The Fourth Sunday of Easter Year B

Easter 4B April 25, 2021 A letter to Mims Gage Ochsner IV on the occasions of your baptism. Dear Gage, Today is the Fourth Sunday of Easter, the day in the life of the church that we call Good Shepherd Sunday. Our readings focus on how Jesus is the good shepherd of his people, and coincidentally, it’s the exact same Sunday that your sister was baptized in this church three years ago. It is the day, when we are still celebrating from Easter, when we recognize the power that Jesus has in our lives: the power to lay down his life for us and to take it up; the power to know us each intimately and to call us each by name; the power to go before us into the big D death and all of the little deaths that we experience in this life and to lead us into the new life of resurrection, to feast at God’s heavenly banquet and to find new life in all the losses and failures of this life together. Today, your parents and your godparents are saying yes on your behalf. They are claiming your place as a sheep in Jesus’ flock, a lamb of his own redeeming. They are making promises on your behalf of how they will teach you to live your life; and then, when you are old enough, you will be able to make those promises for yourself. Those promises include that you will seek and serve Christ in all persons and love your neighbor as yourself; that you will persevere in resisting evil and repent and return to the lord; that you will continue in the apostles teaching, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers; that you will proclaim by word and example the good news of God in Christ, and that you will strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being. That’s a lot of ask of any parents and any little person and really any one of us. But you won’t be alone on this journey. You’ll have the help and companionship of all us, your fellow sheep, along the way. And you will have Jesus, who will always be with you, knowing you, loving you, calling you, and keeping you. There may be times that you forget all of this, sweet Gage, and that is why we are here. For it is the work of all of us other sheep to help you remember. As we take communion beside you week after week, we will help you remember that you are God’s beloved; that nothing can separate you from the love of God through our good shepherd and friend, Jesus. I watched a video this week that starts with a fluffy sheep who has gotten itself stuck in a narrow crevice. I watched as the young shepherd wrestled the stuck sheep out of the crevice, and I watched as the sheep bounded joyfully down the side of the crevice and leapt right back in to the narrow crack just a few yards down the way from the where the shepherd still stood. In the video, you can see the shepherd sigh, and then begin moving toward the stuck sheep once again to try to fish it out. It’s easy to see the work that Jesus does as being similar to that shepherd—how he fishes us out of the narrow places in our lives where we often get stuck, sometimes over and over again. But it’s important to remember that Jesus also empowers his people to do that work for each other, to help each other get unstuck, to help each other remember who we are called to be and what we are called to do. It’s why we gather here (in person or virtually) week after week after week. Because we need each other. And so, Gage, if you take nothing else away from this day, I hope that you will know and remember, somewhere down deep in your little soul, that you are God’s beloved, known intimately, called by name, and deeply loved by Jesus, no matter how many times you get stuck. On this day and always you will be “marked as Christ’s own forever.” And we are grateful to be fellow sheep on this path with you. Your sister in Christ, Melanie+

