7th Sunday of Easter Year A

7th Sunday of Easter May 24, 2020 When Mary Margaret was a preschooler, she hated taking naps. She would fight and resist until finally, I said, “Ok, you don’t have to take a nap, but you do have to stay in your room and be quiet for a certain amount of time.” This plan started off great, until a little bit of time passed, and MM called out, “Is it time yet?” “Not yet!” I replied patiently the first time and then with gradually decreasing patience every time after. “Is it time yet?” “Not yet!” until I finally just gave up and let her out. It started the dame way the next day and the day after that until I did what desperate mother’s do when they have the option: I called my mamma, and of course, she knew what to do. I told MM that I was going to put a timer in the hallway outside her bedroom door, and so when the timer went off, she would know it was time to come out. (This plan had an added benefit, which I recently confessed to MM, which allowed me to creep quietly outside her door and add time to the timer because I knew either she needed more quiet time or I did.) “Is it time yet?” the disciples ask the risen Christ. “Is it time for you to restore the kingdom of Israel?” Jesus tells them that it is not for them to know the times that God has set, but they can know that they will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon them, and they will be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. As Jesus is telling them this, he ascends to heaven, and his disciples are all left there, probably with their mouths hanging open and starting up after him. And as they are standing and staring, suddenly two men in white robes appear and tell them “It’s not time yet. He’ll come back, but it’s not time yet.” So the disciples return to the room where they are staying, and they stay there and pray together. The 7th Sunday of Easter is always a strange, in-between sort of time in the liturgical year—an already but not yet kind of time. This past Thursday, we celebrated the Feast of the Ascension and next Sunday, we celebrated the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We know the spirit is coming because Jesus has promised this gift, but it’s not time yet. “Is it time yet?” our ecumenical partners have begun asking our bishop-elect. “Is it time yet?” our bishop-elect wonders what the clergy think. “Is it time yet?” we clergy ask each other. “Is it time yet?” some of you are asking. Two weeks ago our vestry had an important conversation, but we weren’t even trying to answer the question, “Is it time yet?” But rather we were reflecting on the question, “What will we need to do when it is time?” What will church need to look like when it is time?” What will we need to do to try our best and hardest to keep everyone safe? As we talked through the options, it became clear to us that when it is finally time, much of what we have known and loved about doing church together will have to look different—no nursery or choral singing; probably no coffee hour; all wearing masks when entering and leaving; no touching or hugging and staying 6 feet apart (which may have to include ushers telling you where to sit), and there were so many other creative and responsible questions asked by your vestry. Quickly the conversation moved from beyond “Is it time yet?” and “what will we need to do when it is time?” to questions such as “Can we engage with each other more and more meaningfully the way we are doing church now than what in person would have to look like, fell like, be like? And then they started thinking about the most vulnerable ones of you, how you would feel if some of us came back before you felt it was safe, ,and how we would feel if you came back before we knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was safe. It’s not time yet. Even though the Catholics are starting back to in person worship; even though our President is saying it is necessary, we know it is not time yet because we trust the promise of our Lord that he is with us, even now, in what we do—in continuing to be the church even when we are not together in these walls, in caring for each other and caring for those in need. We trust the promise of our Lord that we will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon us. And we trust our bishop-elect and we trust each other. That’s part of what it means to be the church. And so we stay home and wash our hands, and we wear our masks in public when we have to go out, and we listen to our bishop-elect, even as he listens to us, and we continue to pray together, even as we wait. But as you all well know, we have not ceased being the church. In closing, I want to share with you a reflection written by a seminary classmate of ours who is also the Bishop-elect of the Diocese of Missouri, the Rev Deon Johnson: “The work of the church is essential. The work of caring for the lonely, the marginalized, and the oppressed is essential. The work of speaking truth to power and seeking justice is essential. The work of being a loving, liberating, and life giving presence in the world is essential. The work of welcoming the stranger, the refugee and the undocumented is essential. The work of reconciliation and healing and caring is essential. The church does not need to “open” because the church never “closed”. We who make up the Body of Christ, the church, love God and our neighbors and ourselves so much that we will stay away from our buildings until it is safe. We are the church.”

