There’s a great talk from 2011 by a computer programmer named Rich Hickey with the title “Simple Made Easy.” The core idea is that although we often use these words interchangeably, “simple” and “easy” mean different things. Something is simple when it does or means or consists of exactly one thing. The opposite of “simple” is “complex”; complex things are made from simple things woven together in a way that can be hard to disentangle. Something is easy, on the other hand, when it’s familiar or close at hand; when we can just do it without much effort. The opposite of “easy” is “hard.” And these two categories can be combined in any combination. We can probably all imagine things that are simple and easy (a vegetable peeler) and things that are complex and difficult (rocket science, brain surgery). But the other two combinations are possible as well. Rich Hickey’s point about programming is that in our effort to make things easy, we often make them more complex, and then suffer the consequences. A good non-programming example of this would be taco seasoning, which combines cumin and oregano and pepper, garlic powder and chili powder and also a bunch of salt. It’s easy to use, but the complexity has a cost: you can’t tweak the flavor profile, or add more spices relative to the salt. If you want spicier tacos, they end up saltier; if you want something milder, it turns out bland.

Now, both Rich Hickey and tacos are entirely irrelevant to the rest of this sermon, except insofar as the Two Great Commandments that Jesus names in our Gospel reading today fall into that fourth category of things: they’re very simple, but they’re not at all easy.

Imagine yourself in Boston in 1771. The Boston Massacre has happened. The Tea Party is yet to come. Imagine that you’re down on the Common, hanging out with a crowd of people listening to a popular preacher who’s visiting from out of town. Suddenly a group of local Tories arrive, parishioners of the Old North Church, along with a couple of British regulars in their famous red coats. And they ask the preacher, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and teach the way of God in accordance with truth …” (Matt. 22:16) Tell us then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to King George III?

If he says “no,” they’re going to put him under arrest: that’s sedition. And if he says “yes” in front of this crowd—well, he’ll be lucky if all they do is throw him in the Harbor as a Tea Party of One. If you’re trying to undermine a rival who you see as a threat, this kind of trap isn’t half bad.

That’s more or less the situation Jesus is in, in today’s gospel.

You know, I can’t help but think that this all would’ve turned out differently if the ancient Israelites had only had smartphones.

In our reading from Exodus last Sunday, God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, including the second one: “You shall not make for yourself an idol.” (Exodus 20:4) And this Sunday, we read about the people doing exactly that: making and worshiping a golden calf. This is typical, in a way. When someone tries to tell us what to do—even God—we often respond by pushing back. So perhaps this is a theological account of a common tendency: No sooner do we hear the law than we begin to break it.

On Tuesday, The New York Times ran a fascinating story about a series of meetings between Christopher Olah, one of the cofounders of the AI company Anthropic, and religious leaders of different faiths, from all around the world. “The discussions served two purposes,” the Times reports: “to broach the possibility of AI consciousness, a controversial idea that Anthropic’s leaders had been unusually open to; and to learn how Anthropic—which could be valued at $2 trillion—might apply centuries of human moral wisdom to its models, as rapidly as possible. If the models themselves could be made to choose goodness, Mr. Olah reasoned, the world would be more safe.”

Believing that his company had created a thinking machine with superhuman intelligence, which can already be used by humans for good or evil and which he believed may even be a conscious moral agent capable of doing good and evil on its own, Chris Olah reached out to the religious leaders of the world to learn: how can we make it choose goodness?

There’s a kind of innocence about this question that fascinates me.

During the first week of my first college semester, I walked into my freshman seminar and met a guy named Phil. Phil was a really nice guy; also, he’d soon come to shatter my dearest hopes and dreams. That first day, after we’d all introduced ourselves, I turned to Phil and asked, “Are you a runner, Phil?” Now, I already knew Phil was a runner. He was a local legend; a kid from the next town over who’d won the D1 state championship in cross country our senior year in a literal photo finish. (2nd place was from Charlestown, I’m sorry to say.) Anyway, Phil was running for the college cross country team, and NCAA rules said that they could only have organized practices 6 days a week. So Phil and I started running together on that 7th day, and I soon discovered that he was just in a totally different league. Phil’s casual run with Greg on his day off was one of my most challenging workouts of the week. I’d loved running in high school; I was running with a track club at the time, in hopes of one day walking on to the college team. I soon discovered I just didn’t have what it takes. Thanks, Phil.

Have you ever had a moment like this, when you met someone who shared a passion for something you held dear, but was just way better at it than you were? Or a moment when you finally reached some new phase in your life you’d always dreamed of, and suddenly realized you had no idea what you were doing?

The landowner in today’s parable behaves more or less like you’d expect an ancient vineyard-owner to behave, at first. He sets out early in the morning, so that he doesn’t lose any of the precious daylight hours. He hires day laborers who are standing in the marketplace, because he needs extra help at harvest time. And he makes a deal to pay them the typical daily wage.

