"You don't know God and God don't know you," a sermon preached in Christ Chapel on April 1 by the Rev. Merrill Wade, rector of St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Austin

I want to tell you about one of my seminary days some 17 years ago.

It was my first day off to field placement. Great day! I arose and read Morning Prayer. I was the preacher that day and I felt very prepared – I liked my sermon! I felt almost serene leaving my apartment at 6:00AM on a soft and warm day in New York City.

Bursting out the front door of apartments, I was off to do God’s will with pinache!

Out of the corner of my eye I caught something large in the trash. I stopped briefly to look. It was a man, or maybe a woman, or maybe a man – I couldn’t tell.

I focused my eyes just long enough to want to mind my own business – to look away and be on my way – for the person had a handful of spaghetti up above their mouth, sucking it in. I quickly surmised it was the very same spaghetti that had journeyed from my kitchen and dining room to the trash upstairs and then down into that trash bin outside the night before.

Well, while I wanted to be on my way but “the look” I was getting held me fixed. I was spellbound. Finally, a deep female voice said something like the following. “You must be one of the God boys from across the street. Well, you don’t know God and God for sure don’t know you!”

I was furious but I didn’t say a word. I was able to break free from her stare but I shook all the way to the subway station. I had been feeling so good and well prepared and hopeful about this next step toward ordination, this next test of my worthiness, this next opportunity to shine. I was ready to preach and serve the Lord and then I was verbally attacked on my way!

I arrived at the Port Authority to get on the early bus out to Montclair New Jersey, the site of my field placement. And meandering through the buildings to the busses I truthfully have to step over at least 50 people, some of them in their vomit, to get on to the bus and out to that place where my sermon, my precious sermon, would find a home and hearing.

Needless to say, by this time I am tied up in knots. My sermon was, no doubt, “a tight exposition of God’s mercy and grace”. But it felt kind of stupid as I read over it on the bus ride out to the suburbs.

Well, it was, so to speak, a good sermon. Intelligent and helpful and hopeful. The good people of St. John’s, Montclair, told me so. I returned to General Seminary happier.

As I backtracked to the seminary the Port Authority was cleaned up and bustling with people who were purposefully walking and talking. I was delighted that the trash bin was unattended outside the apartment upon my arrival and around 2PM in the light breeze of a gorgeous fall day my friend Scott and I took a long walk up 9th Avenue, discussing the events of our first day in field placement.

I told him about the woman in the trash. We both felt sorry and appalled. Poverty. Mental illness. I was now ready to be sympathetic and kind. Maybe I should hunt for her, I spoke to the wind.

We discussed the deplorable human condition in Manhattan on Sunday mornings before the police and transit authority “swept” the public places and streets. We felt guilty for our relative comfort.

Well, we felt guilty until we got to 42nd Street at Times Square. There, on this beautiful afternoon we were physically threatened, absolutely propositioned, and were handed some of the lewdest pornography imaginable - and all of this within 60 seconds of turning right into Times Square. Folks, this was truly reprehensible situation. This hodgepodge of people were, to use a word carefully – gross!! Scott and I restarted our conversation about poverty and mental illness but it just didn’t register. This was sick, sin-sick.

And we recalled the scriptures. How much better, we speculated, would it be for God and humanity if this whole lot were removed from Manhattan? If all these thugs and gangsters and pimps and these adult shops and vendors and all their sick garbage were simply removed, done away with?

And I recalled with Scott that suddenly favorite scripture of ours, 2nd Kings 10, where Jehu cleverly gathered all the worshipers of Baal in Israel together at a temple of Baal and put them to the sword all at once, once and for all! Then they crushed the phallic symbols and other Baal monuments and objects of worship and the place was flattened to the ground and became a public latrine. All for God’s sake. Well, Times Square in 1987 was already a latrine.

Well, I hope you know that we caught on to our “bad attitude”. We left Times Square more confused than ever, falling quiet on the way home, being sure to stop and drink a few beers and get focused on college football and the World Series - let’s say – “friendlier topics”.

A day in the life of a seminarian. To be sure! I know that you have your stories. Your life really is a pilgrimage through the scriptures, like the called and freed Israelites through desert sand to oasis to sand and fear to oasis and trust and fear again.

And you alone can discover and relate your own needs for personal comfort; your desire to be appreciated; your personal encounters with meaningless suffering. And your response, and our church’s responses, to suffering with often meaningless theology and practice. And preaching. Always preparing to preach.

I have never forgotten what that woman in the trash said to me. “You don’t know God and God don’t know you.” Powerful words of judgment from a total stranger caught in my garbage. And a powerful prophecy that once hung over me like a sword but now simply speaks deep truth that I yearn to nurture.

