Ordinary Time

Rector's Report--Annual Parish Meeting 2012

2012-01-29T05:04:00.000-08:00

Rector’s report—Annual Parish meeting
January 29, 2012
First, of all, I want to thank you for being here today. Today we do much of the business of the church, the nuts and bolts of our common life together, and your presence here and your participation in that is very important.
I’d like to thank everyone who has supported the work and ministry of St. Peter’s by-the-Sea this past year—those who have given money, energy, ideas, physical labor, those who have offered your prayers, those who have shown up, for worship, events, offerings. Together, we have accomplished so much this last year, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
I’d like to thank those who have completed their terms as Vestry members. [Sometimes I think being a Vestry member is truly a thankless job. They are certainly “the few and the proud”. (Did you know that out of almost 20 people we asked to run for warden or vestry this year, 4 accepted?)] One of my joys of working closely with the Vestry is to see how each person brings their own unique gifts and offers them to contribute to the good and the work of the whole. These folks are no exception to that.
Judy Joest has a wonderful sense of humor; she’s someone who can tell a story and have me laughing so hard I’m crying, and that is truly a gift. She would often bring some levity to our work, and she has steadily and consistently for the last three years, spearheaded our pastoral care efforts. I can’t tell you how many times I have been to the hospital to see a parishioner, and either Judy Joest has been there right before me or is coming in as I’m leaving.
Alan Jones has been a quiet presence on Vestry for the last three years, but this year, Alan has exhibited an amazing insight into the heart of matters and an ability to cut to the heart and articulate key truths that often get lost to the rest of us. It has been truly a gift to our work together.
Doug Singletary is so very rooted in the Episcopal tradition and in the life and history of St. Peter’s by-the-Sea. As someone who has been active in leadership in this church for many, many years, he helped keep us grounded in these key identities of what it means to be Episcopalians in this particular community.
And Bob Wolford, who has completed his second year as Junior Warden…Bob is someone who gets things done. I can’t tell you how many times I would come in on a Sunday or a Monday, and something new had been accomplished by Bob’s quietly working at the church on Saturday or a Sunday. A clock is hung in the parish hall; my ordination and ministry certificates (that have been under the ledge of my desk for almost 2 years) are hung on the wall of my office; the sexton’s supply closet is reorganized and shelving has been added. These are all things that probably didn’t make it into Bob’s report, but his tenure as Jr Warden has been full of these small, quiet projects that, once completed, improve the life and the workings of this parish. Thank you to each of you for your service, for your willingness to share your gifts in leadership in this church, and for your love and support of St. Peter’s by-the-Sea.
I would also like to thank those who are continuing to serve on the Vestry this year; I’d like to thank Margaret and Neely who continue on as Clerk and Treasurer, respectively, and who each bring a good, strong dose of pragmatism with them. And I’d like to thank Marie, for her incredible leadership and her steadiness as senior warden. Marie is so very sharp, and I think that she and I have both grown and changed in this last of year of working closely together. I deeply value her leadership, her friendship, and her support.
The Vestry of St. Peter’s by-the-Sea is an amazing group of people, who deeply love this church and try to make the most faithful decisions possible in the circumstances. I cannot tell you how much time they put into the work that they do, but it is a lot, and I know that they do it for love of you all, and for love of this church. Please, do what you can to support them this year. Do what you can to love them, to be kind to them, to follow them, and to trust that their actions are always done through prayer and in faithfulness, trying to lead St. Peter’s to continue to bear fruit worthy of the Kingdom of God.
Be mindful that every criticism and complaint beats them up at least a little bit and erodes the fabric of our common life. We are all flawed human beings, and we are all doing the best that we can and trying to be faithful to following our Lord Jesus Christ.
I’d also like to thank the Vestry and the committee chairs for their written reports that are in your packets. We slightly shifted our focus as a Vestry this year, with our new system of quarterly parish meetings, and to do this, we are asking that every group keeps track of whatever way is appropriate to count or measure growth in that area. The statistics and information provided in these reports in your packets is both enlightening and amazing, and I think it gives us a wonderful picture of all that we have accomplished this year. There are just a few things I’d like to highlight.
First, last year, one of my visions for 2011 was to start a hospitality time after the 10:30 service. The hospitality and new members committee, under the direction of Helen Graham and the energy of Kerry Hudson quickly acted to meet my vision and started offering a hospitality time, solely through the donations of people willing to do it, and it now serves at least 50-60 people in attendance each week (and many more on special occasions). In addition to providing food during this time, Edwin Graham has been creating a new, multi-media slide presentation each Sunday that is on at both hospitality times. These slide presentations provide information about upcoming events, feature a mystery person every week, and they help us all stay better connected.
Another goal for this year was to maintain excellence in music and to continue to build our music program. Under the leadership of JT Anglin, Donna Hutchings, Barbara Blanchard, Debbie Anglin, and Keith Ballard, all three of our choirs are flourishing. The chancel choir is now up to 20 members (the largest since I’ve been here). The bell choir has 10 ringers, and the children’s choir has 11 children enrolled (the largest number since each’s inception). And we continue to work together to provide worship that is a fit offering to God, that is accessible to the people in the pews, and that offers the full breadth and beauty of our Anglican heritage and our Episcopal identity.
Last year I also spoke about our need for more parking on sight. This is an item that the Vestry has talked about at great deal, and it is currently on our “wish list” for things we’d like to work on in the future when more funding for such a project becomes available.
We continue to offer solid offerings for Christian formation of all ages. The children’s Sunday school program is thriving under the direction of Debbie Anglin and a number of dedicated teachers. The recent surveys about the Adult Forum indicate an overwhelming response to continue those offerings. The lectionary class, the Young Adult Sunday school, the Wednesday night seasonal offerings, and the short term studies have all been of outstanding quality. Truly we offer something for everyone who desires to be formed and shaped in the image and likeness of Christ through study and discussion together.
We’ve also had a lot of fun together this last year. We’ve broken bread together in small groups around each others’ tables in our Common Ground Groups, which we’ll hear a little more about later. We’ve learned to dance together; we’ve barbequed together; we’ve celebrated special events, major milestones, and ordinary days together, and through all this, we have strengthened the bonds of our common affection.
And we’ve helped a whole lot of people. We’ve served more than 4,050 meals at Feed My Sheep. We’ve made and delivered 650 sack lunches to hungry people on 2nd Sundays. We provided 70 thanksgiving meals to needy individuals and families in our community. We gave 42 outfits for girls coming through the Harrison County Children’s Emergency Shelter. We provided dinners for the residents of IHN for 24 evenings. We bought Christmas gifts for 30 children of the Women’s shelter this past Christmas. We sent three of our Arts Academy students to Camp Bratton Green on full scholarships and provided partial scholarship assistance for parishioners. We worked with other churches of this diocese and helped build a Habitat House in Smithville, through the loan of our equipment and the labor of members. We gave $2,688 out of our budget to local agencies, and then we raised an additional $7548 to go to other charitable organizations. By my rough calculations, we have improved the lives of around 5,000 people who have been in need this past year. That is amazing, and I am so proud of you all!
Just a few more numbers about this past year, and then I’ll move on to plans for the coming year. This summer, I started keeping up with the number of pastoral encounters that I make in a given week. Now this number is just during the week, because I’ve found no possible way to keep up with this on a given Sunday (other than having a vestry member follow me around with one of those clicker things that they have at events for counting…). And some weeks, I’m so busy, I forget to write it down and count it (so this is hardly scientific). But on average, I have 29 pastoral encounters during the week. This can include calls, visits, notes, emails, Facebook messages, texts—any encounter that I consider to be primarily of a pastoral nature, and the numbers vary greatly in an given week. Usually on shorter weeks, when I’m not in the office, it can be as low as 16. On crazy weeks, it can be as high as 72. But 30-40 is usually a normal week.
Also, our average Sunday attendance has grown this year from 131 to 148. On normal Sundays, we have about 40 people at the 8:00 service and about 100 people at the 10:30 service.
So, briefly, my goals for 2012: to do all that we have done this year and more. We are moving in the right direction; we’ve got structures to support our continued movement and growth in this direction, and we need to keep it going.
This year, we’ll have a rebuilding year for pastoral care. With Judy Joest rotating off the Vestry, we are going to look at new structures to support the continued life and development of pastoral care in the church.
Margaret McCrary has agreed to help me by leading the project to preserve and display the fullness of the history and life of St. Peter’s by-the-Sea by collecting, framing, and displaying pictures to hang on the walls of the hall way from the church back to the parish hall (which has been named in Memory of Buddy Hopkins). Soon, we will be calling upon some members of the church to help with this, and we ask that if you have any pictures which express the fullness of the life and history of St. Peter’s by-the-Sea such as baptisms, weddings, special events (Easter egg hunts, pageants, etc), historic events (building consecrations), or history of the church, that you share them with us. We may not be able to use all of them, but Margaret and her committee would like as many options as they can get as they decide how to tell the story of the life and history of St. Peter’s by-the-Sea on that wall in there.
We will be taking on the bishop’s challenge to read the four gospels with him during Lent, and we will be providing some structure to help make that meaningful for you to be provided on Wednesday nights as our Lenten formation offering.
I will be working with a small group of volunteers who want to help realize our dream of hosting a reception to honor our senior citizens of this parish, and it is my hope to make that a reality this spring.
In closing, I’d like to share what I learned about you, about us, this past summer. When Sue Cassady and I were completing our 2nd year of the Congregational Development training, one of the exercises that we had to do was to look around at the people who were visiting and joining St. Peter’s by-the-Sea. In that exercise, we were supposed to learn about what kind of people we are attracting and what that says about our community and our identity. As Sue and I did this work together, we realized that we were attracting an incredible diversity of people to St. Peter’s. We could not identify one single demographic or other characteristic to help us further understand our identity and what people are finding when they come to St. Peter’s and decide to stay.
But then, as we delved more deeply into what we know about this wide diversity of people who are newly attracted to St. Peter’s by-the-Sea, we realized what it was that attracts them. We are a resurrection community. In this world where so much is marked by death and destruction and corruption, we are both a place and community that places our hope in the resurrection, that says we shall not be overcome by hardship or adversity, by death or destruction. We are a church and a people who put our trust in the resurrection of our Lord that shows, once and for all, that God’s love is stronger than anything that this old world can throw at us. We are a church and people who are an outward and visible sign of the hope that the Kingdom of God is already with us, even now, and we are going to work to continue to bring it to fruition. We are a church and a people that welcome you, regardless of where you have come from, and we will try to help you bind up your broken heart as so many people have helped us do for ours.
We are a resurrection people. May God give us the grace to continue to grow into this truth in the coming year and the hope to be truly worthy of that name.