The Third Sunday of Easter Year B

The Third Sunday of Easter Year B April 18, 2021 I’ve been reading the Presiding Bishop’s book that our whole diocese is reading for Eastertide. It is titled Love is the Way: Holding On To Hope in Troubling Times. I’ve been listening to Bishop Curry read it through audible as I go on my daily walks around the beautiful Isle of Hope. Because I didn’t start it until we got home from our college tour and trip to see family last week, I’m a week behind, and I’ve been thinking about the questions for reflection from the diocese for last week. In the early part of the book, Bishop Curry talks about a lady named Josie Robinson who stepped into their family soon after his mother became ill when he was still young. Before she’d even met the children, Josie ironed stacks of their clothes, and Bishop Curry talks about all the ways that she loved them sacrificially, even as she poured her love in action into the world through her vocation as a principal at a local high school whose purpose was to help teenage mothers continue their education. One of the questions for reflection for these early chapters is: “Josie Robbins embodied the love this book is about in her care for the Curry Family after Mrs. Curry's illness. Who has made sacrificial, self-giving love real to you?” I’ve been thinking about this, even as I’ve been going through some things my mom saved for me to go through as she and my dad have been cleaning out their home that we grew up in. Among the items my mom saved was a little placard I had forgotten I had. The front says, “I love you.” And the back is a handwritten portion that says, “My very special friend Melanie.” This placard was given to me when I was a young child by my friend whose name was Jane Schutt. Jane was my grandparents’ age when I knew her, and my mom and I would go over to Jane’s house where Jane would entertain me with such mystical items as her autoharp and her cheese board with it’s own wire cheese slicer attached. (She actually gave me a cheese board of my own for Christmas one year because I loved it so much.) Jane always called me her special friend, on birthday and Christmas cards, in book inscriptions, and she was the first adult I can remember being true friends with beyond the relationship of family. I knew Jane’s love in action as a small child as she loved me and treated me like an equal despite the differences in our ages. It wasn’t until I got to seminary after Jane had died that I learned about the way she had loved in a much broader context. As I was reading one of our books for our Church History class, I was startled to come across Jane’s name. The book was titled Episcopalians and Race, and I learned in that book that my special friend Jane had had a cross burned in her yard by the KKK when she was working for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Bishop Curry offers this definition of love: “Love is a firm commitment to act for the well being of someone other than yourself. It can be personal or political, individual or communal, intimate or public. Love will not be segregated to the private, personal precincts of life. Love, as I read it in the Bible, is ubiquitous. It affects all aspects of life.” i He writes later in the chapter: “If love looks outward to the good of the other, then its opposite isn’t hate. Its opposite is selfishness! It’s a life completely centered on the self. Dr. King referred to this as the ‘reverse Copernican revolution.’ To be selfish is to put yourself in the place of the sun, the whole universe revolving around you. Forget morality -at that point you’ve left reason behind. Life becomes a living lie. Because no amount of smarts, money, or accomplishments puts any one human at the center of existence.”ii I’ve been thinking about all of this, about love being an action and both including and expanding beyond personal relationships, about how the opposite of love isn’t hate but it is selfishness. And then I read part of our Epistle reading for today from First John: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.” And I see Jesus’s encounter with is disciples after his resurrection, his continuation of his self-giving love for them and for all of creation. I can’t help but think about the first line of Mary Oliver’s poem The Messenger which says, “My work is loving the world.” The poem goes on to talk about nature and creation and the delight and wonder found there and how it serves as a source of gratitude. But I can’t help but wonder what it would mean to love the world not just through creation but to try to live selflessly for all the other people of the world and for creation? What would it mean to give the same level of care and consideration for strangers across the country or across the globe that we would for our special friends, our spouses, our parents, our children, and other members of our family? What does it mean that we are all God’s children? How does that tie with others’ claim on us and affect our very thoughts and actions in every moment of every day? Any love for others that we might be called to offer is only rooted in and through the love that God offers us which is made manifest in the person of Jesus Christ and continues to be experienced through the workings of the Holy Spirit. All love comes from God, and we are able to love because God first loved us. Sometimes we are already full to the brim of God’s love, and it isn’t as difficult to let that love spill out and over to love others. And other times, we need to take time and space to be filled up ourselves with God’s love before we can go out and love others. As I offer this prayerful meditation on the passage from First John in closing today, I invite you to close your eyes and ask God for what you need today. When we shall be Praying 1 John 3.2-3 Beloved, we are God’s children now; I am your child, I am beloved, I am yours, I am of you. I am. what we will be has not yet been revealed. I am not done. I am becoming. As you will. What we do know is this: I seek knowing deeper than thinking. Christ, when you are revealed, I open my eyes, I dare to imagine. we will be like you, beloved, made in your image, divine, breathing your breath. for we will see you as you are. See you in all things, see through the eyes of love. All who have this hope in you trust even in the dark. What is is becoming. purify themselves, just as you are pure. Raised to new life, full of your light, pure love.iii Curry, Michael with Sarah Grace. Love is the Way: Holding On To Hope in Troubling Times. Avery: New York, 2020, p 14. Ibid. p 18. Steve Garnaas-Holmes. www.unfoldinglight.net; April 15, 2021