Funeral Homily for Stella Nussbaum

Funeral homily_Stella Nussbaum May 18, 2020 Stella Nussbaum was a beautiful soul, and she had the unique gift of inspiring and inviting the souls of those around her to give themselves to beauty as well. As your wife, your mother, your grandmother, she loved you well and uniquely; she loved you colorfully, creatively, vibrantly, musically. Stella was rooted and grounded in her awareness of her own stature as a beloved child of God, and her love flowed out of the deep wellspring of her faith. She was sincere, kind, graceful, and grace-filled, and she had the gift of seeing the best in everyone. Her soul delighted to ring out in praise to God the Creator—through her music, her art, her gardening. She created beauty, sought out mystery and then shared those gifts readily with others, inviting others into that way of engaging with creation (discovering secret gardens and mountain streams filled with fairies). She shared her childlike awe and wonder with all of you; she gave you glimpses of the holy, and she nurtured you, helping you find your God-given potential and inviting you to discover you own passion and then to apply passion to any task. Stella’s death was a long and gradual death as she slipped away slowly, over many long years; you all walked with her and loved her as faithfully as any family could, and your love and care for her has been a fitting tribute to her. So today, we gather in this strange season, spread out but still united in the love that we shared for and with Stella. We give thanks for her life, and we give thanks for her death because we know that on April 22nd, she was received into the arms of our Lord, who is her long-time friend and not a stranger. We mourn the loss of this beautiful soul in this world with us, and we remember that death is not the end, but a change; that through Jesus’s death and resurrection, God has proven, once and for all, that God’s love is stronger than anything. God’s love is stronger than our frail bodies; God’s love is stronger than the horror that is Alzheimer’s; God’s love is stronger than anything-even death. Today we mourn the loss of Stella-both on April 22 and all the days before that, and we trust the hope of our faith that we will all feast again together at God’s table where Stella will know you and love you in the way that only Stella can love.

6th Sunday of Easter Year A 2020

Easter 6A 2020 May 17, 2020 This past week, I watched a TED talk by a scientist named Uri Alon. The talk was titled “When Science Demands a Leap Into the Unknown.” Alon talked about his experiences doing scientific research, going as far back as his research for his PhD, along with experience doing research with his students, and he uses his experiences doing improvisational theater to help reflect on the scientific process. He said that science presents the process of research as being moving from point a, which is the question, to point b which is the answer; but Alon has found this is not usually how science works. Instead, in trying to move between points a and b, as experiments fail and the way to the answer becomes blocked, scientists usually find themselves in a place where they get stuck. Alon calls this stuck place “the cloud,” and he says that in science “the cloud” is “an inherent part of research because it stands guard at the boundary between the known and the unknown.” If scientists can enter the cloud, leaving behind the answer “no” but instead saying “yes, and,” then often the way becomes open for creativity, new ideas, and the discovery of new things that had before been unknown. (I found it to be an interesting talk, and I’ll put the link to the TED talk on our Facebook page in case you’d like to watch it.)i In our Acts reading for today, we see Paul using some creativity to appeal to the Athenians in his proclamation of the gospel. He references their altar to an unknown God, and he invites them to enter the cloud with him, moving through the boundary between the known and the unknown to experience the reality of the living God, who is yet unknown to them. In our gospel reading, Jesus is preparing his disciples for his departure, but he promises that he will not leave them orphaned. He promises that they will be given the gift of the Holy Spirit, the advocate, the Spirit of truth who will be with them forever. Jesus is trying to prepare his disciples for their entering of “the cloud,” living into the unknown of what life will be like without him present. It is a scary and anxious prospect for each of them, and throughout the gospels, we see how they resist and reject the unknown, even up to their disbelief about his resurrection. We, too, are living in a season of the unknown. We all want it to be as simple as moving from point a to point b and finding an answer or a return to normal, but that is just not the reality we find ourselves in. At least for now, we are stuck; we are stuck in the cloud, in the unknown of what church is going to be like in the future, of what life is going to be like in the future. For those of us who are planners, this is an especially difficult season because there is just no planning when you are in the cloud. But we can take a lesson from Uri Alon, from Paul, and from Jesus, who has already sent us the Holy Spirit, the source of creativity and hope and advocacy, to join us in the unknown, in the cloud. Now is the time for us to reach out to at least one other person to offer support and encouragement, to give each other the courage to say “yes, and.” Because it is in the cloud, in the midst of the unknown, when creativity can happen, if we are open and receptive to it. Your invitation this week is to consider the question: “How is living with so much uncertainty opening you to new experiences?”ii And as you consider this, I invite you to contemplate how the Holy Spirit might be inviting you to live more creatively by answering “yes, and” in this season of the unknown. i.. https://www.ted.com/talks/uri_alon_why_science_demands_a_leap_into_the_unknown/transcript#t-930218 ii. https://www.ruthws.com/paintbox/2020/year-a/sixth-sunday-of-easter?ref=email And thanks to Ruth Woodliff-Stanley for sharing Uri Alon’s Ted talk in light of today’s readings.