4th Sunday after Epiphany Year B

2012-01-29T05:00:00.000-08:00

The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany Year B
January 29, 2012
Today’s readings all have something to say about authority. They talk about how we know the mind of God (which is the definition of authority in the life of the church), and how we then follow where God is calling us. In the Old Testament reading, we see the question of who the children of Israel will follow after Moses is dead? Who will be the prophet, the leader, the voice of God’s will and authority in the common life of that people?
In the epistle, we see Paul writing to the troubled community in Corinth about how authority comes not through knowledge but through love, and how, as a part of a community, sometimes we are called to sacrifice our own preferences for the good of others.
In the gospel reading, Mark shows us Jesus’s first act of ministry after he has called his new disciples to follow him. Jesus goes to the synagogue in Capernaum and teaches there, and he is noted as one who speaks with authority. As a result of that, an unclean spirit challenges him, and he heals the man of the unclean spirit, thus proving his authority even more to those who are watching, including his new followers.
It’s important to note that the Greek work that our reading today translates as authority is not power (that’s a totally different word). But authority here is more about a willingness or even a right that has everything to do with seeing justice served. This is the Way that Jesus walks, on which we follow: the care for the poor in spirit, the mournful, the lost, the sick, the hungry. It is what we sign onto as his followers and what the ministry of the church is all about.
This question of authority--of how we know the mind of God and what way do we follow--is one that is still present with us now, especially on this day as we prepare to have our annual parish meeting. For us, the mind of God is always revealed in community. It is why we are all here, because knowing the mind of God in our own individual lives is hard work, and we have found it is much easier when we do it together, as a community. Sometimes, someone can hear something from God that we haven’t ever heard before, and it can help us along our way.
A few years ago, I was reading the book called The Meaning of Jesus by Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright, and I was struck by Tom Wright’s writing about what it means to follow the call of discipleship to Jesus. He was writing about the call to “repent and believe in the good news”. Wright says that we often hear that call with our modern ears as a call to “give up personal sins and accept a body of dogma or a scheme of religious salvation” (38). But in reality, Wright says that Jesus is issuing a call with a political bend saying to people to “Give up your agendas and trust me for mine.”
“Give up your agendas and trust me for mine.” In the church this is a key point in how we follow Jesus. It is also a Key point in how we are the Church together. At different times in our common life, some are called to lead, and some are called to follow. It is the dance that we all choose to dance when we join the church.
I recently read a fascinating article in the The Christian Century titled “How to Follow the Leader: Five habits of healthy congregations.” It’s an interesting article that talks about the call of members of a church to not just follow Jesus but to also follow the leaders of the church. In fact, the author writes that following is crucial. He writes of the term “followership” which is defined as “the discipline of supporting leaders and helping them to lead well. It is not submission, but the wise and good care of leaders, done out of a sense of gratitude for their willingness to take on the responsibilities of leadership, and a sense of hope and faith in their abilities and potential…Good followers remain free to think for themselves but recognize a responsibility to help leaders lead well.”
For Christians, good followership is hardly a foreign concept. “After all the gospels begin with Jesus saying, “Follow me.” To be a Christian means “following Jesus”—listening to him, learning from him and doing what he does.” It is giving up our own agendas and trusting him for his.
The early disciples are very clearly works in progress when it comes to being good followers, and so are we. But “by becoming mature and engaged followers of the leaders we call and elect in the church, we demonstrate one aspect or expression of Christian discipleship.”
It is the job of good leaders to help a congregation to identify its most pressing problems and important challenges, and then to mobilize the faith and the resources to take on those challenges. “Followership requires an overriding commitment to the good of the organization regardless of whether there is complete agreement…Good followership entails a commitment to the mission of the church. Good following means knowing what tasks and business have ‘your name on it’ and which ones don’t. It involves a respect for the roles that help govern a congregation and not overstepping them.”
We are called by our Lord, every day, to let go of our own agendas and to follow him. We are called to grow more deeply and more fully in how we trust and how we follow in our own lives and in the life of the church.
Let us pray. O Lord our God, teach us to ask for the right blessings. Guide the vessel of our life toward yourself, the tranquil haven of all storm-tossed souls. Show us the course we should take. Renew a willing spirit within us. Let your Spirit curb our wayward senses and guide and enable us to our true good, to keep your laws and in all our deeds always to rejoice in your glorious and gladdening presence. For yours is the glory and praise of all your saints for ever and ever. (Basil the Great 330-379)