The deep truth that she seemed to know and understand, even in her dementia, is that I have earned no status before God, no claim, no respectability, no virtue. Nothing. She was right about me not knowing God. She laid me bare before God on my “happy religious preaching day” and I was angry about it, because she told me the truth about myself.

In this gospel today from Luke we find Jesus engaged in yet another verbal encounter with the temple authorities. These leaders are at a point of exhaustion. Jesus keeps coming and coming and coming and telling the truth and implicating these leaders for their self-serving theologies and practices. They are angry and defensive.

Luke tells us they wanted to kill Jesus, to rid themselves of that truth that slices through status, through claims of privilege, through socially prescribed respectability and presumptions of virtue.

Today we heard the “Allegory of the Wicked Tenant Farmers.” This is Luke’s version of Mark’s parable that condemns the religious authorities once again. As Luke’s community hears this text read aloud some time late in the 1st Century, they are nodding their head – “yes, the temple is in ruins, the risen Lord lives and feeds us his very essence in communion, yes – Jesus told the truth about the Jews, for they rejected the cornerstone.”

And it is, unfortunately, in this type of allegorical synopsis of “salvation history” that 20 centuries of Christian triumphalism and pogrom and holocaust and crusade and xenophobia have found renewal in nearly every generation. Luke was wrong. I have been to Israel three times. The State of Israel isn’t always glowingly virtuous but it lives and Judaism is vibrant and seeking new life here in the US and all over the world!

So I say to you that the Spirit of Jesus is asking us to do something different with this text. I believe he is asking us to journey into the heart and mind of those bedraggled religious authorities, because “they are us” and serve as our appropriate context. Each of us in this room is seeking or exercising formal religious authority.

If you exercise formal authority in a religious setting for any real length of time you will, you will, become a part of the establishment, for good or for ill. Of the intensely serious and well-intended people that graduate from our seminaries, it is my unstudied thesis that those with sharply delineated theologies -- of any theological stripe – tend to flame out in the ministry within five years. No, they don’t join the establishment, and they don’t not make any lasting impression on it either. And some of them sit outside the ministry they were called to – sullen and resentful.

Why? Because they were more in love with their ideas than the people they led.

My reading of the New Testament is not that the Pharisees and Sadduccees and chief priests and scribes and temple authorities were bad people – they were good people. They just didn’t love the lowly people of God as much as they loved their ideas about God.

Luke states that the temple authorities interrogated Jesus about his source of authority, for the people were hanging on every word he spoke. Of course they were hanging on every word he spoke.

He cared.

He reached out and touched people that lay on the subway floor in their vomit. He walked among the thugs and the pimps and actually spoke to them. He honored the dishonored poor with his jokes and riddles that confounded the honorable Pharisees.

His audience wasn’t an audience but flesh and blood human beings who were as essential to him as the organs of his own body. That was, in essence, Jesus’ authority. It was the difference that has made a difference for the rest of human history. I think Jesus saw the good inherent in each human being. Where the “authority figures” rightly looked for conformity, Jesus was moved with compassion and looked for a “new creation” to emerge.

I am suggesting, therefore, that God sees in us, as we quest toward some form of religious leadership, that which we cannot see in ourselves. God sees that which can be nurtured through spiritual practice to bloom – that which is encouragable – that which can bear the burden of hope in a despairing world -- that which can free us to care. This is Good News. God sees our fullness, our maturity, our health, our full hearts, and wants to love us so profoundly that our full humanity quite simply spills over and out to the world with gratitude. That is my sermon.

But I am not through. I want to do something else. I want to leave you with three confessions in the form of pastoral admonitions:

1. Continue to find your way to some practice of silence and contemplation. I have created much agony for myself and my family and parishioners with good hard work without contemplation. This is essential because others will not likely tell you the truth about yourselves, especially if you are successful. The Spirit will tell you the truth or find a way for you to hear it and it will set you free, if you desire freedom.

2. Avoid periods at the end of sentences in your spiritual journal. God will have God’s way with you someday, some how. This is the trust factor. This is the essence of unfettered faith.

3. Drink deeply from that well of grace that is this seminary – learn, learn, learn – and understand as well that your “theology, as a bundle of ideas” is temporary. You will hate your work and look like an “ass” if your ideas are not adaptable to your authentic experience of life and to the real life experiences of the people who look to you for leadership. Ecclesiologist Kennon Callahan’s rule-of-thumb is to not preach one minute more on any given Sunday than the number of hours you spent the week before in conversation with people sharing their real hurts and hopes with you.

Paul likens all I’ve tried to say to you today to a race. OK!! Let’s go! Running, striving, pressing forward. Yes, from desert sand to oasis to desert sand. From ineptitude to ineptitude. Offering your ideas, and loving your Lord, and nurturing the Lord’s people, and, hopefully, learning amidst all your striving, to be gentle with yourselves along the way. AMEN.