My 9-11 Story Twenty-five Years On

 

My 9-11 Story Twenty-five Years On

In 2001, I was working at the Department of State in the Public Diplomacy regional office of the East Asian and Pacific Bureau, living in North Chevy Chase, Maryland. 

 I needed to go to Seoul Korea for three weeks to prepare for and carry out a program. At that time, Narita Airport in Tokyo was a grim, unpleasant place to spend more than 1 hour on transit. (This has since changed—I now LOVE going through Narita on 12-14 hour trans-Pacific flights, if only for the shower/shave/nap in the hour-rate hotel in the terminal and the great sushi opposite Gate 33 in the International Terminal). At any rate, I wanted to avoid Narita at all costs, and booked a flight accordingly—an early, early morning flight on September 11 out of Dulles airport through Los Angeles, on direct to Seoul.

About a week before my departure, I had a very pointed argument with my dear wife Elena about—what else?—money and family finances. We had two kids in college and one just about to start and it was a sore topic. We both emotionally kind of shut down, and Elena stopped talking much to me.

Knowing I was about to leave for three weeks, and that my schedule required me to get up at three a.m. to meet an airport shuttle, I knew that I was going to leave that morning unable to have a breakfast or chat of any kind with my wife. And I did not want to go off for three weeks on opposite sides of the world not on speaking terms.

So I asked my secretary to change the booking for later in the morning, so Elena and I could wake up and have breakfast together before I left.

The booking that came up was a noon flight out of Reagan National through San Francisco, then Narita, then Seoul. Not good, but I wanted that time at home.

The morning of my flight, I got up at our regular time, and had a nice breakfast with Elena. We had started to talk again. Both of us knew it was important to connect before a separation of three weeks.

I had a cab pick me up at 9:15 a.m for the 12 noon flight from Reagan/ National. We headed down Rock Creek Parkway, that gem of an urban park that looks like the wild woods down the middle of metropolitan Washington D.C.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, as we emerged from the Park onto the broad bottom-lands of the Potomac near the Kennedy Center and Georgetown, my Pakistani driver and I noticed a lot of smoke coming from across the river, in Arlington. It looked like the Pentagon was on fire, but that couldn’t be. There were lots of sirens too.

Just as we took the turn onto the 14th Street Bridge across the Potomac, a Park Police car cut in front of us and stopped us, the first car stopped as they shut down all traffic across the bridges.

“Please officer, can you let us get over? One last car? Otherwise I’ll be late for my flight at Reagan.”

“You won’t be flying anywhere today. The FAA just shut down all air traffic in the continental U.S. Haven’t you been listening the radio?” he added, suspiciously eyeing my distinctly Middle-Eastern-looking cabbie, “the nation’s under attack. The Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon just minutes ago.”

I thought for a moment that I needed to have the driver take me to the State Department, but realizing that major federal buildings were being evacuated, told the driver to take me back to my home. It took 30 minutes to come down from there, but five hours to get back. Cell phones were not working. The traffic of the city quickly slowed to full gridlock.

Listening to the radio in the car now, I felt a terrible chill when the details started coming out. I checked my travel papers in my briefcase, which still had the original booking listed, the one that my secretary had canceled to give me time for breakfast with my wife.

It was AA 77, flying Dulles – Los Angeles, the plane that had been crashed into the Pentagon.

Had I not wanted a few extra minutes to repair things with my wife, I would have been on that plane.

When I finally got home, we hugged a long time, grateful to be together, to be alive.

Our son Charlie hugged us as well. He already knew then that the father of one of his best friends at school, a father who worked in WTC Tower One, was missing. His remains were never found or identified.

I told this story to a friend in Beijing 10 years after 9-11, a Canadian Mennonite minister who coordinated relief work in East Asia and was strongly involved in aiding the hungry in North Korea. He asked, “So what did you learn from this? What is the take-away?”

I had often thought about this in the ten years after the attacks.

I answered him this way: I guess the easy meaning is that God looked after me and took a bad thing (our argument) and turned it into a good thing (keeping me from dying that day). There are many, many examples in scripture where God turns bad things into good.

But that is a little dissatisfying, especially since there were people who were not saved from taking that flight. I think I heard once that the wife of Ted Olsen, George W. Bush’s Solicitor General, had been booked on AA77 at the last minute. She died on the flight together with everyone else.

A simple take-away is that I wanted just a few more minutes with my wife before I took off for three weeks, and the actual result was the blessing of many additional years of sweet, wonderful life. God gives us way more than we deserve, and God’s blessings are ridiculously overabundant when they come. But again, there remains the mystery of suffering, the puzzle of those not spared.

I would be a pathetically ungrateful person if I did not thank God for intervening and keeping me from harm that day. Because despite the apparent randomness of my changing that ticket booking, it really felt to me like God was looking out over me and my family that day.

But I would be a pathetically selfish and obtuse person if I did not mourn deeply those not spared, and wonder at the mystery of a loving almighty and all-good God in a world where true evil and seemingly random horror exists. I would be a total jerk to feel that I somehow deserved saving and those who died didn’t deserve to be saved.

I do not believe that randomness and horror—whether it is in the statistics of victims of terrorism, the random victims of natural disasters, or in the great amount of waste found in natural selection and the evolution of species—is evidence that there is no loving, almighty, all-good God and Maker of us all. I still believe in providence and in the loving God that Jesus called Father.