Epiphany 2B sermon

2012-01-15T03:59:00.000-08:00

Epiphany 2B
(slightly reworked from 1/18/09)
January 15, 2012
It was a Sunday like any other Sunday. The pastor stood in front of his congregation and greeted them with open arms, saying “The peace of Christ be always with you!” A little boy leaned over to his mother and asked, “A Piece of Christ? What am I supposed to do with a piece of Christ?”
It’s an innocent question that gets at the very heart of who we are as Christians. And it especially powerful when we remember the baptisms last Sunday, the bishop’s words to them and to us about how in baptism we are marked as Christ’s own forever, and it is the church’s job-- it is your job and my job-- to help each other remember that.
So what am I to do with “a piece of Christ”?
Our readings for today give us three different looks at what it means to respond to God’s call in our lives. Samuel, whose mother so longed for a baby that she promised God she would dedicate that baby to God’s service, is eager and ready to serve. But he doesn’t recognize the voice of the Lord until gentle but flawed Eli, whose own sight is growing dim, understands and tells Samuel how to answer God. Paul chides the people of the church in Corinth for their gluttony and fornication and reminds them that their bodies, their lives are not their own; they are a member of the body of Christ, bought with a price, and a temple for the Holy Spirit. Philip responds to Nathaniel’s skepticism with an invitation to “Come and see.” And when he does, Jesus’s recognition of who Nathaniel really is, Jesus’s ability to see into his heart, seeing who he is at his very foundation, immediately transforms him into one who is passionate and eager to follow. These readings remind us that the call of the Christian is best heard in community. They remind us that our call must start from an understanding that “I am not my own” but that I am God’s and have been even before I was born.
So what am I to do with “a piece of Christ?”
In the face of the world saying God has nothing left to say, the prophet says to reply: “Here I am Lord. Speak, your servant listens.”
In the face of the world saying that you are your own person, you can do whatever you want/need to find yourself, the poet says, “God has always known you; you must seek the knowledge of yourself in and through God.”
In the face of the world saying you can find meaning and fulfillment in food and sex, the teacher says, “Don’t you know that you are not your own and you are called to glorify God who dwells in you in and through how you use your body?”
In the face of the world who asks, “Can anything good/new/surprising come out of the middle of nowhere?” the friend replies, not with argument or justification, but with an invitation and a smile: “Come and see!”
In the face of resistance and skepticism, our Lord replies: “I have seen inside your very heart, and it leaps with joy as it recognizes me, its deepest desire. Come and follow me and allow me to give you back your life in a way that only I can.”
God’s call to each of us (as individuals and as a church) is a reminder first --that “you are not your own” and second --that we are to “glorify God in all that we are and all that we do.”
We are called, like John the Baptist, to testify to the light, to surrender our lives and our very selves to God, to whom we already belong, allowing that awareness and that surrender to transform us. We are called to help each other hear the call of our Lord, trusting the wisdom of others to help us recognize the call of God in our own lives; not judging but inviting others to go back and try answering a different way or inviting them to join us and to “come and see!” We are called to live our lives differently, as those who are holy, set apart; to confront the world by shining the light of the Son on the world’s excesses, on our own systems of evil and injustice.
Do you know that [you] are members of Christ? Therefore, a piece of Christ will always be with you. Now go forth, and let it shine into the world!

Martin Hood's funeral homily

2012-01-15T03:58:00.000-08:00

Martin Hood’s funeral homily
January 14, 2012
When I sit down with families to plan a funeral service, I make it a point to ask the family members of the person who has died, to share some stories with me. I’ve found that sometimes, some of these snapshots of a life can be woven into the funeral homily in meaningful ways. Yesterday, when I was sitting with Kylie, Lee, and Fran, I asked them to tell me stories about Martin. I told them that I was looking for one that could be used in this homily, and each one thought about a story; and the stories began coming in rapid succession, each one funnier than the one before. But as each one of those women told their stories, they would each preface them with the caveat: “but you couldn’t tell this one in church…” Finally, we decided that everyone who is here today probably has a Martin story. But none of them can be repeated in church…
There’s a prayer, a collect in the prayer book, that has been rattling around in my head these last few days. It starts off with the words: “Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross, that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace…” There’s a lot under the surface in those few simple words: the agony, the despair, the defeat, the humiliation of the cross…the absolute worst of humanity, the absolute worst choice we could make—to choose to put to death God. As the family and friends of Martin, we all know a taste of that darkness on this bright, sunny day.
But we also know the rest of the story, the reality of Jesus’s arms of love; how God’s love proved to be stronger than our darkness and despair in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. We remember, especially today, how God takes the worst decision that we people could make and uses it to accomplish our salvation, redemption, and restoration into God’s kingdom of love.
Today we remember together the cross and the resurrection: the ultimate bad decision, the deep despair of humankind and the surprise of hope—that God’s love is stronger than anything, stronger than our grief and sadness, stronger than our despair and bad decisions, stronger than anything and everything. Even death.
It is no secret that throughout his life, Martin wrestled with the darkness, with depression and anxiety. But what you may or may not know is how throughout his life, he also encountered the surprise of hope—how the first time he held his niece, Shelby, he made the decision to be different, to live his life differently, and he did it. He was surprised by hope in meeting Kylie and in their life together that was filled with so much laughter. He was surprised by hope in his passion for his work and his brilliance at programming. He was surprised by hope as he became a father to Olivia, in the way that he quietly and faithfully loved her and provided for her.
In his life we remember and give thanks for the hope; and we are confident that he is once again being surprised by hope in eternal life in the loving arms of the God who created him.
So this day, even in our sadness, we give thanks for the life of Martin Hood. We remember all that was so wonderful about him—all those stories that we can’t tell in church; we hold tightly to one another, and we hold fast to the surprise of hope that is the resurrection of Jesus Christ: that God’s love (for Martin and for each of us) is stronger than our grief, our despair, our anger, our loss, our bad decisions. We hold fast to the hope that God’s love is stronger than anything and everything.
Even death.

