June 11, 2023 – Rev. Katharine Flexor, Rector

Genesis 12:1-9<br /> Psalm 33:1-12<br /> Romans 4:13-25<br /> Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26   As many of you know, I’ve been rehabbing my knee after surgery, and the one<br /> exercise I can most safely do is ride my stationary bike, which is incredibly boring.<br /> So I’ve been listening to podcasts, and I’ve heard some recently from Ezra Klein of<br /> the New York Times. Maybe because he’s a parent of young children, he’s been<br /> asking questions lately that I’m thinking about myself – about the burden of<br /> caring for children and the elderly, and who is doing that; about the plague of<br /> loneliness in our culture; about our isolation from one another in this country.<br /> And although he’s a journalist, raised as a secular Jew, he is curious enough about<br /> organized religion to note when it offers something that we humans need – the<br /> practice of Sabbath and rest, for example; and the connections with other people,<br /> the structure of meaning beyond our own daily lives. In a recent edition, he<br /> interviewed the author of a book about intentional communities, tracing through<br /> history different experiments human beings have made with living in extended<br /> communities of support beyond the nuclear family. I won’t go into the whole<br /> conversation, but I found it interesting that they pointed out that although these<br /> experiments are often seen as radical, in our culture we in fact all tend to live in<br /> such communities at two distinct times in our lives: young adulthood, in college<br /> dorms and first apartments; and old age, in retirement and assisted living<br /> facilities. But in the long stretch in between those two phases of life, when many<br /> are working in their careers, raising kids, taking care of aging parents, juggling all<br /> the combined social and financial pressures of life, we tend to live in the most<br /> isolated way possible: the single-family home, the house surrounded by the fence<br /> with the garage door down. Not everyone in this country can or does live this<br /> way, but it is the prevailing image in our media of normal American life. And with<br /> that image, the message we hear is that when you’re a real adult and you’ve<br /> really made it, you go it alone. You close yourself off from other people, and you<br /> do your life, complicated though it may be. And we’re all supposed to be able to<br /> do that, as grownups.<br /> But all the evidence of social sciences lately shows us that a lot of people in this<br /> country are exhausted, depressed, physically unhealthy, in broken relationships,<br /> in debt, and overusing alcohol as they try to live out this American dream. The<br /> intense pressures combined with the isolation are damaging so many of us. Yet<br /> still we persist in dreaming th