Easter Day 2021

Easter Day 2021 April 4, 2021 Those of you who know me or have heard just a few of my sermons know that I’m an avid reader. I read lots of different types of books—books of poetry, books on religion, leadership, and psychology, the occasional work of non-fiction, but mostly, I read novels. I’ll confess that I’m one of those people who, when about mid-way into a novel, will occasionally flip to the last page and take a peek at how it ends. Because I love a good happy ending, with all loose ends tied up not too neatly but just neatly enough. Which could explain why I find the gospel of Mark to be so unsettling. Imagine sitting down to read this short, action packed gospel, where Jesus is constantly on the move, constantly irritated and frustrated with the denseness and ineptitude of his disciples. So about half-way through, say about at the Transfiguration, when God has revealed God’s glory through Jesus and Jesus predicts his death for the first time and the disciples misunderstand it all spectacularly, imagine that you flip to the end to see if you find a happy ending, some nice, clear resolution. And you get the reading from today’s gospel with the very last line of Mark being: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” (Now, if those of you who are extra-curious about Mark’s gospel go home and look up the end in your Bibles, I should tell you that there are other verses included that scholars believe were not a part of the original gospel and were written by someone else.) “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” It’s definitely not the most satisfactory closing line of a story and other gospel accounts give us appearances of the Resurrected Christ who speaks a good word to his confused and frightened disciples. So what does Mark’s version of the resurrection have to offer us? Once the sabbath is over, the two women make their way to Jesus’ tomb with spices to anoint his body. Along the way, they are fretting about how they will roll away the heavy stone that blocks the tomb’s entrance, but when they arrive, they discover that the stone has already been rolled back. As they enter the tomb to investigate, they see a young man dressed in white seated on the right side. And they are understandably alarmed. He says to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” The strange messenger gives them the good news that Jesus has been raised, and he gives the women a task—to go tell Jesus’s disciples and Peter (the one who denied him) that he is going ahead of you to Galilee and there you will see him. He’s going home, where the story all began, and you should go there too. And Mark tells us that the women’s first response to this astonishing news is to be seized by terror and amazement, fleeing from the tomb and being silent about what they had seen. And we get that don’t we? We who have lived through the events of the last year. We’ve learned about the unpredictability of life and death. We are starting to understand that resurrection doesn’t mean resuscitation, that though we may long for things to “go back to normal,” the way they were before we were all faced with a global pandemic that our lives won’t just be resuscitated to resume at some magical point in time in the future. We have learned that resurrection, that new life is mysterious and unpredictable, that we often have to rely on strange, unrecognizable messengers who we only understand and recognize later, and that there is a certain amount of terror involved when facing resurrection. [And the good news of Mark’s gospel is that, despite its unsatisfactory ending, Jesus’s resurrection did, in fact occur, and the disciples eventually overcome their terror and their silence to spread the good news that God’s love is stronger even than death and that we, as Jesus’s followers, get to participate in that victory both in this life and in the next.] Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we approach your Son’s resurrection with joy and with fear. It is, as birth always is, filled with delight and danger. Bring resurrection to our lives in spite of us. May we allow you to roll the stones away from all that entombs us, to set us free to liberate those around us. Help us to surrender to you that we may be victorious through him who loved us and gave himself for us. Amen.