Christmas Day 2011

2011-12-24T18:57:00.000-08:00

As many times as I’ve heard story of Jesus’s birth from Luke’s gospel, as many times as I’ve read it myself, as many times as I’ve preached on it… I have never really noticed the prevalence of the manger in the Luke’s story. Luke mentions the manger three times. And we talk about it readily, see it everywhere, but I’ve never really thought about the Eucharistic significance. The shepherds greet God incarnate, not just in a barn, or a cave or a courtyard, not on a pile of blankets in the corner of the room. God incarnate is lying inside the feeding place. The shepherds greet God who is with us at table. Over and over again he feeds us: in his life and his ministry, in his teaching and witness, in his death and resurrection, and in the mystery and wonder of his birth.
It is meet and right, therefore, that we gather together today, on this day of his birth, and allow him to feed us again.
May you be given a taste of the hope, the wonder, the mystery of this baby who is God with us, and who will feed you whenever you ask.

Christmas Eve 2011

2011-12-24T18:54:00.000-08:00

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.” Israel is truly a dark place as the prophet Isaiah proclaims this bit of good news. The land is immersed in deep and overwhelming fear as Israel and Judah are both facing their immanent destructions. In just a few years, Judah (the southern kingdom) will become a resident captive and the northern kingdom of Israel will be no more. At this point in history, political machinations are afoot, and the people of the northern kingdom of Israel have declared war on Jerusalem while the Assyrians are practically at the doors of the kingdom. Into this crisis, God sends Isaiah to speak good news to King Ahaz and his people. I am giving you a sign to show that I am with you, God tells God’s people, in the midst of their darkness. No matter what happens God will be with you.
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.” Israel has found itself again under the darkness of Roman occupation. The efficient and ruthless Romans are ruling the country with an iron fist, and the people of Israel just try to keep their heads down and go about their daily lives. Some of the more shiftless members of the population of Bethlehem, the shepherds, are working, tending their sheep one ordinary night when a brilliant light splits the darkness and lights up the night. Angels appear to them and tell them the good news: God is with you. No matter what happens, God will be with you.
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.” I know that I do not have to speak to you of the darkness of the world. You know of it as well as I. We see it writ large in war, torture, hunger, disease, terrorist bombings, and the wrongful use of power. We see it writ small in family quarrels, disease and death, old age and infirmity, rebellious children, fear, guilt, loneliness, and bereavement. No, we are not strangers to the land of deep darkness.
Modern day mystic and priest Anthony DeMello writes: “Look steadily at the darkness. It won’t be long before you see the light. Gaze at things. It won’t be long before you see the Word.”i We too dwell with the darkness. Tonight we come here to remember that Jesus Christ is God who is with us; we come here because we desperately hope that the light of Christ will drive away the shadows and the darkness of our lives, of our world. All throughout our story, the story of the love affair between God and God’s people, we, God’s people have pulled away, and God says to us, I am with you. Tonight we celebrate and remember the reality that God is in fact with us, no matter what darkness we may face in our lives. No matter what happens, God will be with you.
The artist and poet Jan Richardson has written a blessing for Winter Solstice that speaks to those of us who walk in darkness and long for the light of Christ in our lives and in our world.

Blessing for the Longest Night
All throughout these months
as the shadows
have lengthened,
this blessing has been
gathering itself,
making ready,
preparing for
this night.
It has practiced
walking in the dark,
traveling with
its eyes closed,
feeling its way
by memory
by touch
by the pull of the moon
even as it wanes.
So believe me
when I tell you
this blessing will
reach you
even if you
have not light enough
to read it;
it will find you
even though you cannot
see it coming.
You will know
the moment of its
arriving
by your release
of the breath
you have held
so long;
a loosening
of the clenching
in your hands,
of the clutch
around your heart;
a thinning
of the darkness
that had drawn itself
around you.
This blessing
does not mean
to take the night away
but it knows
its hidden roads,
knows the resting spots
along the path,
knows what it means
to travel
in the company
of a friend.
So when
this blessing comes,
take its hand.
Get up.
Set out on the road
you cannot see.
This is the night
when you can trust
that any direction
you go,
you will be walking
toward the dawn.ii

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shined.” Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy for all people. God is with you, this night and always. No matter what happens, God will be with you.

i. Anthony de Mello, Selected Writings, ed. William Dych, SJ. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999, p 49.
ii. © Jan L. Richardson. janrichardson.com

Blue Christmas meditation

2011-12-21T17:58:00.000-08:00

Here is the link for the meditation I read at our Blue Christmas service. It was written by my friend and seminary classmate the Rev. Dr. Jackie Cameron.

http://episcopalcredo.org/wellness/wellness-advent/advent-2-health/?month=12&year=2011&categoryID=&relatedID=

4th Sunday of Advent Year B

2011-12-18T04:39:00.000-08:00

4th Sunday of Advent
December 18, 2011
The other night, as I was putting my 3 year old son to bed, Jack and I were talking about angels. Early on in the conversation, Jack says to me, “Me no like angels. Me scared of angels.” You’re scared of angels? I asked. And just as the words, “But why?” where coming out of my mouth, I realized something. The kid was on to something. Angels are scary! In just about all the stories in scripture about angels, what is the one of the first thing the angel says? “Do not be afraid!”
The word angel (angelos) means messenger. Angels always show up with an invitation from God; a warning that God is about to shake things up, and God invites that particular person to be a part of God’s new beginning.
In her book The Glorious Impossible, Madeleine L’Engle retells the story of the life of Jesus through her own words and the illustrations of the medieval artist Giotto. On the page about the Annunciation, she writes,
An angel came to Mary. A fourteen year old girl was visited by an angel, an archangel. In Scripture, whenever an angel appears to anyone, the angel’s first words usually are, “FEAR NOT!”—which gives us an idea of what angels must have looked like.
So the Archangel Gabriel, who visited Mary, greeted her with great courtesy, and then said, “FEAR NOT!”
And then he told her that she was going to have a baby, a remarkable baby who would be called eh son of the Highest.
Mary was already engaged to Joseph. The wedding would be soon. This was strange and startling news indeed. Mary, fourteen years old, looked the angel in the face, asking, with incredible courage, “But how can this be?”
And the angels told her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow you. and the Holy Thing which shall be born of you shall be called the son of God.”
What an amazing, what an impossible message the angel brought to a young girl! But Mary looked at the angle and said, “Be it unto me according to your word.”
And so the life of Jesus began as it would end, with the impossible. When he was a grown man he would say to his disciples, “For human beings it is impossible. For God nothing is impossible.”
Possible things are easy to believe. The Glorious Impossibles are what bring joy to our hearts, hope to our lives, songs to our lips… i
When angels show up, it is always with an invitation to participate in the Glorious Impossible. God could easily do it without us, but God doesn’t. Augustine once said, “Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not.”
Today we celebrate that God is inviting us all to participate in the Glorious Impossible: The miracle of God with us. Do not be afraid.

i. L’Engle, Madeleine. The Glorious Impossible. Simon and Schuster: New York, 1990, 1.

