when the Spirit came down on Peter and the apostles, that is just what he did: he is the one that stood up and would go on to face down the High Priest and the authorities and to proclaim the Gospel, even though in the end it brought him to the cross himself, crucified head-down in Rome.

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And so it is for all of us my friends — none of us here are born great. I doubt if any of us will be called to achieve greatness — but, who knows, who among us may have greatness thrust upon us — by being put in the right place at the right time to make use of the gift which we may have thought was purely practical, purely a useful trade, purely a way to make a living, suddenly transformed by the situation in which we find ourselves into something marvelous. Who among us may find some gift transformed into a way to be a hero and perform an act of heroism?

That’s what makes it grace, my friends. To become a hero is not something any of us should expect or even desire. Let us rather hope that if we are ever placed in the position to make such a use of the gifts that God has given us that we will have the courage so to do — to become unlikely heroes. Glory to God, whose power working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.+

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Unexpected Good

God is a well of mercy that never stops flowing...

Proper 15a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Joseph told his brothers, “Do not be distressed, or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life.… So it was not you who sent me here, but God.”

Some years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book called, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. This was not a book written from the dispassionate standpoint of a scholar and teacher. Rabbi Kushner was dealing with a personal tragedy as well — the death of his own young son. Even had he not experienced such a tragedy in his own family, he would not have needed to look very far to see many examples of bad things happening to good people. All you have to do is turn on the TV news to see plenty of examples of such tragedies. There is a whole subsection of theology dealing with just this question and I could go on and preach a couple of dozen sermons on the topic.

But for today I want to take a different approach and look at a different question, the opposite question: Why do good things happen to bad people? And I do that because of the continuation of the story that we heard this morning from the book of Genesis. We heard the start of Joseph’s story last week — how his brothers, jealous of their father’s affection, were on the point of murdering him; and how a sequence of events led them to sell him into slavery in Egypt. Today we jump almost to the end of his story — in between last week and this Joseph is framed on a charge of sexual misconduct with his boss’s wife, thrown into prison, makes use of his skill as an interpreter of dreams to get out of prison, and more than that, to be raised to a position of high power in Pharaoh’s kingdom. And he uses that power to store up supplies of food for the world-wide famine foretold in Pharaoh’s dreams — a pair of dreams that Joseph is able to interpret as a warning from God that a famine will strike the whole world.

When his brothers arrive, Joseph takes the time to indulge in a bit of payback: in the previous chapter — for they have come to Egypt to beg for food, for the famine is indeed world-wide, but have failed to recognize Joseph as their brother. This gives him an opportunity to play a few mean tricks on them — which, of course, they fully deserve. After that payback he finally chooses to reveal himself to them, in large part because he wants to see his elderly father again, and he knows that the famine is only just beginning and will get much worse. And the lesson he derives from this, is that even though his brothers did a truly terrible thing to him — he now sees that this was God’s way of working; God has taken this very bad thing and made a good thing come out of it. As Joseph would say in the last chapter of Genesis, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people.” So it is that a good thing came out of the actions of bad people; and in the end, even good things for those bad people.

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And that’s the hard part for us to understand. We expect wrongdoers to get punished, not rewarded. We expect bad things to happen to bad people. The problem is that this is a point of view that puts us in the place of God; it puts us in the position of judging others, deciding that they are bad and deserve punishment. And it isn’t really a question of being right or not — that is, it may be perfectly true that the people who we think are be bad are bad, and do deserve to be punished. The problem is that in placing ourselves in the judge’s seat and condemning others, even if we are right, we forget that we too are guilty — perhaps at times even more than those we condemn.

This is one of the hardest teachings of Jesus to wrap our heads around. How many Christian leaders seem to think that their primary task is telling other people how bad they are? How easy it is to forget that a central teaching of the Christian faith is, Do not judge! How easy it is for Christian disciples to consider themselves equal to their master, competent to judge — and even worse, getting on a high horse to decide who is a worthy recipient of God’s mercy.

We see them do that in today’s gospel reading. A Gentile woman, a Canaanite, approaches Jesus and begs him to cast a demon out of her daughter. And notice that at first Jesus says nothing. Matthew goes out of his way to include that detail: Jesus doesn’t answer her at all. He keeps silent. Is he waiting to see what the disciples will do? Will they intercede and join in her plea for mercy? Will they say to Jesus, Look at this poor woman? Jesus doesn’t have to wait long because they very quickly urge him to send her away because she keeps shouting after them. And at first he confirms their action — for he tells them that he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. Even when the woman comes and kneels before him, and asks for help, he says that it isn’t right to take children’s food and throw it to dogs. But she insists that even the dogs get the scraps — and Jesus acknowledges her great faith and her daughter is healed instantly.

Just as Joseph puts his bad brothers through the ringer — framing them for theft and putting them in prison — before finally revealing himself to them and forgiving them; Jesus puts his disciples to the test, and gives the woman herself a hard time, before relenting and responding in mercy.