Sermon for the Diocese of Georgia for the Feast of Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich_DioGA Evening Prayer May 6, 2020 I first met Dame Julian of Norwich, whose feast we commemorate today, when I was a junior in college. I was an English major, and I was taking a class titled Medieval Visionary Literature. We had just slogged our way through Dante’s Inferno, when we finally began the refreshingly weird and wonderful unit on Medieval Women mystics. Julian of Norwich was born in 1342, placing her childhood in the middle of the Black Death/Bubonic Plague and its recurrences; her adolescence, in the midst of the Peasants’ Revolts; and her adulthood, witnessing the violent and bloody suppression of religious dissenters. It is believed that approximately one-third of the population of England may have succumbed to the plague, and in Norwich, the death toll may have been as high as one-half of the city’s 13,000 inhabitants. Towards her thirtieth birthday, Julian fell gravely ill and neared death. In her illness and subsequent miraculous recovery, she experienced the ‘Showings’ or visions of the Passion of Christ and of his mother, Mary. She recovered from the illness and wrote down this experience, which was also the first book written in English by a woman. She wrote two versions of this account, the shorter one soon after her recovery, and a longer version after a number of years had passed. Between the two, she requested to live adjacent to the Church of St. Julian as an anchorite – a person set apart for prayer in seclusion and contemplation. But we do know that she continued to offer spiritual direction and counsel to those who sought her out in her isolation. You can find quotes of Julian’s all over the internet, the most famous one being: “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” But what really captured my imagination when I first encountered Julian of Norwich is how she referred to Jesus as our mother. In fact some scholars suggest that Julian is best known to us for her teachings on the motherhood of Christ. While the idea of the feminine face of the divine is not completely new to Julian (we can see it in the Isaiah passage for today and in other writings of the church), Julian takes the image beyond the usual stereotypes of the female or mother as “generative…and sacrificial,” “loving and tender,” and “nurturing”i I can remember being electrified as I read Julian’s words where she writes about Jesus as mother and how he cares for us daily: “In our spiritual birthing, he shows tenderness and care beyond any other mother in so much as our soul is of more value in his eyes. He kindles our understanding, he directs our ways, he eases our consciences, he comforts our soul, he lightens our heart and gives us, in part, knowledge and love of his blessed Godhead… If we fall, hastily he picks us up in his lovely embrace and touches us graciously… A mother may allow her child to fall sometimes and feel distress in various ways to be a lesson, but she will never, out of love, allow any kind of danger to come to her child. And though it is possible for our earthly mother to allow her child to perish, our heavenly mother Jesus will not allow us who are his children to die.”ii So, in this strange season, what does this mean for us to think about Jesus as our mother? How might that image feed and nurture us and give us hope? Even though not all of us have had the opportunity to be a mother, and some of us have not had the benefit of witnessing healthy mothering from our own birth mothers, I suspect that everyone can identify at least a few aspects of healthy motherhood. For me, motherhood means feeding people—my mother and my grandmother cooking for us or me cooking for my family. It means the way that the good mothers among us, both within the church and without, can help create a sense of belonging and offer nurture and care. It means delighting in the mystery of the other, in discovering hidden dimensions and talents. There is a demanding physicality to motherhood: whether it is in pregnancy and childbirth and nursing or in being climbed on like a jungle gym by a rambunctious toddler. Maternal love can be fiercely protective, and it acts as a tether to connect a mother to her children across time and space and even into and beyond death. What might it mean for you to think about Jesus as mother this week? Does it make you feel safe, uncomfortable? Think about what you need right now? What kind of nurture can Jesus offer you? Do you need to be fed? Do you need to find a safe place to rest? Do you need to belong? Do you need to have the space to test boundaries, to realize your potential, to fail or fall and be picked up again? Do you need to feel tethered, anchored to one who is greater than yourself, grounded and rooted in unconditional love? I’d like to close with Julian’s own words in the conclusion of her longer work, after which she has had 15 years to ponder the vision given to her by our Lord in her illness. May her vision be a gift and a comfort to us all during these trying days: “It was more than 15 years ago that I was answered in my spirit’s understanding. ‘You would know our Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well. Love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Hold on to this and you will know and understand love more and more. But you will not know or learn anything else-ever!’ So it was that I learned that love was our Lord’s meaning. And I saw for certain, both here and elsewhere, that before ever he made us, God loved us; and that his love has never slackened, nor ever shall. In this love all his works have been done, and in this love he has made everything serve us; and in this love our life is everlasting….”iii i.From Caroline Bynum Jesus as Mother (Berkley and Los Angeles: U of California Press, 1982) p 131 ii.Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 61 iii.Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 86