The fact that Jesus ended up on a cross is no proof that his faith and hope were empty wishes. The very fact that he could continue to declare his trust in God while on the cross (read the rest of the psalm beginning “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me” that he recited while hanging there, Psalm 22), the very fact that in the midst of all the randomness and horror that seem to be the norm of most human life, our hearts simply will not accept this as right and normal, this to me is evidence that we are not created for this world alone, and that in fact we are children destined for another home which we have never yet seen. This is what I told my friend in 2011, and they remain my feelings to this day.

This has become all the clearer to me in the last few years, with my nation's turn from its feeble efforts to pursue its better values and its embrace of a hateful, lying, insane, and downright stupid leadership that mistakes national greatness for brutality, coercion, and bullying. The rise of such a loathsome cabal as Donald Trump, his Republican Congress, and Supreme Court to me is not a sign that there is no God or Providence. Rather, the fact that most people in the country and the world , even increasingly people formerly hoodwinked by such craven criminals, see this as so evil and abnormal is evidence that there is indeed Good at the heart of the world.

Twenty-five years on from 9-11, I feel that each day in my life since then has been a grace, an added plus, a blessing from God. The most important work I did at State Department, much of it now undone by that cabal, came after the attacks. My calling as a priest came about 5 years after I was granted this extra time. So did the ten years of helping as principal caregiver my beloved Elena through her suffering and death from Parkinson's disease. As did my retirement from State and subsequent work as an Episcopal Priest, full-time and retired, in Southern Oregon, Hawaii, and Northern California. I've seen my kids struggle and thrive as adults. And I fell in love and married Will, and found joy as an out gay man. I am making great progress on my work on the Ashland Bible. All of this is a blessing, a grace.

And maybe that is the point: all our times and all our days—of each and every one of us—are graces. We must be thankful for each day, and all the blessings we see, and know in our hearts that God loves us all, though we do not understand how the world's brokenness can continue and even sometimes seem to triumph in the presence of such love.

Thanks be to God. 

 

Love's Tourettes (Proper 18A)

  

      Love’s Tourettes
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18 Year A RCL)
6 September 2026--9:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of St. Luke, Grants Pass (Oregon)

Readings: Ezekiel 33:7-11; Psalm 119:33-40; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

 

There was a rock band in Beijing when I lived there before moving to Ashland.  One of its members was a senior U.S. Embassy official, the person charged with most of the financial rules negotiations between the U.S. and China.  This band had the best name for a Rock and Roll Band I have ever heard: Love’s Tourettes.   Yes, that’s right.  It was named after the neurological disorder known as Tourette Syndrome, marked by severe stammering, inability to get one’s words out, and occasional uncontrollable bursts of deeply obscene and offensive language.  Almost none of us needed anyone to explain the joke:  sometimes in love we are so nervous and fearful that words escape us and, as glib as we might be at other times, we find ourselves grasping for words, unable to express the simplest of ideas.  Sometime in love, especially when it goes bad or runs into conflict, we are prone to rage, and the vilest of language just comes out, usually loudly. 

 

Love’s Tourettes:  we become tongue tied for fear of repelling the beloved, or fear of losing the beloved.  We are reduced to rage and blue streaks when things are going wrong and we fear the same thing.  It is the very intimacy and vulnerability we establish in deep relationship that makes such relationships so painful at times. 

 

Today’s Gospel has a set of rules for dealing with conflict within the Church, within the beloved community.  They seek to help us cure Love’s Tourettes we might have when relationships go wrong among those who walk the way with Jesus.  The rules are based on the idea that over time, we are influenced by those we spend our time with, for good or for ill.  If we’re with someone who makes us a better person, that’s good.  If it’s a case of a bad apple spoling the bushel of apples, that’s bad.  You know the basic outline:  first talk to the one who has offended in private.  If that doesn’t resolve it, then go with two other people who can witness the exchange and bring some objectivity to it, and if necessary, assist each party to listen to the other and improve their communication.  Finally, if that doesn’t work and the offender persists, “they shall be to you as a pagan and a tax collector.”    Well, what does that mean? 

 

A common reading is this:  this is gradual escalation.  Try out a one-one-one talk where public grandstanding can be avoided.  If that’s no good, call in witnesses so they can help you brow beat the offender into submission, as Methodists used to say and Baptists still say, “labor with the brother.”   And if that is no good, then kick his sorry behind out of the community altogether.  To me, this understanding is basically, a polite form of Love’s Tourettes.  I may not swear at you, but I am reduced to inarticulate silence when I say, “I wash my hands of you.” 

 

I wonder if that’s a right reading.  We know Jesus said “If someone sins against you seven times in a day..., keep on forgiving them seven times" (Luke 17:3-4) and that one form of the saying corrects any misunderstanding we might have by adding, "don’t just forgive seven times, but seventy-seven,” that is, never stop forgiving.  This is probably the original form of the saying from the historical Jesus, using a striking and memorable turn of the phrase, and its emendation to just seven times and by adding the words “if they say they’re sorry,” is clearly the creation of the later church trying to make rules out of the legacy of Jesus' sayings.  

 

The saying in today’s Gospel, with its law-like procedural character and concern for rules to run a community, is almost certainly a creation of the author of the St. Matthew Gospel.  It was written in Syrian Antioch for a mixed Jewish-pagan church, one with lots of conflicts and intercultural strife.  It is trying to create a Standard Operating Procedure for managing church conflict.   But remember this:  Matthew, also called Levi, the disciple of Jesus that this Gospel was always associated with, was originally a tax-collector.  And a major part of the church it is written to are gentiles, or less politely, pagans. 