Advent 3B sermon

2011-12-11T04:36:00.001-08:00

Advent 3B
December 11, 2011
In his book about Paul, the British theologian and bishop NT Wright reminisces about his ordination over 30 years ago. In the many cards and notes of encouragement that he received, Wright remembers one card in particular. On the front was the Greek phrase: “The One who calls you is faithful.”i It is the heart of the good news; the crux of our hope. No matter what happens to you, no matter what choices you make:
The One who calls you is faithful.
Our readings for today bear witness to the dream of God. In the gospel of John, we see John the Baptist, whose call is to be a witness, to testify to the light that shines in the darkness and is not overcome. John the Baptist bears witness that the dream of God is coming into fulfillment and will be made incarnate in the person of Jesus.
The One who calls you is faithful.
In the reading from Isaiah, we fast forward from our reading last week which spoke words of promise and comfort to a people who had been in exile for decades. This week, we see the fulfillment of the promise: the restoration of God’s people back in Israel. The people who have been in exile have returned home and they are beginning to rebuild their lives and their land. Psalm 126 says that it is a like a dream-come-true. These people have dreamed for so long of returning home, and finally God has accomplished their home-coming. In the reading for Isaiah, we see the dream of God, the restoration of Zion, the Lord’s city, and what that will look like: the broken-hearted will be bound up, the captives and the prisoners will know release, the city will know the Jubilee year as well as seeing the Lord’s vengeance. The mourners will be comforted. And they will all be called oaks of righteousness.
For the one who calls you is faithful.
Isaiah is not just speaking about the work of individuals. He is talking about systemic change and transformation-- what happens when all people participate in the dream of God! What happens when all people of faith offer their lives, through hundreds of small acts of faithfulness, to the fulfillment of God’s dream, to the restoration of God’s city.
In one of the earliest Christian writings that we have, Paul is writing to the Thessalonians and offering them comfort and reassurance, explaining to them how to live in the meantime, as they wait for Jesus’s return. Again, in Paul’s writing we see a small slice of the dream of God for Christian community. How both individuals and the church are called to be: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil. May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.”
Are we giving ourselves over to the dream of God or are we waiting on God to fulfill our own individual dreams? Are we willing to accept the transformation that comes with God’s dream or are we expecting God to yield to us, to fix everything the way we want it and us remain unchanged? How are you being called to let go of your own dream, so that you can give yourself over to the dream of God, the dream of the one who is calling us and who is truly faithful? What might that look like?
In her memoir called Mighty Be Our Powers (2011), the Nobel laureate Leymah Gbowee (Pronounced: Leemah Bowee) describes how one night she became a participant in God’s dream while sleeping on her office floor: "I didn't know where I was. Everything was dark. I couldn't see a face, but I heard a voice, and it was talking to me — commanding me: 'Gather the women to pray for peace!' At 5 A.M. she woke up shaking, feeling like she had heard the voice of God.
Peace was a distant dream for Liberians after fourteen years of savage civil war (1989–2003). By some estimates, ten percent of the population had been slaughtered. Twenty-five percent had fled the country. Starvation, systematic rape, torture, mutilation and Charles Taylor's cocaine-crazed child soldiers had traumatized the nation. Schools and hospitals closed. Rats and dogs ate the unburied dead who littered the streets. There was no water, electricity or phone service.
Later that morning Gbowee related her dream to the women at her Lutheran church. Sister Esther Musah, an evangelist, led them in prayer: "Dear God, thank you for sending us this vision. Give us your blessing, Lord, and offer us Your protection and guidance in helping us to understand what it means." What it meant was the start of the Liberian women's peace movement that ended the civil war.
About twenty Lutheran women began to gather every Tuesday at noon to pray. Sometimes they fasted. They invited other Christian churches. At one meeting, a woman named Asatu spoke up: "I'm the only Muslim here, and we want to join this peace movement." "Praise the Lord!" shouted the Christian women. And so Muslim and Christian women formed an alliance. They shared their horror stories. Training sessions and workshops followed. They passed out brochures and marched to city hall. Three days a week for six months they visited the mosques, the markets, and the churches of Monrovia: "Liberian women, awake for peace!"
In the end, the women forced Charles Taylor to peace talks in Ghana, and then in Ghana they barricaded the do-nothing men in their plenary hall until they signed peace accords. After the 2003 accords, they were instrumental in disarming the country, registering voters, and electing Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as the first woman head of state in Africa.
When people ask “who were these women?” Gbowee says, "I will say they are ordinary mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters." They sowed bitter tears. They went out weeping. And through hundreds of small acts of faithfulness, they courageously participated in God’s dream of peace, joy, and laughter for their beloved country.ii
The one who calls you is faithful.
How are you being called, how are we being called to bear witness with our very lives to the one who is calling us and who is truly faithful? You do not have to be a Nobel-prize winning peace activist to participate in the dream of God. But you do have to relinquish a part of yourself, your desire for control, your plan or dream for the way that things are going to turn out. And to participate in the dream of God. It starts right here, right now, in hundreds of small acts of faithfulness.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes “…In the early Church people were attracted to it not so much by the preaching, but by the fact that they saw Christians as a community, living a new life as if what God had done was important, and had made a difference. They saw a community of those who, whether poor or rich, male or female, free or slave, young or old—all quite unbelievable loved and cared for each other. It was the lifestyle of the Christians that was witnessing.”iii
The one who calls you is faithful! What small acts of faithfulness might you offer to participate in the dream of God in your life, in this time, and in this place?

i. Wright, NT. Paul For Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians. London: SPCK, 2002, p 133.
ii. This story is originally found on the website of Daniel Clendin: http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20111205JJ.shtml
iii. Tutu, Desmond. Crying in the Wilderness. Ed. John Webster. London: Mowbray, 1990, pp 6-7