A few hours later, he goes back to the market. He hires more workers and sends them to work as well, and he tells them he’ll pay them whatever’s fair. And then he comes back again at noon and three o’clock, and he does the same thing.

Now, this is kind of odd.

On December 16, 1956, a young woman made American cultural history with a nothing but a football, a helmet, and a dream. In the eyes of the world, her job that day was simply to hold the ball for a kicker. And she did. As the kicker ran forward at full speed, she carefully held the ball in place; as his leg swung back, she remained focused on the plan; and then, as the kicker’s foot flew forward, she pulled the ball away, and—WHOMP. History was made. For the first time ever, Lucy van Pelt had pulled the ball away from the swinging foot of a gullible young kicker named Charlie Brown.

In the Peanuts comic strip every subsequent autumn from 1956 to 1998, Lucy played that trick again. As the years passed, and Charlie Brown grew neither older nor wiser, Lucy repeated the same football gag, with endless variations. Every year, she had a new explanation for why this year would be different. “You’re truly amazing!” she says to Charlie one year, as he pumps himself up to try again. “You talk the talk and you walk the walk!” Run run run run aaaaaah! “But you don’t kick the kick.”

Lord, if my friend pulls the football away when I try to kick it, how many times should I forgive? As many as seven times? Not seven times, I tell you, Charlie Brown, but seventy-seven times.

When Alice and I were married, one of my mother’s oldest friends gave us a wedding gift: a binder full of some of her family’s favorite recipes, with plenty of empty plastic page protectors for us to add our own. I’ve put a few recipes in there over the years, but I have to admit I’m not good at keeping up with it; in part because, try as I might, I can never seem to keep a printer working for more than a couple months at a time. Anyway, as a result, I often find myself cooking from recipes that I found online. In other words, I often find myself doing something with which you may be familiar: scrolling through what appears to be the entire story of the recipe author’s life, marriage, and culinary education, until I finally arrive at the recipe itself. I’ve never really understood this phenomenon. I don’t need to know about your first date. I just want to know how much baking powder these waffles need.

I think people sometimes make the mistake of reading the Bible as if it’s a recipe blog.

The Presbyterian minister Eugene Peterson once wrote an essay entitled “The Ministry of Small Talk.” He begins it with a story from his youth: “My pastor, during my adolescent years [in the late ’40s] came often to our home. After a brief and awkward interval, he always said, ‘And how are things in your SOUL today?’ (He always pronounced ‘soul’ in capital letters.)” Teenage Eugene never said much; his ordinary thoughts and experiences, he writes, “seemed small potatoes after that question. I knew,” he writes, “that if I ever wanted to discuss matters of SOUL, I could go to him. But for everything else, I would probably do better with someone who wouldn’t brush away as worldly vanity what it felt like to get cut from the basketball varsity.”[1] Eugene had been told—and his pastor had been told, too—that big questions and weighty demands, not the ordinary struggles of his life.

And, when you listen to our readings this morning, you can kind of understand where they’d get that idea.

Who gave you your name? Do you go by the name your parents gave you at your birth? Is it a nickname that you got along the way? Is your name really your middle name? Has it changed, by marriage or by choice? Did it take time for you to discover what your true name really was? Do different people call you different things? (I can think of a number of people I know who affectionately call their spouses by their full, legal names, and not the nicknames everyone else uses.)

I’m named “Greg” in part because there’s no diminutive to change; there is no parallel in a young Greg’s life to the moment at which “Timmy” becomes “Tim” or “Jimmy” turns to “Jim” or “James.” I’ve always been called “Greg,” and never Gregory; except by cousin Hannah, who we used to babysit when she was six, who called me “Pwincess Gwegowy” for a while.

Just before I left for vacation, movie theaters around the world began showing the epic action fantasy film The Odyssey. Has anyone seen it? I haven’t. And in fact, I forgot my copy of The Odyssey at home, so I didn’t even read any Homer on the beach. But I did read an adaptation that I hadn’t read before: a novel by Natalie Haynes entitled A Thousand Ships, a re-telling of the stories of the Trojan War from the perspectives of the women involved.

It’s a great book, a powerful reminder of the horrors that lurk behind these stories of war. And it reminded me of one of the ironies of epic tales: the heroes involved are often physically very strong and emotionally very fragile. Most of the first half of the Iliad consists of Achilles pouting over a slight; I don’t want to spoil the ending of The Odyssey for anyone who hasn’t found time to read it in the last 3000 years, but I can’t help but think that it would’ve ended a little differently if Odysseus could gather up the courage to talk to his wife. The ultimate Homeric hero is Achilles, who is almost entirely invulnerable; but the “almost” makes all the difference. He’s almost completely safe from harm, but can be killed by an arrow to the heel; he’s completely unmoved by the victims of his violence, but his world is completely shattered by the death of his best friend. For all his invulnerability, he’s a very vulnerable man.