 

So when it says, “let them be for you a tax-collector or a pagan” I think it is not necessarily saying this is the last straw and you have got to break of relations with the person.  Rather, it is saying that communication has broken down.  Community has gone by the boards.  The relationship between the offender and the offended had turned out to be a non-relationship, or an antagonistic one, like the relationships of Matthew’s Jewish readers with tax-collectors or pagans.  It is not saying give up on that nasty person because you couldn’t use friendly persuasion or browbeat them into conformity.  It is saying face up to the face that your relationship is bad.  Your communication is non-existent. 

 

Why did Jesus teach “never stop forgiving”?  Why did he teach, “don’t give up on someone?   Why did he keep on forgiving, even the worst things? 

 

There is a hint in today’s Hebrew Scripture lesson: “As I live, says Yahweh God, I take no pleasure when a wicked person dies, but rather when they turn from their ways and live.”   This passage is the scriptural warrant for the Church’s doctrine of the universal salvific will of God, that God wants everyone to be saved, for everyone to come out alright.  It comes from Jesus’ basic description of God as a loving parent, who gives good gifts to all his children.  It is the principal scriptural problem with John Calvin’s doctrine of a double predestination, one to salvation and heaven, and one to damnation and hell.   

 

The fact that God wishes good for all is the reason in this passage from Ezekiel for the prophets to warn people—it gives them a chance to turn back from the things that will destroy them.  

 

God wants us all to come out okay, and thus we need to help warn people who are going to where things will not be okay.  But this general desire to help and to show love by engaging others can have a distorted form:  where we try to remake all others in our own image.    This is why a desire for the brotherhood and sisterhood of the human family is often corrupted at best by a proselytizing urge and at worst an urge to holy war. 

 

Recognizing a break down in relationship, recognizing that someone has become a stranger to us, an alien, a pagan, or a tax-collector does not mean giving up on them.  Quite the opposite:  it means never giving up on them, never stopping to the engage and try to communicate, even when they have walked away from us.   

 

Never give up.  Don’t cave into Love’s Tourettes:  This has to do with not just the nature of God, all-loving, ever able, desiring life and health and prosperity for all.   It has to do with the nature human beings: always eager to turn things into an us and them game, always ready to confuse the line between good and evil that runs down the middle of each and every human heart with a line between one group of people and another or even one person and another. 

 

This applies not to life in the church, but also life in any community.  In our currently bitterly divided country, it seems we often simply will not talk religion or politics, or anything else of importance, with anyone who differs from us.  This is unfortunate, since it makes it impossible for anyone on either side to change.  We mustn’t let our grievance against anyone, no matter how justified, make us simply cut them out of our life.  I’d like to give one example from my own life, when I was working for the Department of State at US Embassies overseas, one that involves President Richard Nixon. 

    

 

50 years after he made the statement that we won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore, both democrats and republicans indeed love to vilify him. His criminal acts that drove him from the White House, his at times truculent and suspicious personality, are just too easy a target. 

 

But you know, the Chinese love Richard Nixon, because “only Nixon could go to China.”  And I have a fond place in my heart for him, despite his flaws.   In the fall of 1989 in Beijing, he did something for me, my family, and my colleagues at the U.S. Embassy.  Despite private efforts by President George Herbert Walker Bush to repair relations with the Chinese regime after the Tian'anmen Massacre, relations were getting worse and worse.   The Chinese leadership, besieged and isolated, had focused its anger on dissidents and supporters of democracy.  The U.S. Embassy had granted refuge to the leading two Chinese dissidents in the scary days right after the Massacre, and as a result, the leadership sent in scores of military troops wearing police insignia to surround the Embassy compounds to provide what they called “security.”  They were a dangerous and harassing presence, stationed every 2 meters of so, facing in toward the compounds with riot helmets on and AK-47 machine guns drawn.  As things got worse over weeks, they clearly got the order to specifically target for harassment the children of the Embassy officers through whom the dissidents had sought refuge and in whose office complex they had been housed.  My eleven-year-old son was stopped, screamed at, and had an AK-47 dry-fired in his face:  shooting without ammunition, to make the target think he was being shot.  This also happened to the eleven-year-old daughter of a close colleague.  There was a sense that if things kept going in the way they were, relations would have to be broken and Embassy staff withdrawn.  Into this came former President Nixon.  He was invited by the Chinese government to come and help repair things.  He was briefed as soon as he arrived, and immediately sent a message to the staff of Chinese supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, whom he was to meet the next day.  He said that he had been told of the situation.  “If the extra guards are still present around the Embassy when I get up tomorrow, I will go directly to the airport and return to the U.S.  I will not meet with you with this harassment going on.”    The next morning came, and all the military had been withdrawn.  Our families could again live in confidence that we were not going to be harassed or worse.  A couple years later, Nixon returned, and in an Embassy gathering to meet him, I was able to privately give my personal thanks for what he had done, and say how much it had mattered for us.  He teared up, smiled, and said, “Thank you for telling me that, you know, it’s not often these days that anyone tells me I’ve done something good!” 