2nd Sunday of Advent Year B

2011-12-04T04:26:00.000-08:00

2nd Sunday of Advent
December 3, 2011

The Old Testament reading and the gospel reading for today, the 2nd Sunday of Advent, were both written for people who were dwelling in the wilderness of disappointment and frustrated expectations. In Isaiah, the prophet is writing to a people who have witnessed the destruction of their homes, their faith, their government, their very lives. And they have been living in this wilderness of disappointment, in captivity for decades.
Mark’s gospel is also written to a people who are dwelling in the wilderness of disappointment. Over and over again, the writer of Mark’s gospel is emphasizing that following the way of Jesus is difficult; that more often than not, we just don’t get it; that discipleship includes embracing suffering and death as our Lord embraced them. The writer of Mark is writing to try to deal with the apparent failure of Jesus’s message.
Into this wilderness come the springs of hope in the words of 2nd Isaiah and strangely enough, in the call of repentance of the rough figure John the Baptist. Both are reminding us that God longs to be reconciled with us. Both invite us to examine our inner landscapes, to see how God might be calling us to allow God to re-shape and rearrange our lives and our souls that we might be made less empty and more sated, less wounded and more whole, less self-centered and more godly.
In Mark’s gospel, the writer refers frequently to “the way.” Here it is written of the voice of one crying in the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord …” The heart of Mark’s gospel is all about following Jesus on ‘the way’; it’s all about discipleship. And all throughout the gospel, Mark is showing us what it means to follow Jesus, to follow the Way—that it is truly a difficult path. Mark is trying to suggest that Jesus properly understands and accepts death and that he suffers and dies willingly, and so for Mark, that is what it means to follow Christ. That is the Way.
In our gospel for today, I am struck how John the Baptist suddenly appears in the wilderness. It’s not necessarily his home, where he lives, but it is where he shows up to deliver his message. And his message is to prepare the way and to follow it. He preaches about God’s ultimate purpose, the purpose that is captured so beautifully in the love song that is Isaiah 40. God’s purpose is forgiveness and reconciliation. Repentance or turning and confession are the call of John the Baptist. They are the tools that God uses in the wilderness to reshape our spiritual landscapes. Some of us are so reluctant to do this work, to embrace John’s call to repentance and confession. But this is the way that we must accept the death of ourselves in order to have the peace and the comfort that God so freely offers.
In our Old Testament and Gospel readings for today, we find much emphasis placed upon changing landscapes, the wilderness, and upon preparing the way of the Lord. These familiar words from Isaiah, about how God is going to dramatically shake up, rearrange and reshape the landscape, are words of great comfort and restoration for the original hearers—those who have been suffering in the wilderness of captivity and slavery for decades. It is said that the job of the prophets is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.
I know there are many of you sitting out there this morning who are also suffering in your own wilderness and exile, deeply longing for a great, dramatic shake-up, for a great change in the landscape. There may be others of you who are relatively comfortable, for whom these words of dramatic rearranging of the landscape are quite threatening. Now just wait a minute! I built my house on that hill! I do not want it to be brought down into a valley! Whether we like it or not, life and God periodically rearrange the landscapes of our lives and our spirits.
Whether you are one of those who are already pretty comfortable, or one of those in desperate need of comfort, we are all invited on this Second Sunday of Advent to ponder and to participate in the surveying of our interior landscapes.
Another preacher writes about this endeavor saying: “During Advent, we go with John into the wilderness to prepare the way to welcome Christ into our hearts and lives anew at Christmas. We have the opportunity to explore the inner geography of our lives for areas of dead wood, thorns or tangled knots. Twisted relationships, the dead wood of old hurts or habits, the confusion that sometimes comes when we feel we can’t see the wood for the trees—all these are wilderness areas, and they need to be cleared away before growth and new life is possible. Or perhaps there are desert patches—arid, dry areas where nothing can grow or blossom, parts of us which have almost withered away from not being used or tended or tested—some tenderness, some care, some talent, some forgiveness, some humor—that need the water of life to bring them bursting into flower.” (Kathy Galloway, Getting Personal: Sermons and Meditations SPCK, London, 1995, pp89-90)
What are the wilderness areas in your soul these days? Do you harbor the dead wood of old hurts and habits? Do you cultivate the thorns of disappointment or betrayal? What part of your soul has fallen into the dessert and so longs for water and nurture and nourishment? Do you have valleys of disappointment or half-hearted commitment that God is seeking to fill? How might God be calling you to rearrange the landscape of your heart and your soul to prepare the way for Jesus? What part of your life is God longing to reshape, to give you comfort and nourishment, if you will but allow it? Where are you being called to repent and to receive God’s forgiveness?
I read an Advent devotion this week by Richard Rohr in which he writes, “When people say piously, ‘Thy kingdom come’ out of one side of their mouth, they need to say ‘My kingdom go!’ out of the other side” (Rohr, Richard. Preparing for Christmas…Daily Meditations for Advent. St. Anthony Messenger: Cincinnati, 2008, p13). I invite you to think about that today as your pray the Lord’s prayer and all through the week. And ask yourself, “What wilderness part of me must die to make room for the new creation waiting to be born?”

Last Sunday after Pentecost--Christ the King Sunday

2011-11-20T04:11:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday after Pentecost (Christ the King)Proper 29A
November 20, 2011
Today is the last Sunday after Pentecost, the day upon which we contemplate the reign of Christ, and much of our readings and music today depict our lord as Christ the King.
We Americans have a love/hate relationship with royalty that goes back to our very beginnings; we covet our independence from monarchs, even as we keep an eye upon what those glamorous royals in other parts of the world are up to.
Kingship is an ambiguous image for us. My friend Sylvia Czarnetsky tells the story of how she planned a children’s Sunday school in her church once on Christ the King Sunday and the craft for the lesson was that all the children and the grown up helpers got to make their own crowns (made out of Burger King crowns and lots of glitter); and then they all got to wear them around during the Sunday school hour. She says that experience taught her one of the core tenants of kingship that every child seems to know: that is that if a person is king, he (or she) gets to boss everyone else around!
We get a completely different image of kingship in our gospel reading for today. In today’s gospel from Matthew, we get the only depiction of the Last Judgment in the New Testament. It comes at the end of a series of exhortations and parables through which Jesus is teaching his followers about right behavior, right action until he comes again.
In today’s parable, Jesus tells us about the coming of the Son of Man. He says that on that day, all nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And the question that will determine which people are sheep and which people are goats will basically be the question, “What have you done for me lately?” The blessed, or the sheep, will be the ones who have, by feeding, clothing, sharing with and befriending the less fortunate, in fact have been serving the Son of Man. The goats will be the ones who haven’t done this.
So, I have three questions for you today. Now, I’m going to do something a little unorthodox and ask you to actually raise your hands. Who here has ever in your life done what Jesus has asked of us in the beginning of the passage and fed a hungry person, clothed a naked person or visited a person in prison? You have! That’s wonderful! You are the sheep. Now, who here has, even once in your life, walked past a hungry person, failed to clothe a naked person, or not visited someone in prison? Well, that’s too bad. You’re all goats. How many of you raised your hand both times? You know what that means? It means that we are a bunch of good goats.

That little exercise is from a book called Good Goats: Healing our Image of God. And in it, the authors explain more about this concept of what it means to be a good goat. “All of us who have felt alienated, unloved, overwhelmed by shame or helplessly caught in an addiction know what it’s like to be in hell. And all of us who have been welcomed home, who have seen our goodness reflected in the affirming eyes of another or who have been loved into recovery know what it’s like to be in heaven. We all have wheat and weeds within us, sheep and goats. The kingdom of God is within us, and we’re all good goats.”i
What Jesus is teaching his disciples and us in the passage, is that salvation is not something that we can achieve if we work hard enough. Salvation is, like the love of God, something that steals upon us. It is something that we discover, often in the places where we least expect it. Salvation is what we find in those moments when we can manage to glimpse the face of God in the face of the other. Jesus’s kingship is an invitation to us to live more fully into the best of our own humanity. We may not be able to end hunger, to visit all who are sick, to include every stranger. But when we open our hearts to the King’s compassion, then we can look at least one or two of the suffering in the eyes and see them as God sees them: beautiful and lovely and worthy of love. We may not be able to change the world, but we can offer comfort and solace to those who are trampled down by life, in whatever small ways we can, along the way.
So although we’d all like to live more fully into a kingship in which we are the boss and we get to boss everyone around and run the world according to our own way (because face it, we know we could do it…), we follow a king of a different sort. We follow a king who is not too proud or too lofty to dwell with people in their worst moments. We follow a king who does not flinch from touching people right where they are sickest, most broken. We follow a king who dwells in the darkest of places, in the hearts of all of us who are poor, sick, stranger, imprisoned, and naked. We follow a king who invites us to see his face in the face of the other and to find our salvation and the Kingdom of God there.

i. Linn, Dennis, Sheila Fabricant Linn, and Matthew Linn. Good Goats: Healing Our Image of God. Paulist: Mahwah, 1994, p49.

