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I sincerely apologize to those of you in the chapel who have to look at my face at that scale . I'm happy to provide counseling, referrals to anyone who needs to recover from this experience. Will you

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pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight. O Lord our rock and our Redeemer. Amen. I want to take you on

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a little trip this morning. Come with me to Virginia Theological Seminaries. Way Back in 2004, We're in more hall, one of the four residents halls . We have full meal service at the dining hall

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. So there isn't a full kitchen. There's a little kitchenette placed between the hallway and the student lounge . Are you with me? It's great picture me there in that student lounge, committing the number two

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sin of seminary life gossip. A student who all called joe and I are gossiping about another student who all call Mark markets tall, kind handsome cradle Episcopalian from the south. So joe and I of course

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resent him immediately. Not only is a handsome and kind, the other strike against him. And the subject of our gossip Is that he's on the other side of the key theological debate at Virginia Seminary circa

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2004. The ongoing argument is whether humans are born good or bad. I a wise 26 year old and firmly an Augustinian is I've done quite a lot of babysitting at this point and have confirmed that Children

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are adorable little monsters, firmly steeped in original sin . Mark who appears to be perfect in every way and is a naive 23 and new to the seminary thinks people are born good, or at least the

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version of him were gossiping about believes that I've never had a class with him or asked him his opinion . So I'm relying on joe's stories to firm up my judgments. We're talking about this out loud in

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the little kitchenette and of course not just discussing the merits of the arguments for either side, but just laughing about how stupid Mark must be to believe what he believes at no point. Does it occur to

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us that perhaps there are third or fourth theological options here? We're not particularly interested in the theology of the problem so much as bonding over cutting someone else down. I know you can't relate just then because

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God never cuts me a break. We realize that Mark has entered the hallway, unseen by us and has heard everything we've said. I chase after him to apologize. I don't remember if I caught up

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to him. I don't remember whether we reconciled. Remember the flush of shame emerging as I chased him to apologize. And I remember what I was thinking , this kind of proves my point, doesn't it

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? And here we come to the first sin of seminary self righteousness, Francis suffered. The english author of unapologetic has an expression to describe the dilemma I'm in. He calls it the human propensity to mess

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things up, but he doesn't use the word mess and his definition. But since I'm not Nadia Bolz , whoever, I'll leave that word to your imagination . And boy, do we mess things up?

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We gossip, we break hearts, we crash our cars, we leave the iron on, we snapped . Our pets were a mess. I want to look at our gospel reading today through this lens.

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This is a stunning, beautiful passage. We think we know what it's going to say because Matthew's version of the beatitudes is so familiar to us. But when we read with a close eye, we realized

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jesus isn't on a mountain, looking down at his followers, Jesus is on a level place he's eye to eye with the people. And then we noticed a key few other differences in the text poor rather

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than poor in spirit hungry rather than those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, luke's doing something different here and then right, when we think that the attitudes should be over, jesus gets very intense. Woe

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to you who are rich, woe to you who are full now, won't you? And I'll speak well of you, jesus is not pulling any punches instead of just lifting up the downtrodden and jesus is

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putting those in power in their place and wakes us up and we think it's a good thing, jesus is not referring to us, huh? We study and work at a seminary, no one could accuse

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us of being rich and we haven't eaten since breakfast and it's almost noon now, so our bellies are no longer full and the more we think about it except for dolly Parton. The mega rich are kind

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of the worst, aren't they? Flying around in private planes doing mysterious rich people stuff. I mean , hasn't anyone watched the Tinder swindler on netflix texts like these invite us to take a side, don't

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they? I want to be on the side of the hungry and the poor and the weeping. They're the ones jesus likes, they're going to get to be part of the Kingdom of God and the rich

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. I mean in a year marked by incredible human suffering. We've got billionaires racing each other to take joyrides in space and then we think, well if jesus is judgmental of the rich, he's probably judgmental

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of other people who misuse their power, right? I mean, you would definitely judge people punching flight attendants. And what about that harvard professor sexually harassing his students, Jesus would hate that. And if

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we keep thinking about it, Jesus would probably judge people who don't pick up after their dogs in public spaces or People only tip 10%. I mean, we could probably come up with a really long list

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of the stuff, jesus would judge and in a huge coincidence it would be all the same stuff that irritates us once we realized jesus is totally on our side, we can just walk around quite contentedly living

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our lives, judging everyone who disagrees with us about anything walter, you who voted for that candidate, won't do you? Who grabbed that parking space first of all, do you? Who pointed out that

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spelling error in the bulletin after the service was over ? It's fantastic or it's the human propensity to mess things up, even how we read scripture, Jesus is so radical. Our brains can't process the transformation

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he brings to the world. We hear his message , but because we love order and being right and other people being wrong, we distort his meaning. So the message says what we want to hear,

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we hear the sermon on the plane and we put it into human categories good guys and bad guys. We line up behind Jesus, ready to judge the people he's judging. Last year Christianity today released a

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podcast called the rise and fall of sorry the rise and fall of Mars Hill, it documented the collapse of a massive evangelical churches system. Mars Hill headed by a charismatic pastor named Mark Driscoll. The story

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goes how you'd expect stories of controlling and charismatic men to go financial mismanagement, inappropriate sexual discourse, oppression of women, abusive staff. Some mainland christians seem to experience almost glee at this down fold of someone