 

Richard Nixon, who has become for many such a caricature of evil, himself still cared about being told he had done a good thing. Like all of us, the line between good and evil was down the middle of his heart, and God still enticed him to follow his better angels.  All of us are thus enticed by God to do good, because God loves us all.  That’s why we should never give up on people.  That’s why we should never succumb to Love’s Tourettes. 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

 

Upon the Rock, Against Hell's Gates (Propoer 16A)

  

Upon the Rock, Against Hell's Gates

23 August 2026 10:00 am Sung Mass

Proper 16A

Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit, Sutherlin (OR)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Exod. 1:8- 2:10; Psalm 124; Rom.12:1-8; Matt. 16:13-20

 

Today’s Gospel tells about Jesus giving Peter a new name and what are called “the keys of the kingdom.”  In popular imagination, that means Peter has become the doorkeeper of heaven, like in a story once told me by one of my Jesuit professors:

“Bill Gates dies.  When he gets to the Pearly Gates, there is a long line of people waiting to be interviewed by St. Peter before he’ll let them in.  He goes up to the front of the line and waits on the side close to St. Peter, who turns to him and asks him if there is anything he can do for him.  “I’m Bill Gates.  I was one of the richest men in the world and gave hundreds of millions of dollars for projects to help the disadvantaged and stop malaria.  Can’t you get me around this long, long line?”  St. Peter replies, “Oh no, no.  This is heaven’s door.  All are equal in the sight of God.  There are no favorites here, and certainly neither rich nor poor.  You must go and stand in the line and wait your turn like everybody else, Mr. Gates.”  After what seems an eternity, he is only half way up the line when from the rear comes a commotion, “Make way, make way for the Pope!”  At that a man in a cope and miter, croisier in hand, quickly goes to the head of the line, where St. Peter admits him into heaven him without further ado.  Bill Gates asks the woman in front of him to hold his place in the line, and goes back up to confront the Saint.  “Yes, Mr. Gates?” says Peter.  “I thought you said ‘there are no favorites here’ and ‘all are alike in the sight of God.’”  “Yes, that’s true, and your question is… ?”   “What about that guy in the funny hat with the shepherd’s crook?  He cut the line and you let him.  That’s not fair.”  St. Peter, with a look of sudden recognition on his face replies, shaking his head, “Oh no!  But he was the pope! It’s been a thousand years since we’ve had one of those get in up here!”

 

But Peter as the doorkeeper of heaven is not what today’s Gospel is about.  

The scene takes place in Gentile territory, near the city Caesarea Philippi, a city in the foothills of Mount Hermon, in what we now call the Golan Heights.  Now called in Arabic Banias, it was originally “Panea,” the City of Pan, because it was a center of worship of that Greek god.  This satyr, half man half goat, was a nature and fertility deity, usually represented in a state of sexual excitement and playing reed pipes, leading his devotees in drunken orgies. 

 

The temple was located at the mouth of a large cave which at that time had a spring that was one of the headwaters of the Jordan.  The cave’s mouth opens in a large face of exposed bedrock, upon which the Temple of Pan was built, a cave people thought looked like a spooky gate leading to the underworld.  

 

Jesus in today’s gospel takes a field trip to Caesarea Philippi with his closest followers, most of them in their twenties.  Later Rabbis would rule the city as totally off-limits for followers of God, a place seen as “Sin City,” where “What you do in Caesarea stays in Caesarea.” 

Jesus asks his followers, “Who do people say the Messiah is?” and “Who do you say I am?” 

Simon replies, “You are the Messiah.  The Son of the Living God.” 

Jesus replies by telling Simon that his recognition of Jesus’ identity did not come from publicly available data, but rather from God speaking in his heart and mind.   

Then Jesus gives Simon a new name:  Rock.  In the Aramaic he would have been speaking, the word is Qepha’.  It is where the name Cephas, one of the Greek names for Peter in the New Testament, comes from.  When you translate Qepha’ into Greek rather than just transliterate it as Cephas, it becomes Petros, our familiar name Peter. 

The rock image used in the name is important for two reasons.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Rock of Israel, the one reliable thing they can cling to when all else fails or fades, is God himself.  It is also the place where God puts you when he wants you safe, “the rock that is higher” than the turmoil you see about you.  It is from a stone that God makes water spring for the children of Isra’el in the desert.  It is also the foundation of the house built by the wise man in one of Jesus’ parables, as opposed to the fool’s foundation of sand.

So he is giving Simon a name to remind him of the source of his knowledge and of his strength. 

“You are Rock, and upon this Rock I will build my Church.”  The Greek here uses two different words, one masculine (petros “stone”) and one feminine (petra “massive outcropping of bedrock”).  But again, in the Aramaic Jesus would have been speaking, there is only one word—Qepha’. 

Now Roman Catholics have traditionally differed in their interpretation of this verse from Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christians.  Rome has always insisted that it is the person of Peter, and the role he plays (the “Petrine Office”) in the Church that is the foundation stone Jesus refers to. They link it to Peter later becoming Bishop of Rome and say that Peter’s role as Bishop of Rome and leader of the other bishops, the papacy, increasingly monarchic over the centuries, is what is at issue.   Predictably, Protestants have always the “Rock” at issue is faith alone, apart from works—the confession of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God made by Peter in the story—that is the bedrock of the Church.   The Eastern Orthodox have generally said that the Rock is divine revelation, the act of God making Jesus’ identity known (“flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father in Heaven”). 

The fact that Jesus here follows his play on words with an immediate statement of Church authority (“what you bind on earth, God will bind, what you untie, God will untie”) and ultimate success (“the gates of Hell shall not prevail against you”) has lead most modern scholars from all these traditions to agree that the story in Matthew is indeed about the leading role of Peter in the early Church rather than later papal presumptions, salvation through works alone, or Eastern Christian mysticism.  

Within three decades of Jesus’ death, Christians were divided between Jewish congregations who saw James the brother of Jesus as the natural heir to Jesus as leader and wholly gentile congregations who saw Paul, the missionary who had converted them, in this role.  Matthew’s story here is, as it were, taking the “compromise candidate” for Church leader.  Rather than either of the favorites of the two major parties in the early church, Matthew’s source says it is Peter. 