22nd Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 28A

2011-11-13T04:17:00.000-08:00

22nd Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 28A
November 13, 2011
This past week, I learned something that has disturbed me greatly. A behavioral psychologist in Jackson was sharing with a group of clergy that she had been doing research among people of faith as we approached the vote on the controversial personhood initiative. She said that her research group had gathered significant data that showed that many people of faith were afraid of what would happen to them if they voted no. The data showed that the people of faith believed that God would be watching them when they entered the poll booth, watching to see how they voted, and they feared divine retribution if they voted no. People of faith actually told this behavioral psychologist that they believed that if they voted no on ballot initiative 26 then God was going to get them.
At first I was incredulous. And then I was somewhat scornful. None of these people could possibly be Episcopalians, because surely our theology is much more sophisticated than that! And then I felt so very terribly sorry for those people, for whom that is their faith, those whom have chosen to live their lives in that kind of fear of God.
And then I read the gospel for today. In today’s parable, Jesus tells of a man who is preparing to go on a journey, and he entrusts to three of his slaves an enormous amount of his money. Two of the slaves take the money and use it to make more money, so when the master returns, they give him his money back and then some. The third slave takes the money the master gives him and he takes a shovel and digs a hole in the ground to bury the money and keep it safe until the master returns. But when he returns that money to the master and confesses his fear to him, the master severely chastises him and has him cast into the outer darkness.
We make a mistake if we read this parable to be about God and the nature of God’s kingdom. This parable is, instead, about us and about all the people of God. The chief problem of the third slave, especially in contrast to the other two slaves, is the failure of his imagination. It is the chief failure of all people of faith, this failure of imagination. We can see it all throughout the story of God and God’s people: God invites peoples’ trust; God invites peoples’ best hopes, their best dreams, and our imaginations fail us. We cannot get over thinking that God is just as small as we are. We cannot imagine God to be any bigger, better, different than ourselves. And in that way, we fail, again and again and again.
Think about the stories of our faith, how the Israelites turned away from God over and over again because their imaginations failed them, their trust failed them. Think about the Pharisees, the Scribes, even the disciples. How they could not see the glory of God who was right in front of them because of the failure of their imaginations. We see this failure of imagination at work in the faithful community at Thessolonika, to whom Paul is writing to invite them to expand their imaginations, to not be discouraged, to remember their hope. He writes to capture their imaginations once again with the real hope “that God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him.”
If we are truthful, we see this failure of imagination at work in our own world, in our own church, in our own lives. Truly we are not so different from those people who thought that God was going to get them if they voted a certain way. We all share in this failure of imagination regarding the goodness and the abundance of God.
The theologian James Allison writes about the success of the imagination of the first two slaves in this parable. He writes, “The key feature of this parable is that it is the imagination of the servants as to what their master is like which is the determining factor of their conscience and thus the wellspring of their activity. The first two servants…trusted that their master was the sort of daring fellow who would do rash and crazy things for which there was no script, would dare, would experiment, would risk losing things and so would end up multiplying things greatly. In other words, they perceived their master’s regard for them as one of liking them enough to be daring them and encouraging them to be adventurous, and so, imagining and trusting that abundance would multiply, they indeed multiplied abundance.”i

Again and again, Jesus invites us to step beyond our fear; to allow ourselves to be inspired by hope; to leave behind the limits of our own imaginations; to give our hearts to God’s abundance; and to stake our lives on this radical abundance that is so far beyond anything our own imaginations can provide. If only we could do this, if only we could give our hearts and our imaginations to God’s abundance, what a different world we would dwell in! How different our own lives would be!

Here are the readings for today: http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp28_RCL.html

i Allison, James. On Being Liked. London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 2003, p 109.

A letter to those being baptized on the Sunday after All Saints

2011-11-06T04:07:00.000-08:00

Sunday after All Saint’s Day
November 6, 2011

Dear Avery and Gabe,

Today is a very special day. It is the day when we are gathered to baptize you both and to begin the life-long process for you of walking the way of faithfulness to God through following the path of Jesus Christ. It is the day when we gather together to promise to support you in your life of faith, even as we renew and reaffirm our own baptismal promises. It is the day when we remember all of the saints who have come before us, those who have walked this way with us, and even those who will come after us.

In the gospel reading for today (on this day of your baptism) we see Jesus giving his first sermon, and he is telling his disciples, the crowds and us two very important things in this sermon. Jesus is, first and foremost, telling us about the nature of God, and he is telling us how to follow him on the path of faithfulness to God.

In this sermon, Jesus is telling us that God’s kingdom is based on the values of God and not on the values of this world. God values mercy, humility, kindness, peace, righteousness. God values the weak, the powerless, the little children; all those who most often get trampled by the powerful. And to be faithful to God and the values of God’s kingdom, then we must give our hearts to things which would seem to profit us little: mercy, mourning, peace, and meekness.

Jesus tells us that way of discipleship that we begin at our baptism is the process of following this road to the Kingdom of God. And we are both already there in the moment of our baptism as well as traveling there until the day of our death.

As you each walk this road of faithfulness all the days of your lives, may you remember what Jesus is teaching on this first day of your life of faith:
You are on the right road when you are poor in spirit for only then can you truly possess the kingdom of heaven.
You are on the right road when you mourn, and you will be comforted.
You are on the right road when you are meek for you will inherit the earth.
You are on the right road when you hunger and thirst for righteousness for you will be filled.
You are on the right road when your heart is pure for then you are able to see the face of God.
You are on the right road when you make peace and God will claim you as God’s child as God does on this day.
You are on the right road when you are persecuted for upholding the values of the Kingdom of God and you will thus belong to that kingdom.
You are on the right road when people despise you and mistreat you for the good things for which you stand and in that, you share kinship with our Lord Jesus who has gone this way before you through death and into new life and resurrection.

There may be times in your life and in your faith, when you feel so lonely, so overwhelmed, so unfulfilled, you so long for something more and better and not so difficult that you do not know how you can bear to continue down this road. And on those days, I invite you to remember this day, when all the believers past, present, and future gather together to promise to uphold you on this way and who, from this day forward, shine the light of their lives and their faith ahead of you into the darkness toward Jesus who walks this road before all of us. You do not walk this road alone, but you walk with a whole host of companions, a great cloud of witnesses.

There will be times as you follow this way of faithfulness that you will be faced with impossible choices. There will be times on this way when parts of you will die. Sometimes they will be the sick, unhealthy parts of you that keep you from God: your pride, vainglory, and selfishness. But other times they will be your deepest hearts desires: your hopes, your dreams and your wishes for the future. In each of those deaths, God is present with you in your mourning, and God offers you new life, new hope on the way.

