Last Sunday after Pentecost-Christ the King-Year B

Last Sunday after Pentecost—Christ the King Sunday November 21, 2021 Today I would like to tell you two tales of two very different bunnies. The first bunny is named Barrington Bunny. Barrington is the only bunny in the whole wide forest, and he is sad and lonely because he cannot go to the other animals’ Christmas parties--he cannot climb trees like a squirrel or swim like a beaver. And he doesn't have a bunny family of his own. Barrington is crying alone in the snow on Christmas Eve when the wise wolf whose eyes are like fire appears before him. The wolf tells Barrington that all of the animals of the forest are his family, and that he, as a bunny, has his own special gifts. He can hop, and he is furry and warm. As Barrington is hopping home filled with hope and a plan to help the members of his family (all the different animals of the forest), a blizzard wind begins to blow, and he comes across a young field mouse who is lost from his family. Barrington tells the mouse to not be afraid, that he will stay with him, and because he is a bunny, he can help keep him warm. In the morning, when the young mouse's parents find him, Barrington has died in the night keeping the little mouse warm. And the wolf comes and keeps watch over Barrington's body all Christmas Day. The second bunny is named Foo Foo. You see, Little Bunny Foo Foo was hopping through the forest. And out of nowhere he inexplicably scoops up a field mouse and bops him on the head. Then, down comes the good fairy, and she says, “Little Bunny Foo Foo, I don’t want to see you scooping up the field mice and bopping them on the head. I’ll give you three chances. And if you do, I’m gonna turn you into a goon!” Well, we all know what happens. Whatever inexplicable forces that are at work in Little Bunny Foo Foo’s soul to make him want to bop the innocent field mice on the head do not abate, in spite of the good fairy’s warning, and he burns through his three chances, getting turned into a goon in the end. These two stories of two different bunnies are actually two different pictures of kingship that we need to consider on this Last Sunday after Pentecost which is also known as Christ the King Sunday. The Foo Foo way of kingship is a way of might and violence. Foo Foo is bigger and stronger than the field mice and he exercises his power over them until someone stronger than him comes along and punishes him with more violence. The Barrington way of kingship is a way that knows and experiences suffering and loneliness, a way that reaches out to others out of that shared pain and offers a comforting presence even to the point of sacrificial death. We all know suffering, loneliness, tribulation. And most of the time, we are like the communities who John's gospel and Revelation are being written to. We want a strong, Foo Foo like King who will come in and bop all our enemies on the head and rescue us from our suffering. That is the world's way. But Jesus is not a Foo Foo like King. "My kingdom is not of this world," he says. “The way of using might to bring about victory, the way of violence, the way of ‘bopping the little ones on the head’ (or even turning the bullies into goons) is not my way,” he tells us in that one simple phrase. His is the way of Barrington Bunny: the way of staying beside those who are suffering, the way of sacrifice, the way of peace and a love that eventually conquers everything-even death. If we are to be his followers, the citizens of his kingdom, then that must be our way too. Which kind of bunny will you be? Whose way do you follow?