James came to believe in Jesus only after the resurrection, and the Jewish communities he led wanted to turn gentile converts into Jews of one kind or another; Paul became a Christian long after Jesus’ death, after an infamous career of persecuting the followers of Jesus.  He then seemed to go to the opposite extreme by insisting that Gentile converts and even fellow Jews not observe Jewish Law.  Peter, however, was the one who was personally close to Jesus during his lifetime, was the leader of the inner circle of the Twelve that spent the most time with Jesus, and was a Jew who came to accept and even embrace the outreach of this originally strange sect of Judaism to non-Jews and non-observers of Jewish Law.

 “You are Rock, and upon this Rock I will build my Church.”  From all the other stories we read in the New Testament, this “Rock” was not all that solid to begin with.  “Rocky” might be a better way of describing his impetuousness, and extremes in devotion followed by extremes in failure.  In Mark’s version of this story, immediately after the confession of Peter, Jesus does not give him the keys to the kingdom, but rather criticizes him for not accepting his prediction of the coming passion and scolds him and says, “Get behind me, Satan!”  (Mark 8:27-30; 31-33).   Elsewhere, we read of Peter’s silly reaction to the marvelous epiphany on the Mount of Transfiguration.  We elsewhere see him walking on water through faith and then, faith faltering, sinking into the waves.  We see him sleeping through Jesus' prayers at Gethsemane, and then disavowing Jesus three times during the Passion.  But finally, after Jesus has appeared to the women, Peter is the first male disciple (at that misogynistic time, the first legally acceptable witness) to see the Risen Lord.  One of the earliest fragments of early Christian tradition found in the New Testament is preserved in St. Paul’s formulaic recitation, “For I passed on to you what was first passed on to me, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared, first to Cephas and the Twelve, . . . then to James and the apostles” (1 Cor. 15: 3-7).

So the name “Rock” reminds Simon of who it is that is his rock.  It is this connection that gives authority and power to Simon’s ministry. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom.”   The image of keys that open irrevocably or close definitively is taken from a series of passages in the Hebrew Scriptures and Intertestamental literature.  The idea is that Peter’s actions will be definitive and reflect the will of God (cf. Isa 22:22, 23; Job 12:14; 1 Enoch 1-16).    

“What you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  This passive construction is a euphemism for “What you declare as binding, God will bind.  What you declare as loosened, God will loosen.” So in Matthew’s view, it is Peter’s ruling on the terms and conditions of gentile entry into the Church that take priority over Paul’s or James’, and this because Peter’s rock was God himself, as shown by his early confession of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God.  

The Church built on this Rock, says Jesus, will be able to defeat even the “Gates of Hell.” The image is a common Old Testament image for death itself (Isa 38:10; Job 38:17; Psa 9:14; Wis 16:13).    

But set here in Caesarea Philippi, the reference could also be an image of the Church’s ultimate defeat of the evils of the world, as represented by the Temple of Pan at the Gates of Hell, in Sin City.  Gates were a symbol of defensive military action, not attack. So here the church is seen are seen as a vanguard in an effort to reclaim this enemy-occupied territory we call our world.  Based on the Rock of our Salvation, we simply cannot be defeated by the horrors of the world we see before us, including sick religion and death itself.    

Friends, Jesus here is asking not just Simon, but all of us, “Who do people say I am? And who do you say I am?”  He is offering us new names and true identities, the authentic names and selves we were created for but which we have wandered far from.

 

Faith is trust in unseen truth, and looks beyond the visible, beyond the temptations and distractions around us, beyond the Temple of Pan, the Gates of Hell, and beyond the messed-up lives we see about us and which we lead.  It looks even beyond suffering and Death.  If we rely on our Rock, and build upon the firm foundation of Jesus Himself, then our unstable, unsteady selves, our “rocky” selves, will be transformed.  And together, as community in Him as He is in community with the Father, we will be unstoppable in charging up the rocky slope, breaking down the gates of Hell and Death, and changing ourselves and the world.  

 

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

 

A Dog Named Hoover (Proper 15A)

Christ and the Canaanite Woman (1594–1595) by Annibale Carracci

  

A Dog named Hoover

 Proper 15A 

16 August 2026; 10:30 am Sung Mass

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D. 

The Mission Church of St. Paul the Apostle, Crescent City (CA)

Genesis 45:1-15; Psalm 133; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

 

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen

I once had a friend in trouble tell me that he did not feel he could pray and ask for God’s help because, as he said, “I’m just too rotten a person.  I’m not even sure there is a God, and if there is, I definitely am not the kind of person God would be interested in helping.”

 

Society at large and religions in particular create and define themselves by establishing boundaries—the believer vs unbeliever, righteous vs the wicked.  This can be a real burden when we find ourselves outside of those boundaries. 

 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus encounters a person who by all standards is outside the boundaries—he is traveling near the primarily Gentile territory of what is now Southern Lebanon, and a woman approaches.  Strike One—women were not supposed to directly engage with strangers who were men. 

 

She is a pagan, in Matthew anachronistically called a Canaanite, that Old Testament people seen as the Israelites’ ultimate enemies, unclean pagans engaging in immoral idolatrous worship.  Strike Two.  

 

In Mark’s version of the story, she is a Greek, of mixed Syrian and Phoenician heritage.  A half-breed pagan to boot, coming from the two great oppressors of the Jewish people before the Romans arrived.  Strike Three. 

 

She might as well be wearing a bell and calling out before her, unclean, unclean. 