The Bible has its own fragile heroes of this kind. But its central stories are different; they’re stories in which vulnerability itself is the source of strength.

So I have to admit: I don’t really like traveling. I might even say I really don’t like traveling, especially by plane. My problem with travel is not the being-in-a-new-place. It’s the uncertainty and the waiting that drive me nuts.

I wait anxiously before a trip, worrying that the worst could happen. And then I spend my time away worrying about the trip home. And then I return home safe and sound. And I wonder: wait, would I have enjoyed this more if I’d known in advance that none of the things I worried about were going to happen? (None of them have ever happened, by the way. Maybe one day, I’ll learn.)

An Emerson College poll last year revealed a surprising paradox about news consumption in America: social media is the least-widely-trusted and most-widely-used source for information about the news. More than half of Americans reported that they put “not much trust” or “no trust at all” in the information they received from social media sites; even so, nearly 40% said that social media or YouTube were their main sources of news.

Some would say that this is an example of what economists call “revealed preferences”; the idea there’s a difference between what consumers say they prefer and the preferences that are revealed by their actual purchases. Or you might think that there are two kinds of people: the ones who distrust social media, and the ones who get news from it. But I don’t think either of these is right. Like many people, I’m in both categories. I really would prefer to do what my wife Alice does, and get all my news from long-form journalism and 19th-century novels. And yet “I find it to be a law that when I want to [read The Atlantic online], [Facebook] lies close at hand.” (cf. Romans 7:21) Again and again, fifteen minutes into scrolling through posts that alternately baffle and enrage me, I realize I’m that I’m just like Paul: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)

This story of “The Binding of Isaac” is one of the most beautifully written stories in human history, about one of the most horrifying acts any of us could imagine. It raises some challenging questions for those of us who receive it as Holy Scripture. What kind of man would respond to a vision like this so immediately, with so few questions? Who is the God who would test someone in this way?

Part of the power of the story comes the contrast between the intensity of the emotions and the simplicity of the words. God “tests” Abraham, and he says to him, “Abraham!” and Abraham answers, simply, “Here I am.” There is no narrative context, no vivid dream, no complex symbolism; just the voice of God speaking his name. “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the land of Moriah,” God says—and then, with the same cadence and simplicity, and with no obvious change in tone— “and offer him there as a burnt offering.” (Gen. 22:1-2)

I generally avoid making a big deal out of certain days that are widely celebrated in the world around us but aren’t Christian “holy days.” I don’t give a “Mother’s Day sermon.” There are no special prayers for Father’s Day. And that’s really because, while there are many people celebrating these days, many people find them hard; I’ve known more than a few people who avoid going to church on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day entirely: because they never wanted to be parents, and don’t want a whole morning about how great parents are; or because they do want to be parents, but aren’t; because their own parents were not loving figures in their lives; or because they were, and they wish they were still here. Ordinarily, I’d say a quiet “Happy Father’s Day” to a few of the dads after church, and that would be all.

Unfortunately, our readings today are a little on the nose. So we will be talking about parents and their children. And so I’d like to begin with a greeting that’s appropriate to the spirit of our religious observances today, and wish a Happy Bad Father’s Day to you all.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “We make plans, and God laughs.” I don’t always love this phrase. It does a good job of expressing the unpredictability of a world in which our best-laid plans so often go awry. But I think it makes God sound a little too mean-spirited. A few years ago, for example, I was training to run in the Bunker Hill Day road race. I was all ready to prove once and for all that I was the fastest priest in Charlestown. And then, a couple weeks before the race, we went on a trip to New York to visit my in-laws and I cut my shin on a broken toy teapot, so badly that I ended up needing nine stitches. “We make plans, God laughs…” I’m not sure I like that sense of humor.

There’s a story told by the Irish writer Frank O’Connor that comes from his childhood wandering through the countryside outside Cork in southern Ireland. If you recognize it, it’s probably because it was popularized by President John F. Kennedy, who re-told it in speeches several times. In his autobiography An Only Child, O’Connor writes, “When as kids we came to an orchard wall that seemed too high to climb, we took off our caps and tossed them over the wall, and then we had no choice but to follow them.” It’s an idyllic image of audacity and determination and the spirit of adventure.

This time of year is a season of goodbyes. At colleges around the country, graduating students are saying goodbye to their campuses and professors, to roommates and friends, and maybe even to education itself—although hopefully not to learning. In local schools, teachers are getting ready to say goodbye to this year’s class of students, and students are saying goodbye to friends as they scatter to camps and vacations for the summer.

  People sometimes celebrate Pentecost as “the birthday of the Church,” with red balloons and a birthday cake at Coffee Hour. But I like to think of it as an anniversary, instead, because what begins at Pentecost is more like a marriage than a birth. What begins at Pentecost, or what begins in a wedding ceremony, is not a new individual’s life, but a new form of common life; a way of being together that doesn’t subsume the individuals involved into one blended personality, but rather includes them in something new.