25th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 28B

25th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 28B November 14, 2021 We don’t realize how much we rely on landmarks until they are no longer there. In two different times in my life, I’ve lived someplace where major landmarks have disappeared in an instant. Even though I had only lived in New York City for a couple of weeks before September 11, 2001, in my 3 years there, I never got used to the gap in the downtown skyline where the twin towers once stood when I’d go for a run south on the West-side Highway. On the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the whole landscape was wiped out and irrevocably changed when Hurricane Katrina came ashore. Parishioners who had lived there their entire lives told me stories about how, after Katrina, they would get lost traveling well-known routes because all the distinguishing landmarks were gone, so they never really felt like they knew where they were at any given time. When I moved there 4 years after Katrina, they still hadn’t replaced street signs, so anytime I would try to go somewhere off my regular path, I would often get lost. You should probably know that I often find myself “directionally challenged.” Just last weekend, a companion and I decided to walk to dinner from St. Mark’s Church in Brunswick where we’d had the opening service of convention. It actually took us a while to realize that we had gotten lost on the three-block trip to the restaurant, and when we called my husband to come get us, we finally realized that we had walked in the opposite direction of the restaurant—this is with ample street signs and my phone’s gps. But even for people who are not directionally-challenged like me, it is easy to get lost when known landmarks are wiped away. The community that the writer of Mark is addressing knows something about this. As one commentator writes, “Mark was likely written during (or just after) the disastrous Jewish revolt against Roman imperial occupation in Palestine (66 – 70 CE). Mark’s world was shattered and shaken to its core. The Roman armies vanquished the rebellion and destroyed the Jewish temple, desecrating what for Jews was nothing less than the sacred heart of the world. The message of Mark’s Gospel is thus a message of hope proclaimed in the midst of catastrophe, grace in the midst of violence and ruin. To really hear it, we have to listen from a position of desolation, chaos, and bewilderment; we have to listen alongside the traumatized soldier, the displaced refugee, the pregnant teenager, the addict and his heartbroken family…. This is where Mark lives. These are the depths from which Mark proclaims God’s good news.”i So, it makes sense that in our portion of Mark for today, we see the disciples begging Jesus for certainty. We, who have seen many of the landmarks of our world shifting for the last 18 months, can certainly understand that longing for a sure foundation, for known landmarks, when the world around us feels like it is in chaos. The Hebrews reading is a portion of a sermon to a dispirited congregation. The preacher is addressing a congregation that is suffering from decline; he is addressing a flock who is “tired and discouraged about the way evil seems to persist in the world. As a result the congregation has begun to question the value of being followers of Christ. Attendance at worship has begun to falter, zeal for mission has waned, and the kind of congregational life that is rich with love and compassion has begun to dissipate.” ii It’s interesting to me that both Mark and the Hebrews reading end up in the same place—hope. In the gospel reading, Jesus doesn’t offer his disciples certainty but he does offer hope, telling them that God will come to the rescue “in spectacular fashion: righting wrongs, routing wrongdoers, and thereby inaugurating a new era of justice and compassion.” In similar fashion, the author of Hebrews urges his congregation saying, “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” What might that look like—that holding fast to hope—what might that look like for us in a world where many of our major landmarks were taken away from us in March 2020 and if they are being built back, many of them look very different from before? Last weekend at Diocesan Convention, our bishop Frank Logue shared the gift of a road map for the journey in the form of a question that had been shared with him by a fellow bishop. That question is “what does faithfulness to Jesus look like in this moment?” “What does faithfulness to Jesus look like in this moment?” It doesn’t necessarily offer the certainty that the disciples and many of us long for. It does, however, offer us a new landmark when all around us seems in chaos, and it is helpful reminder of both how we might continue to hold fast to hope, and it is also a reminder that “he who has promised is faithful.” Asking ourselves “what does faithfulness to Jesus look like in this moment?” gives us the road map, for one small step at a time and reminds us that Jesus is walking the path right beside us. It helps us move forward together until we recognize the landmarks around us or until we find a completely new path and the courage and hope to follow it. i.https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/lectionary-commentary-for-twenty-sixth-week-after-pentecost ii. I quoted this in a previous sermon I preached in 2012, but I cannot find where the original quote came from. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/lectionary-commentary-for-twenty-sixth-week-after-pentecost