 

But this woman is worried about her daughter, afflicted with mental illness, thought to be the work of evil spirits.  She has heard that this Jewish wonder-worker Jesus can expel such demons.  So she rushes up and loudly begs him to heal her daughter, using language that is more Jewish than pagan, “O Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me and my daughter.”  The reference is probably to an inter-testamental belief that King Solomon, literally the “Son of David,” could cure bodily or mental ills.  She has heard that Jesus is perhaps a descendant of David and has some of Solomon’s legendary power to heal. 

Jesus ignores her.  It is almost like he cannot hear her.  

She only gets louder. 

 

The way Jesus reacts is quite offensive to us of modern sensibilities.  It was also offensive to ancient sensibilities, and that is the reason that Luke drops this story from those he borrows from Mark’s Gospel. 

 

In the Creed, we say that we believe that God became incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human in the person of Jesus.  But we usually don’t like to see Jesus as quite this human.  Here he seems to be cold and unfeeling. As she gets louder, he ignores her all the more.  

 

His reaction is strange, given the fact that he has already in Matthew’s Gospel healed a gentile in gentile territory, that the verses preceding this story tell of Jesus breaking down barriers of clean and unclean in Jewish Law, and that many of his parables there seem to focus on the overflowing abundance of God's kindness. 

 

When the disciples just can’t bear it any longer, they ask Jesus to break his silence and just send the woman away.  His reply is “I am focused on my work in calling my fellow Jews to change their hearts and ways; I can’t take the time for this woman.” 

 

She begs him directly, “Lord, help me.” 

 

His reply here is no longer simply cold and unfeeling, it’s downright nasty: “I can’t take food set aside for the children and throw it away for you dogs to eat.”  The slur made by using the word dogs, seems downright bigoted.  

 

Christians have tried to explain away the slur, or take it off of Jesus’ lips ever since:  As I said before, Luke simply deletes the story and does not include it in his Gospel.  Some of the Church Fathers say that Jesus was simply testing the woman’s faith by using the slur ironically to see if she would persist (as if putting “air quotes” around the slur makes it any less offensive!) 

 

Others have tried to take the sting out of the phrase by noting that the Greek word used in the text is a diminutive kynarios “doggie,” instead of the more common kynos “dog.”   But this just means domesticated dogs, still seen as unclean, instead of vicious and mangy wild or feral ones.  It does not make the slur less offensive.  

 

Again, Jesus' talk here about the economy of divine blessing almost as if it were a zero-sum game is strange.  In his previous feeding of the crowd on the hillside, there was a ridiculous overabundance of leftovers.  But the point appears to be that Jesus is so focused on his mission to fellow Jews that he cannot hear the woman.  Matthew, with his concern for keeping Jewish Law and portraying Jesus as the new Moses, does not appear to notice the ugliness of the scene as it unfolds.  

 

My friend, with his fear of praying to a God who supposedly judges him unworthy and beyond the bounds of grace, would see someone familiar, I think, in this portrayal of an unfeeling Jesus wholly consumed by boundaries and limits. 

 

But the woman persists. She takes Jesus’ harsh word and turns it on its head with a bit of wit and chutzpah: “Oh, but dogs under the table can eat the crumbs that fall, can’t they?”  It is as if he had said, "this food is too good for you dogs," and she had replied, "Meh! So I'm a dog.  But don't call me Rover, call me Hoover.  'Cuz I can hoover up all those scraps just as they fall from that high and mighty table of yours!"   This kind of “battle of the wits” exchange is seen in Middle Eastern and Arab literature regularly, and is akin to the Rap world’s commonplace of a contest of insult and replying insult, usually involving the opponent’s mother. 

 

Jesus’ reply is amazing.  “Great is your faith, woman!”  The rhetoric and word order stresses GREAT.  “Wow! You’re a GIANT in faith, lady. I’ve never seen such trust! Finally, I find someone who gets it, and surprise, surprise, she’s a pagan!  She’s a Canaanite! She’s a she!”

 

The exorcism is performed at a distance, almost by divine remote control, just like in the two other stories of Jesus healing at a distance, the healing of the centurion’s servant or male lover (Matt. 8:5-13) and of the royal official’s son (John 4:46-54).  Note in all cases, the healing at a distance is done for people who don’t think they’re worthy to have Jesus come under their roofs.  “But speak the word only and my soul shall be healed.” 

 

Reading this story as if the Canaanite woman is a model of faith for us to follow misses the point:  this is not a story trying to say that if only your faith were great enough, God will hear your prayers and grant you your wishes.  Faith here is not a magic trick.   In such magical thinking lies only pain—because when bad things happen to people, whether they are good people or bad people, this way of thinking chalks it up as the fault of those who did not get their way with God.  And if good things happen, then it is the result of the successful use of the trick.  Such a view reduces the Lord’s Book of Blessings to simply a Book of Spells.  

 

Put bluntly, this story isn’t about our interior state of mind, or about whether we are faithful enough for God’s blessings.  The focus of the story is Jesus, not the woman.   In this scene, Jesus, who loves a good joke and regularly tells parables with brutally witty edges, is bested in a contest of wits by a wise-cracking woman desperate for her child’s health.  She takes the callous slur Jesus has unthinkingly adopted from the society around him, and turns it on its head.  Jesus in response, instead of glowering and shouting “BLASHPEMY, OFF WITH YOU, PAGAN WOMAN!” and blasting her right then and there, he laughs out loud, sees he has been had, and recognizes the faith, the trust, in the woman’s heart that drives her persistence and audacity. 