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on the other side of Christianity, putting to the loose leadership, leadership structure and the dangers of putting so much power in the hands of one man as endemic to the evangelical movement. And yes, the

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evangelical community has a reckoning to tend to run many of these issues friends, the human propensity to mess things up, lives in each of us in each of our institutions as an Episcopal priest, I offer

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you this abbreviated list of reasons Episcopal priests have been fired, affair with the secretary affair with the senior warden affair with another clergy person, including the discretionary fund to buy bourbon and nice shoes, lying about

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debt and an affair while being elected bishop of a diocese. Sexual abuse of a minor plumbing a tub into the living room of the rectory so they can watch tv in the tub becoming so addicted to exercise

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. They stopped coming into work falsifying a seminary degree , selling cocaine from the rectory, regularly stealing from the offering plate and killing someone while drunk driving. Anyone want to switch denominations. The fiscal church welcomes

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you. We tell ourselves a story that they're bad guys and good guys, the oppressors and the oppressed . And in our narrative, we're always on jesus team. But anyone with enough power can become the

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oppressor, just ask how many people have been bullied by their bosses and the most justice oriented poverty alleviating nonprofit or grassroot organization before we work ourselves up in a lather about the other side, we need to

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attend to our own house. We need to be able to look at ourselves honestly and see that we are broken. We can't do it on our own Francis suffered, calls us the League of the guilty

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. We look around and instead of seeing people as good guys or bad guys, we couldn't realize we're all in this together, we're on a continuum of how much we mess stuff up. Our location on

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the continuum changes depending on how traumatized, tired, isolated, stressed, sad or sociopathic we are, but we're all on the continuum. I do pretty well, as long as all my plans go exactly

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as I hoped people around me do exactly what I want them to do. I'm not hungry, I'm able to shower and the weather is good. But if any of those things change, it doesn't take

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much for me to get grumpy, started to try to control the people around me, drink that second glass of wine to them out, shop for something . I don't need to feel better and generally,

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who's unpleasantness? Thanks God for Jesus, not the imaginary jesus, that breaks the world into the binaries of people he loves and people who doesn't love people who judges and people who doesn't judge. Remember Jesus

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is on a level place with his disciples, He's looking us in the eye, Jesus sees the core of who we are. He sees our strengths and weaknesses are confidence and doubt our addictions and recoveries.

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And instead of lining us up and choosing those whose mess up the least, he decides to love all of us wherever we are on the continuum, and he offers us love and forgiveness and life. David

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Wallace and Sarah Dixon both preached beautifully about this last week. It makes no sense. We don't deserve it. We mess up so much individually and when we mess up together wars and burn down forests and

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impoverished Children, woe is us. What we do is unforgivable. And yet the woes passage in luke isn't followed by a list of how the rich and filled and praised are going to be punished. No

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, Jesus follows that hair raising text by saying, but I say to you that listen love your enemies do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you

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. He invites us to participate with him in this insane upside down world where the vulnerable or as valued as the powerful, there were both held to account , but can also start over, can try again

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, can make amends, can be forgiven, can heal, can be restored, can share power. Bishops often say, the priests who get into trouble are priests who are isolated and lonely who don't have

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connection. Perhaps they don't want people to see into the messy places of their lives, but you don't have to be afraid of your propensity to mess things up. You don't have to build walls of ice

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between you and other people. So they don't see your flaws. You don't have to stay silent in case you say something wrong. You don't have to sit on your lonely hill of self righteousness because you're

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afraid to look inside, jesus already knows honestly that people around, you already know too. You can let go, you can lean into your identity is one of the League of the guilty, of the

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forgiven of the redeemed. When you realize you're one of the guilty, it's so much easier to ask for forgiveness when you mess up. When you realize you're one of the guilty, it's so much easier

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to learn something new and change your mind. When you realize you're one of the guilty, you can stop chasing perfection and start to love the person you already are, the one that jesus loves to word

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to those of you who are going to pursue ministry , Brother Martin smith and Episcopal Monk and we do have them spoke at a diocese of Virginia clergy conference years ago and he spoke about his experience of being

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a priest and a brother as sanctifying for him. I love this imagery of ordination. It's not that we're so special that the church needs us, but that some people need the experience of being pastors to

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help us become the people, God needs us to be. We need the compassion that comes from knowing other people's stories. We need the experience of having people angry with us and having to work through that

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we need the small humiliations and the transcendent moments that come with loving people and ministering to them. This is true of life at the seminary, to you , bump up against each other. You love each

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other, irritate each other. You agree with each other, you violently disagree with each other. All that pushing and pulling and offending and forgiving is as much as part of your formation as what you're learning

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in class. I can remember so many details at the moment. I hurt Mark's feelings, I can still feel it in my body, but I couldn't tell you what electives I took that semester they mattered

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. They're still in my brain somewhere. But the lesson God wanted me to learn in that moment was that I was in the league of the guilty that I had power to hurt people, that my humor

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had a knife's edge. Unfortunately, I could tell you another dozen humiliating stories, many involving sending an email to the wrong person because those are lessons I have to learn over and over and over again.

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But I also know that Jesus loves me too much to let me stay at my worst and jesus won't abandon you either. Jesus is with you even now and whatever. Ordinary or spectacular thing you've messed up

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today, jesus sees you and judges you and offers you forgiveness and grace and new life so you can offer the same to others. Thanks be to God