Proper 16C
Hebrews 12:18-29
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Austin, Tex.

In the Name of the true and living God, whose banner over us is love.

It is a great comfort to me when I read scripture and realize that the people who wrote and read those words for the first time were perhaps not all that different from us. The author of the book of Hebrews, which we heard from a few moments ago, is writing to a group of young, new Christians living a generation or two after Jesus, and they are tired. This is a group of people who are feeling beaten down by the state of the world, by the constant onslaught of hardship and the temptation to despair. They are feeling the invitation to follow Jesus as more of a burden than a relief in a world that does not share the values of what Jesus called the kingdom of God. This is a group of people who are beginning to wonder if it’s worth it to opt out of society’s worst impulses and “live peaceably with all so far as it depends on them” (Romans 12). 

Hebrews is one of the longer books of the New Testament and scholars believe that despite its common name of a letter, it is actually a sermon or maybe a series of sermons that have been stitched together. The Preacher is speaking to an audience in a way that makes it clear that they are very familiar with the Jewish law and the story of the Jewish people, hence a later editor who added the title “To the Hebrews.” So the Preacher knows her audience. They are getting tired, and her main goal is to encourage her audience, exhorting them to stay the course and persevere in pursuit of that beloved community that Jesus has promised them. The passage we hear today is following on from a section where she is particularly asking them to think about what it means to live holy lives, not in the sense of being particularly pious or sanctimonious, but in the sense of living lives that are set apart, lives that are different, lives that have examined the values they were raised with and charted a different course in the expectation that the last shall be first and the lost shall be found and the least shall be the face and the voice of God.

The Preacher exhorts 
her listeners to remember why they chose this new way of being human and she arrives at our passage today where she is laying out a set of images. You have not drawn near to something familiar, something that can be reached out and touched, something that evokes fear. She’s drawing on scenes from the book of Exodus when Moses and the newly freed Hebrew people receive the Law from God, and she says to us that we who have chosen to follow Jesus are not there. You have not come to a mountain that is smoking and trembling, and everyone is scared to death. No, you have come to a different mountain, to the very city where God dwells, to a place of rejoicing defined by this festival gathering of angels and those who have already gone before you. 
And so she is asking her listeners, which is to say us, to consider which of these scenes we want to place ourselves in. 

Over the past few days I’ve been thinking a lot about the news that broke on Thursday of the death of Dr. James Dobson, a name that may be familiar to some of you, the founder of the group Focus on the Family, based in Colorado. 
When he was starting out in the ‘70s, Dobson made a name for himself as someone who was giving parenting advice to Christian families, with books like Dare to Discipline and The Strong-Willed Child. I was talking to a friend the other day and we realized that even though he and I grew up about 20 years apart, when it came time for our parents to tell us about the birds and the bees, they both handed us a copy of the same one of Dobson’s books (for myself, I don’t remember it being especially helpful, even if it was technically accurate). Dobson’s style could fairly be described as authoritarian. He is someone who is interested in parents demanding the respect of their children. 
He emphasizes corporal punishment and withholding affection. Dobson was trained as a psychologist, as a matter of fact, and this lended him some credibility, but he found his way into this particular line of influence as a result of his concern about what he saw as moral decay and social decline. And in his mind that began at home, and it began with the way that parents raised their children. 
Over the decades, Dobson would use Focus on the Family to build on this crusade and eventually become an incredibly influential evangelical advisor in the world of politics. He advised multiple presidents and lobbied heavily against abortion access and LGBTQ rights. Those who have studied the role of Christianity in America over the past several decades would have to say that he is someone who happily laid the groundwork for the social and political predicament we find ourselves in.

Dobson’s legacy is widely felt throughout the Church. I know many people of at least my generation who were taught that seeking love from their caregivers makes them a burden. 
We were taught that compliance is more important than honesty or vulnerability, and that this was the will of God. The language and imagery of Christian faith has always run thick with familial relationships–we speak of God and indeed sometimes our clergy as father and mother; we refer to each other as brother, sister, sibling. This has always been true, and so when you rear children to view their parents as fundamentally people to be feared whose love needs to be earned by compliance, and then fuse this with the language of faith, that is a very potent mix indeed. 

It wouldn’t be fair for me to stand here and say that Dobson invented or even popularized the idea of people being afraid of God. Many Christians before him, indeed many people of all religions in all generations, have weaponized God and clothed God in the suit and tie of a tyrant. Many people’s first lessons in Christian faith are those that teach them to relate to God in the way they relate to their parents, and so the way we teach our children to relate to their caregivers and to all those in power over them matters deeply. Dobson was right that the moral order of our society starts at home. It is not hard to look around at our city and our nation, to see the relationship between the common people and the powerful, and find that we are being pushed forward by fear of many kinds, but especially a fear of authority and a compulsion to quietly comply with violence even when the facts of the matter are clear. We tell ourselves if we make ourselves small and stay in our own lane, if we live in ways that comply with the wishes of the strong and avoid punishment, perhaps we will find the love we long for. Beloved, it has never been so, at home or anywhere else.

As I’ve been reading reflections from folks who are responding to the death of Dr. Dobson, I came across one from Pastor Zach Lambert, who is actually a pastor here in Austin, and he shared this quote: “[Dobson] is being surprised by Love. I do not know if discovering the vastness of God’s love is hell for him, or heaven. Perhaps a bit of both. That’s above my pay grade. But Divine Love has him now.” I hear in this reflection the voice of the preacher of Hebrews. We may pray, if we wish, that Dobson has found himself not in the hands of the god of terror that he proclaimed, but has instead discovered the love and joy and belonging that is at the heart of God. We will have to let God sort that out. But it can and should be said that in the meantime there is plenty of healing that still needs to be done here on earth as it is in heaven, that there are plenty of people who need to hear the word of good news that our God is not a god of terror. Even for myself, this many years on, my own work of seeing God as someone who is my friend is ongoing.

The God who brought the Hebrews out of slavery and raised Jesus Christ from the grave is not a God who demands our fear. God is the source and summit of love and of our joy. 
The world needs communities like All Saints’, like Canterbury, where all of us, but especially those who need healing the most, can learn to know and believe that we are already part of that festal gathering that the preacher describes at the foot of Mount Zion, the holy city of God. The Preacher paints a picture of a party, of a gathering in the heavenly courtroom where angels swing from the chandeliers, because there is one judge who is God and there is one verdict which is “not guilty.” Last night I walked with about 100 Episcopalians down Congress Avenue in the Austin Pride parade, a riotous celebration of those who have been freed from their prisons and who help us dream of a world where the need for physical, emotional, and political violence is done away with once for all. If you want to see an image of the kingdom of God, an image of what the Preacher describes for us today, I hope you’ll come with us next year.


The Preacher of Hebrews invites us to persevere in the way that we have already set out on, to find strength and carry on with what Eugene Peterson called “a long obedience in a single direction”, not because we have to, not because we fear punishment, but because there couldn’t be anything better. Because we have already tasted the first fruits of all the justice and joy that God has promised to the world and we are eager to share it with others. We have not come to terror; we have come to life and that abundant. We have not in these days come to the end of all things, but to the unveiling of what cannot be shaken, to the revelation of what must endure, which is that kingdom of God where the only law is love, where all know themselves to be most beloved children of the Most High God, and where the party goes on all through the night, world without end. 

In the name of the God who has not called us servants but calls us friends. Amen.