 

And so he turns back from—repents of, as it were—the casual callousness stemming from his previous focus on mission boundaries.  To be sure, we believe that Jesus was like us in all things BUT sin.  Matthew is not portraying here a Jesus repenting of a sin, but rather a Jesus who is opening himself further to the unexplored country to which God is leading him.  This scene anticipates the great shift in the Christian faith from mission only to Jews to mission to all.  It reflects the great vision of St. Paul where “In Christ, there is no Jew nor Gentile, no slave nor free, no woman nor man.”

 

To me it is very comforting to think that Jesus could be shamed by a joke into changing his view and learn thereby to spread God’s grace more widely than he previously had thought appropriate. 

 

To me it is very comforting to think that a Canaanite half-breed pushy woman talking out of turn could get the best of Jesus and as a result Jesus would bless her simply because of who and what he was, and because of, not despite, who and what she was.  For those of us who have been beaten up by the church, it gives hope.  And that’s the case whether we are women, divorced and remarried, non-conformers to the church’s demands, gay, foreign, non-Christian, independent thinkers, or any other kind of “sinner” (there go those air quotes again!)

 

Remember the words of the Prayer of Humble Access from the Prayer Book Rite One Eucharist:  “We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.”

 

None of us should feel like my friend, afraid and ashamed to approach Jesus.  Maybe a whole lot of pushy persistence on our part is in order, a bit more witty and humorous audacity. When God appears forbidding to us, that is precisely when we need to remember that God’s basic nature is always to have compassion, and that, despite whatever it may be that we think makes us unworthy to receive Jesus under our roof, or gather up crumbs from under his table. We must learn to ignore that nasty, forbidding Jesus, whether he is using air quotes or not.  We must learn, like this Canaanite woman, this dog named Hoover, to focus on the Compassion of God, and simply trust Jesus, and know that we will be healed. 

 

In the name of God, Amen

 

Stillness in the Heart of God (Proper 14A)

  

Elijah in the Wilderness, Raphael or Raphael’s school

 

Stillness in the Heart of God

Proper 14A 

Homily delivered at

Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Sutherlin OR

By the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

9 August 2026; 10 a.m. Sung Mass

1 Kings 19:9-18; Psalm 85:8-13; Romans 10:5-15; Matthew 14:22-33

 

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

One of my favorite Bible stories as a boy was the story in 1 Kings 18 about Elijah’s conflict with Ba’al worshipers. He challenges Ba’al’s priests to a great “Who hears our prayers?” contest on Mount Carmel.   He dares them to go face to face with him and build competing altars:  whichever god sends down fire from heaven and consumes the sacrifice, that one is the true God.  The Ba’al worshippers, favorites of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, and all the rich and powerful, build their altar, put all sorts of dry tinder around it, and begin praying. Their noisy, self-flagellating prayers don’t seem to work.  Mendelsohn pictures the scene well in his great Oratorio the Elijah: the Ba’al worshippers work themselves into a frenzy, chanting “Ba’al, We Cry to Thee,” and then more frantically “Hear our prayer O Ba’al,” only to be met with four complete measures of absolute silence. “Is your God sleeping?” taunts Elijah, “or perhaps gone to the restroom?”  The priests of Ba’al pray all the louder: again, nothing.  Then Elijah builds his altar, sacrifices a bull, and even pours water all over the wood (I’ve always wondered if it was lighting fluid!) He prays, “Show ‘em what’s what, Lord!”  His prayer is immediately answered by a flash of lightning and fire from heaven that consumes his sacrifice.  Elijah wins, and the outraged crowd of spectators chase and kill the priests of Ba’al. 

 

I think I liked the story so much because it is dramatic, at points funny, with all the color of a Hollywood Western.  Elijah beats the priests of Ba’al just like Sherriff Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday beat the Clantons and McLauries at the O.K. Corral.  Law prevails; the bullies are defeated.  Heady stuff for an 8-year-old boy.  

 

It was only later, when I was 10 or so, that I learned the sequel to the Mt. Carmel story, today’s Hebrew Scriptures lesson.  And I was an adult before I learned that unlike in the film, the OK Corral did not solve anything, but only deepened and aggravated the conflict in Tombstone.  

 

In the Elijah story, Ahab and Jezebel retaliate for the murder of their priests, sending soldiers to massacre the prophets of YHWH. Elijah flees for his life.  He hides in a cave on Mt. Horeb or Sinai, where Moses had received the Law.   And there, in one last great epiphany before he prepares to end his ministry and turn it over to Elisha, he learns that maybe he had misunderstood things on Mt. Carmel. 

 

Archaeological digs have turned up dozens of small representations of Ba’al, as well as texts with prayers and liturgies from his cult. The picture we get from these sounds strangely contemporary and familiar.  One scholar summarizes it thus:

 

“[For Ba’al worshippers, the] supreme good, the good life, consists in satisfaction of human material needs.  This is all we ask of the gods, and this is all they can give us.  They bless us in full when we they satisfy these needs not only in the minimum necessary for survival, but in abundance, so that we enjoy not only the simple life, but also the material comforts of life.  We ask of the gods more than meat and drink; we ask wealth, to that degree which will enable a man to purchase every satisfaction which he craves.  The highest of pleasures is the pleasure of sex: life offers nothing finer, nothing which raises a man to the level of the divine.  Consequently, the difference of the sexes exists only that the male may have this supreme satisfaction; woman is his possession, and her noblest function is to satisfy his sexual appetite.  When she does this, she is a goddess; otherwise, she is a high-grade domestic animal, a drudge, not fully a human being.  Society exists, under the patronage of the gods, to create the conditions in which this good life may be attained.  We must have law, order, restraint, but only to that degree which will prevent human crime from corrupting the good life of the group; the important thing is that law and government should protect wealth, material goods, and should make it possible for every man, within the limits of his capacity, to enjoy himself as he desires.  But the power which puts these good things within a man’s reach should not be restrained, and law and order should not protect the weak; for ultimately it is power that makes the good life possible.  Such is the life of the gods, and such, when the gods are well disposed, is the life they offer to men.”  (John L. McKenzie, SJ, The Two Edged Sword: And Interpretation of the Old Testament [Milwaukee: Bruce, 1956], p. 54). 