And mercy is the point, the point we often miss. Because God is judge, we tend to want him to act like a judge, particularly when we agree with the guilt of those who are accused. We want to see the judge hand down a hard sentence when other people are before the court. We want to see that hard sentence passed, and that the guilty are punished as they deserve — we want bad things to happen to bad people. And so we want to see God act as a stern judge.

Except when we are the ones standing before him. That’s when we want God to be merciful. The problem is that God doesn’t change — God is always just and always merciful. God is always bringing good out of bad. Joseph’s brothers do a terrible thing in trying to kill him and getting him sold into slavery. But God uses that very action to put Joseph in the position to save the lives not only of his brothers but of countless other people, as God gives him the wisdom to understand Pharaoh’s dreams, and to store away enough food to last through the seven-year famine that will afflict the whole world.

Jesus teaches his disciples a lesson about mercy in this gospel we heard today — a lesson about mercy and faith. For recall how just last week he chided Peter, when he sank in the water he tried to walk on: “You of little faith!” Yet here — in front of Peter and the other disciples — he praises this Canaanite woman, this Gentile pagan, without doubt a worshiper of false and foreign gods, he praises her and gives honor to her “great faith.” Imagine how Peter felt at that moment!

Jesus answers the prayer of one who is not among his lost sheep, who is not his child, who is no better than a dog in the household. He does good for one who deserves no good — not because she deserves it but because he is merciful. Mercy is what it is all about. All, as St Paul said, are under disobedience, so that God can show mercy to all. It’s all God’s mercy, grace, and favor that saves us. I’m reminded of a quote from Mark Twain: “When you get to heaven, you will have to leave your dog outside. Admission to Heaven is by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would come in.”

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In his letter to the Romans, Paul the apostle makes that point in big letters. All are placed under disobedience so that God may show mercy to all. There is none perfect, no not one; and yet God causes his sun to shine and the sweet rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike. God is a well of mercy that never stops flowing.

God may have seemed, Paul says, to have turned on his people, his chosen ones, the descendants of Joseph and his brothers, the people of Israel. But Paul insists that their disobedience is temporary and their punishment is temporary, for the very purpose of allowing the good news of salvation through Christ to be extended out beyond that Jewish household to those very Gentiles whom the Israelites think are no better than dogs, unworthy of salvation and doomed to destruction. God is showing mercy to the Gentiles and will do so for Israel in due time. Good things do happen to bad people: for God is merciful. God takes the twisted, broken mess of our lives, what we in our foolishness or our selfishness have spoiled or ruined, and God cleans us up, repairs us, restores us — redeems us.

There is a refrain in the Psalms: his mercy endures forever. Let us give thanks for that at all times — for his mercy endures forever; not seeking God’s judgment, for others or ourselves — for his mercy endures forever; but trusting in God’s mercy — for his mercy endures forever; that even the disobedient and the sinful will find redemption and release — for his mercy endures forever.+

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Brother Against Brother

Envy, jealousy, and littleness of faith...

p14a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Joseph’s brothers said, “Hear comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”

Anyone with experience of a large family will know something about sibling rivalry. But even if you have never experienced it yourself, the Holy Scripture lays out more than enough to satisfy the most insatiable curiosity. Right from the beginning, right from the very first brothers ever to breathe the air of God’s good earth, we find conflict and worse: for Cain killed his brother Abel, striking him down out of jealousy and envy.

Fast forward just a few chapters in Genesis and we find Isaac and his half-brother Ishmael, originally content to play together, soon separated by Isaac’s mother. She is jealous that the son of her servant might inherit along with her son — here it is not the two brothers who are rivals, but their respective mothers!

Isaac will later get payback from his descendant rather than his ancestor, though largely through the machinations of his own wife Rebekah, when his two sons Jacob and Esau set up a rivalry that verges on being as bad as that of Cain and Abel. Jacob cheats his brother out of his inheritance, disguising himself with his mother’s help and deceiving his old, blind father Isaac into giving him his brother’s blessing.

In today’s reading from Genesis we catch up with Jacob some years later. He has settled in Canaan with the large family he has started. And what a family it is! He has four wives — count ‘em, four: Rachel (who died in giving birth to his youngest son, Benjamin) and her sister Leah, and their respective servants Bilhah and Zilpah, and in addition to Benjamin he has eleven other sons and at least one daughter, Dinah — and who knows who is in the kitchen with her!

His favorite son, though, is Joseph, who with Benjamin are the only children born to the his true love Rachel, the one for whom he worked for seven years only to be tricked by his father-in-law into marrying her older sister Leah. (And this is not the only trick to be played on that trickster Jacob before the tale is done! Perhaps this is part of his payback for having cheated his own brother Esau out of his birthright and his blessing.)

In any case, Joseph’s brothers know their father “likes him best” — does anyone remember the Smothers Brothers routine, “Mom always liked you best!” “Lower your voice.” “Mom always liked you best!” — and to make matters worse Jacob broadcasts his favoritism for this teenage boy — giving him a fancy outfit to wear. Think of your own sons and how they might feel if you gave one of them the latest Air Jordans while the rest were stuck with lame tennis shoes or sandals. They might not throw their brother, the one with the fresh kicks, down a pit, but they won’t be happy!