Easter Vigil 2021

Easter Vigil 2021 My dad is a gifted storyteller, so my memories of my childhood are woven through with stories. In the daytime, he’d tell stories to entertain, creating imaginary characters who would do ridiculous things, and he’d also share humorous anecdotes from his daily life and his past. (His most famous story hales from his early teenage years (1965), and it is the tale of how Lamar Gene Fortenberry wrestled the monkey at the Marion County fair in Columbia, MS.) At night after we’d read books before we’d say our prayers, he’d turn off the lights and tell me stories of his childhood-stories with lessons he had learned. But my favorite story would happen once a year. On the eve of my birthday, my dad would tell me the story of the day I was born. He’d put all of his storytelling gifts and flair to work, so that even to this day, I can picture the events of the day I was born, even though I can’t authentically remember them for myself. It became an annual event, this holy remembering accomplished through story. In the church, we have a fancy liturgical word for this holy remembering. It is anamnesis, and it means that we remember and in that remembering we also, in some mysterious way, participate in the events of the past in this present moment. It is at the heart of what we do as we gather on this holiest of nights. We retell the stories that have been told thousands of times, passed down through the centuries from those who witnessed them first-hand to those of us who now participate in the events as if we had been there. We hear the proclamation of God at creation—so good! We feel the fear of the former slaves as their oppressors are bearing down on them and then the guilty relief as we see the walls of water crashing down upon those who would seek to enslave us. We feel the rattling of the dry bones of Ezekiel’s graveyard in our very bones and breathe in the breath of God that gives us all life. And we participate with the women in the shock and awe and joy and confusion of the resurrection, still to this day, wondering what it means for us. My dad’s annual retelling of the story of my birth would help me reconnect with the events and people from my past, and it would also help me be reconnected to my own identity. So our gathering here tonight recalls us, who have been scattered throughout time and distance, and re-members us as the resurrected body of the Christ, the people whom God has chosen to create, protect and defend, reconstitute, redeem, and resurrect from sin and death. As we tell these stories this night, we reconnect with our own identity as beloved children of God as we reaffirm our baptismal covenant and feel the splatter of holy water upon us once again to remember our baptism. Tonight, the past and the future collapse into only the present, and we’ll greet the Lord’s resurrection as participants in this very real present. The good news of tonight is that the story continues, and we have our part in it.

Maundy Thursday 2021

Maundy Thursday 2021 On this Maundy Thursday, since we are not able to offer the foot washing, I’d like to offer a contemplative practice based on our gospel reading for today. This contemplative reading is modeled on Ignatian prayer practice in approaching scripture. I invite you to close your eyes and listen as I read the gospel again. Imagine that you are present at the scene. Think about the sights, the smells, the sounds, the feelings that this scene evokes in you. After I read the gospel through again, I’ll share different phrases again with you and offer questions for you to engage in this contemplative practice. “Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.” After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them. “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, `Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Imagine you are seated at the table with Jesus for supper. You are among those who are friends, with whom you have walked for many seasons. Conversation is flowing naturally as it does when we sit together around table with those we know well. Some are making jokes. Some are talking quietly. You are pleasantly full from supper. You notice Jesus has stood up. He takes off his outer robe and ties a towel around his waist like an apron. Then he pours water into a basin and begins to wash the feet of everyone at the table and to wipe them with the towel that is tied around him. What are you feeling as you watch this unfolding? He comes to Simon Peter, who says to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answers, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand. Peter says to him, “You will never wash my feet.” And Jesus answers, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Do you share some of Simon Peter’s resistance to receiving Jesus’s love in this act? Examine what is underneath that resistance? Is it fear of that intimacy? Is it discomfort with the vulnerability? Is it a feeling of unworthiness to see Jesus kneeling before you at your feet? What do you think Jesus means when he tells you, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.”? Simon Peter proclaims, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” And Jesus responds, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” For he knew who was to betray him. What parts of your body and soul feel dusty and weary from the road? What parts of you feel clean? What parts of you would you ask Jesus to cleanse and refresh? As you watch the scene continue to unfold, you realize that Jesus has washed Judas’s feet, too. Jesus washes the one who will betray him. How does that awareness make you feel? Then you hear Jesus speak to you and all who are gathered: “So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you….I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” How might Jesus be calling you to show love to others? Can you name before him those who you struggle to love: those who have betrayed you, those with whom you disagree, those among your friends and acquaintances who are just a little harder to love? Take a few moments and ask Jesus for what you need as you walk this way with him over the next three days.