 

Ba’al was a god of wealth, power, and pleasure.  He was seen as backing the winners and abandoning losers.  With Ba’al in charge, you had to suck up and kick down: be a toady to the powerful and then treat subordinates with impunity, cheat those with whom you did business, take advantage of the poor and downtrodden, treat the objects of your sexual desire as mere things to be graded and scored, use bullying and force to have your way with others.  You could enjoy unjust privilege with impunity and not a whiff of shame or guilt.  Ba’al devotees were “quality,” winners,” and the “best, smartest, and strongest” of all.  Ba’al is described as a thrower of lightning and thunder, an earth shaker, and sender of whirlwinds and wild fires.  His name, Ba’al, means “Master” or “husband,” and so he was often confused and conflated with YHWH, whose regular use name was Adonai, or “Lord” or “master.”  We have idols labeled as Ba’al and his bedmate Asherah.  Sometimes these are also labeled Yahweh and his Asherah. 

 

But YHWH was the God of all, not just the powerful.  YHWH took care of the widow and orphan, the alien and sojourner, and raised the poor from the ashes.   YHWH was also seen as the source of blessing and prosperity as well as woe, but this was not based on partisanship or support of privilege.  Things that displease YHWH included oppressing the poor, cheating others, dissembling and lying, and practicing malice against the powerless.  YHWH demanded trust and ethical behavior from his people, and ethics meant first and foremost fairness, honesty, compassion, and integrity.  And these things were constraints upon how you enjoyed the blessings, how you took your pleasure.     

 

Elijah does not want anyone to confuse Canaan’s petty fertility fetish, enabler and supporter of the powerful, the rich, and the lustful, with the Holy One of Israel, who demands justice and compassion from all.  That’s why on Mt. Carmel, he Elijah dares his opponents to a contest to see who is the true storm god who can throw thunderbolts, YHWH or Ba’al.  The flash, fire, and fury vindicates Elijah and his supporters massacre the priests of Ba’al.  As satisfying as this story is as a Western, it does not end here.  Elijah’s opponents turn the tables, and kill Yahweh’s prophets too, and begin pursuing Elijah.  Thus Elijah learns, as Jesus later teaches, that those who live by the sword can also die by the sword.   Apparently, all that fury and fire on Carmel didn’t really give Elijah what he needed to truly defeat the great bully god.  That’s how he ends up hiding in a cave on Mount Horeb. 

 

The text in Hebrew of this story is subtle in its use of verbal forms, and when you render these in English it becomes clear that the point of this story is that YHWH and Ba’al are not at all alike.

 

“A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing the rocks, before the Lord, but the Lord was no longer in the whirlwind.  Then an earthquake, but the Lord was no longer in the earthquake.  And then a fire, but God was no longer in the fire.  Finally, there was a still breeze, and the sound of sheer silence.  And when Elijah heard this, he hid his face in his cloak” because he knew that this is where God was.

 

The power and love of God are not found in God’s ability to give us what we want.  God is not a supporter of privilege and abuse of the down-trodden.  God is not in the flash, the fire, and fury.  We sully God by putting him on par with the petty idols of all those about us. 

 

“God blesses us materially when we do what’s right and curses us materially when we do not”—this is the great heresy of the “Prosperity Gospel” taught in many of America’s evangelical churches today.  It is, simply, Ba’al worship, idolatry.  

 

Many whites who call themselves Christians in the last few elections have voted for a candidate who models bullying behavior toward women, the poor, and aliens, boasts his wealth as a sign of his competence to rule, and declares without a whiff of irony that he has nothing of which he should repent, confess, or regret. In him, the golden calf has become a golden toilet bowl.  In the degree that white Evangelicals and Roman Catholics support him because of these misdoings rather despite them, they all fall down at the altar of Ba’al.

 

But God is in utter silence, not the sound and fury.  Listening to silence, contemplating quietness, waiting for subtlety—these are the hallmarks of a life devoted to pursuit of the true spirit.  Noise and flash might on occasion happen, but usually God speaks to us in the silence of our stumbling hearts, seeking coherent expression and understanding, in what the King James Bible translates as “a still, small voice.”

St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta said, “In the silence of the heart, God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.”

As today’s Epistle says, the justice that comes from trusting God is not far away, high in the heaven or low in the abyss, but is at hand, in our very heart.  God does not favor one race, nation, class, or tribe over another.  As the Gospel says, the the flash and awe of seeing Jesus walking on the stormy sea is not enough to keep us on top of the waves.  Flash and awe do not drive out the fear that sinks Peter.  To walk, we must fully trust Jesus.  Trust comes in moments of silent reflection, not in noise and fury. 

 

May we cast away our idols and our worship of Ba’al with all his flash and fury. May we learn to sit in the darkened Holy of Holies, before the empty throne of God, and simply listen to the silence.   May we learn in that silence to hear the voice of the God who is love itself.  Amen.