The Sunday after All Saints' Day-Year B

Sunday after All Saints’ Day Year B November 7, 2021 This time of year, a lot of people like to hang out in graveyards. I’ve seen lots of folks decorating their yards with skeletons, bones, and tombstones this year, and this time of year always sees an increase of interest in cemetery or haunted walking tours. Just this past week, some of us spent some time hanging out here in the Memorial Garden, our church’s very own graveyard, as we held our All Saints’ service in the Memorial Garden for the second year. We wrote the names of the Saints and our faithful departed on luminary bags that we lit up with candles and placed on different graves and on the pathways in our church’s graveyard. After the brief service, many of us lingered, talking with our fellow worshippers among the graves as we waited for darkness to fall to better see the lighted luminaries. I found it to be such a profound moment of peace in the midst of a very full week. Not so long ago, Scott Tanner oversaw a project to clean up the Memorial Garden. In addition to placing new sod and cleaning the markers, Scott ran plumblines through the garden and then straightened the grave markers to be in better alignment. One day, as Scott was out there working in the heat, I went out to check on him toward the end of the day. (He’s said it’s ok that I share all this with you.) Even though the work was grueling, and he was clearly tired, he was strangely luminous. He told me he was actually enjoying the work, and he talked about how, while he was working, he would talk to his friends and loved ones who were buried nearby where he was working, how he could almost just hear how they were responding to him—some were offering him words of encouragement while others were heckling him or still trying to boss him around even from beyond the grave. (I’m sure those of you who have been around here a while can guess who was doing what!) I couldn’t help remembering Scott’s peace and his joy when he told me that he was working among friends and loved ones as we sat among friends, both living and dead, and waited for the darkness to fall this past Monday. The Celtic people-both pagans and Christians-had a name for this. They called it a “thin place,” and they had an abiding awareness of these thin places in their lives and in their world. Harvard theologian Rev. Peter Gomes writes this about thin places: “There is in Celtic mythology the notion of ‘thin places’ in the universe where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity. To seek such places is the vocation of the wise and the good — and for those that find them, the clearest communication between the temporal and eternal. Mountains and rivers are particularly favored as thin places marking invariably as they do, the horizontal and perpendicular frontiers. But perhaps the ultimate of these thin places in the human condition are the experiences people are likely to have as they encounter suffering, joy, and mystery.”i Thin places are places and moments when we recognize that the veil between our current life and our eternal life is thin, sheer, even, at times, non-existent. Thin places, both physically and spiritually, transport us to a place of homecoming and belonging. In the liturgical year, the days surrounding All Saints’ Day are one of these thin places. We see Jesus standing in one of these thin places in our gospel reading for today, as he raises his friend Lazarus from the dead and invites him to come out of his grave. And we see another thin place in the vision of the celebratory banquet in Isaiah, a joyful vision of a time when the scattered will one day be regathered and restored. Today is such a thin place in the life of this church. As we turn in our pledge cards and ask God to bless these gifts that we offer back to God from the gifts God has given us, we stand in the thin place between the past and the future here at St. Thomas. On one side are all those saints who have come before us, who have shined the light of Christ’s love for us in this place. And on the other side are those who have yet to come, to whom we are called to shine the light of Christ’s love—our companions and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the faith—generations yet to be born. We mark our place here in this thin place by making our pledge commitment and by renewing our baptismal vows—reminding and encouraging ourselves and each other of what it means to be bearers of Christ’s light in this place and in this season. Years ago, in the early days of my priesthood, I performed the funeral of a woman named Virginia Stephens. Virginia, who was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother, had been a life-long Episcopalian, and she wasn’t so different from most of those folks buried out in our graveyard. She had been secretary of the parish for a season long before I got there, was a member of the altar guild and a choir member among many other things. One of the gifts Virginia gave to her family and to me as a baby priest, is that she planned her entire funeral. (Perhaps she didn’t trust me or her family to not mess it up!?) As we processed out of the service, her grandchildren bearing her body out of the church for the last time, we sang the hymn Virginia had chosen for her exit. It was hymn 400 which we sang last Sunday and is the same hymn tune as the hymn we’re singing today. It’s a hymn, whose words are attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, and which talks about how all of creation is invited to join in praise of God the Creator. There’s an optional verse that Virginia had us sing, and singing that verse in that moment opened up a thin place for me; even now I can’t hear it without wanting to weep with a strange mix of sorrow and joy. “And even you, most gentle death/ waiting to hush our final breath/O, praise him. Alleluia!/ You lead back home the child of God/for Christ before that way has trod/O praise him! O praise him! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!” i. https://couragerenewal.org/wpccr/thin-places/