Another thing to note about this fancy outfit is that it is a long outfit, not suited for work: long sleeves mean that Joseph doesn’t have to do yard-work; in many ancient cultures having a long robe with long sleeves meant you were among the upper classes, the royalty who had no hard work to do, who had others to do the hard work for them; they couldn’t be bothered to roll up their sleeves and work themselves. Joseph the tattle-tale — one more strike against him: notice how he informs his father when his brothers are slouching in their work — Joseph is home, spending time around the house, at most sent on errands out checking up on his brothers. And today we see what sets the story in motion — the story that will eventually lead Israel into Egypt, and will set the stage for all that is to come as God’s people are formed in that crucible of slavery and then brought out of it in the Exodus.

But we’re still at the prelude here: Joseph is set for a fall; he’s got three strikes against him, and his brothers simmer with jealousy. To add insult to injury, Joseph is a dreamer. He is also innocent enough to tell his brothers and his father the dreams of them bowing down to him — dreams which for some reason those who planned our lectionary this morning have chosen to omit from our reading — but this is why the brothers refer to Joseph as “this dreamer”! Anyway, the scene is set for sibling rivalry of the most dangerous sort, and his brothers gang up on the boy with the intent first to kill him, and then to sell him into slavery. As we hear by the end of the tale, Joseph is bundled off to Egypt. We’ll hear more about that and the aftermath next week.

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For now I want to focus on the thread that ties together all of this sibling rivalry in the book of Genesis: all that ties it together up through our own time. And that is the sin of envy, manifested as jealousy. From Cain through Sarah through Jacob himself and then on to his sons — and on to every human heart if we are honest — jealousy and envy, wanting what someone else has, is the craving the leads to the biggest part of human misery, whether brother against brother or nation against nation. No one said it better than James the brother of the Lord, in the epistle that bears his name: “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts.” (James 4:2) There can be no doubt that the story of Joseph was close to James’ heart: James is the English form of Jacob, after all. And he begins his letter with an appeal to the Twelve Tribes who were descended from Jacob’s unruly household. So his description of jealousy and envy — sins he saw at work in the early church — is sharp and to the point.

The French philosopher René Girard has developed a theory that jealousy forms the basis of much human behavior. I’m not sure it takes a philosopher to read that from the evidence of human history, but René Girard suggests its mechanism. He calls it mimetic desire — but the old words imitation and jealousy will do just fine. Two children — let’s call them Isaac and Ishmael just to keep it in the family — they are sitting on the floor in the romper room happily playing with their toys; perfectly happy, perfectly content, each of them playing with his toy. But then momma comes in and gives Ishmael a new toy. What happens? Anyone want to guess? Little Isaac, until then perfectly happy with his own toy, now wants to have the toy Ishmael has — and so the war begins!

Of course, it is not always a toy; I wish it were. Sometimes, as with Cain and Abel, it is jealousy of God’s blessing. Sometimes it is a birthright or inheritance. How many families have squabbled over grandma’s kitchen table, and who gets it? Sometimes it is an article of clothing — how many young men have been stabbed or shot in the Bronx because someone wanted their jacket? Sometimes it is a father’s favor. Sometimes it is gold, or oil. Sometimes it is called the Gaza Strip, or East Jerusalem, or the Crimea or the Sudan. Whatever it is, as James said, “You want something and do not have it,” — and so follow murder, theft, war, destruction and death.

How soon we forget the verse that ends, “You do not have because you do not ask.” How much of the world’s goods could be shared instead of being fought over? How many sibling rivalries could be stilled if people would set aside jealousy and envy, and cultivate instead the virtues of charity and generosity — to ask, so that it might be given; to knock, so that the door might be opened.

In our Gospel today, Jesus chides Peter because he starts well in his walk on the water, but then begins to doubt. Let’s be honest — doubt is part of our life: it is hard to trust others, it is hard sometimes to ask someone to share what they have; look, let’s face it, sometimes it is hard to share when you are asked! There is always that fear that there won’t be enough to go around; that if I give of what I have I won’t have enough left for myself.

But my friends, we are not called to doubt, to fear — we are called to faith, to trust in the generosity of God, and to “take heart” in the knowledge that he is with us — we can walk on the water if we trust him! He is the same one who fed thousands in the wilderness, who turned a few loaves into enough food to feed a multitude. How much of the world’s five loaves and fishes could be transformed if Isaac and Ishmael would share instead of fighting? There is no need for envy or jealousy — the products of a world-view that is based on scarcity and desire and envy — when the abundant grace of God is there — for the asking; for the asking, my friends. To have great faith instead of that little, stingy, mean faith — the faith that is hardly faith at all, when abundance is around us. Remember, “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

So let us not fear asking God, asking our brothers or sisters, let us not dwell on jealousy or envy, but trust in the abundance of God, and the good news that God is with us, and can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. To him be the glory, from generation to generation in the church and in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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