Finally, we gather together this day to celebrate. Because no matter what hardships we might face in this life and on this road of faithfulness, we know the end of the story. We live the end of the story. We baptize you this day into the end of the story: that no matter what happens, God’s love is stronger than absolutely anything, even death. On this day, we baptize you into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is the way that we follow for faithfulness in God and to live into God’s kingdom; we seal you in the Holy Spirit and mark you as Christ’s own forever. And we celebrate with you, because from this day forward, no matter what happens in your life or what hardships you endure, you belong to God. And God’s love always wins. We promise to help you remember, and to walk this way with you. We promise to help you remember joy, to know peace and to hold fast to hope.
Your sister in Christ, Melanie+

19th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 25A

2011-10-23T04:01:00.000-07:00

19th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 25A
October 23, 2011

Messenger by Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.i

When the lawyer approaches Jesus in today’s gospel, he asks Jesus, “which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus answers him first with the Shema, the cornerstone of Jewish faith, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
“In quoting the Shema, Jesus points out that the aim of the law is to orient one’s entire life toward God. However, one cannot love God without loving what God loves!”ii And what does God love? Everything. Everybody. All of creation. You, and your own unique life.
The question for us this day is How do we do this work? How do we do the work of ‘loving the world;’ how do we do the work of rejoicing, of gratitude? How do we love God whole-lifedly?iii
We love God whole-lifedly through our stewardship. Stewardship is all that I do with all that I have after I say “I believe.” Stewardship is not a season in the church year when the church is trying to make its annual budget. Stewardship is the choices that you make every single day of your lives. It is how you choose to be in this world, how you choose to be in relationship with God. Do the choices you make day in and day out drive you closer to God, or do they drive you away from God? Do your choices bring you closer to God’s people and God’s creation or do they separate you from them? Do you spend your time in this life taking? Or do you spend your time in this life giving, caring, supporting?
Some of these choices involve money and some do not. I had a conversation with my mother not too long ago, where she shared with me the fact that my parents’ decision to become vegetarians was a stewardship issue. They had learned about the miserable existence of most animals who are specifically raised to be food, and they no longer wanted to participate in that system. They had researched about the ways that they could reduce their carbon footprint in this world, to better care for the earth, and so they gave up meat, and they sold their SUV and replaced it with a much smaller, more fuel-efficient car. They are doing this work of conservation and in it they are loving the world and loving their children and grand-children. So the other day, after I had heard my mother talk about this, I was running out the door and went to grab a bottle of water from the fridge, and I stopped. I realized that it would only take a couple of extra minutes to get my aluminum bottle out and fill it with the filtered water from the fridge. Will I save the world with that one bottle of water? No. But in that choice, I chose to be a giver instead of a taker, and I felt more connected with God, the earth, and the people I love because of it.
Last week, I shared with you the fact that Jesus talks about money more than anything else except the kingdom of God. He talks about money more than he talks about heaven and hell combined; 11 of his 39 parables are about money. That should tell us something! There is a direct connection between our money and our relationship with God. I asked you to recall your first memory of money and examine what that memory says about your image of God. I know some of you did this, because you shared your stories with me. Today, I’m going to ask you to do another sort of examination this week. Jesus summed up the spiritual connection with money and the choices that we make in our financial stewardship when he said (in Luke12:34), “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” So I’m going to ask you to do this exercise at some point in the week. Take some time and look at your check-book, online bank statement, and your other financial resources. Just look and see what your checkbook says about where your heart is. Take some time and ask yourself: How do I love through the way I spend my money? Who do I love through the way I spend my money? What does my checkbook show about my relationship with God and others? In the ways that I spend my money, am I loving God whole-lifedly?
Next week is our Consecration Sunday, where we gather to worship and eat together, to celebrate our life together and to make our commitment to what we will give to God through God’s church in the coming year. As you are reflecting on how the choices you make shape your relationship with God, I invite you to pray about how you might grow in your giving and thus grow in your relationship with God. If you don’t normally pledge, then perhaps your step in growth is to pledge this year. If you are pledging, then perhaps your step is to examine what portion of your money you are offering to God and if you feel good about it, that it is an accurate representation of your gratitude for all the good things that come from God. Take the sheet from your bulletin home and see where you fall; look at what percentage you are giving and pray about whether you might be able to grow in your giving. If you show up next Sunday and write a number on the card, that is great! But you have an opportunity now to grow in your relationship with God if you are intentional and prayerful about this process.
I’ve been praying over this whole month about what we are going to write on our card next Sunday. We currently give 10% of my stipend to the church, and it is a spiritual practice for me to write the very first check after I get my paycheck back to God in thanksgiving. Writing that check for me, every other week, is truly a prayer, and I think about all the good things in my life which come from God for which I am grateful as I write it and as I drop it in the plate. When David started working last year, we started giving 10% of his income to different organizations for which we are thankful--organizations which have made a difference (and continue to make a difference) in our lives and in the life of our family, and this also has been a prayer for us. We’ve given to Stewpot and to their capital campaign; we’ve given to MPB, to our alma maters; we’ve give to General Seminary twice, to the Society for the Increase of Ministry (which gave David scholarships during seminary). We’ve given to CES, to the Humane Society. And boy, does it feel good to support these organizations that have supported and formed us! We will continue to do that with the tithe from David’s income, and this year we will be increasing our pledge to St. Peter’s by $50 a month.
‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” How do you do this work? How do you do the work of ‘loving the world;’ how do you do the work of rejoicing,of gratitude? How do you love God whole-lifedly ?
You love God whole-lifedly through your stewardship, through the choices that you make every single day of your lives. It is how you choose to be in this world, how you choose to be in relationship with God. Do the choices you make day in and day out drive you closer to God, or do they drive you away from God? Do your choices bring you closer to God’s people and God’s creation or do they separate you from them? Do you spend your life taking? Or do you spend your life giving and loving?

i. From Thirst. Poems by Mary Oliver. Beacon: Boston, 2006, p 1.
ii. Beach-Verhey, Tim. “Theological Perspective.” Feasting on the Word Year A Vol 4. Westminster: Lousiville, 2011, p214.
iii. This concept of whole-lifedly is attributed to Allen Hilton. “Homiletical Perspective.” Feasting on the Word Year A Vol 4. Westminster: Lousiville, 2011, p215.

Readings for today can be found at http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp25_RCL.html

18th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 24A

2011-10-16T03:55:00.000-07:00

18th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 24A
October 16, 2011
A man suffers a serious heart attack and has open heart bypass surgery. He wakes up from the surgery to find himself in the care of nuns at a Catholic Hospital.
As he is recovering, a nun asks him questions regarding how he was going to pay for his treatment. “Do you have health insurance?”
"No,” the man croaks. “No health insurance."
“Do you have any money in the bank?”
"No money in the bank."
"Do you have a relative who could help you?" asks the nun.
"I only have a spinster sister. She is a nun."
The nun bristles. "Nuns are not spinsters! Nuns are married to God."
“Alright, already!” croaks the patient. "Then send the bill to my brother-in-law."
Perhaps not quite what Jesus meant when he said, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
In our gospel reading for the day, two opposing parties have teamed up in an attempt to trap Jesus: the Herodians who support the Roman rule and law and the Pharisees who do not. They approach Jesus with a question which is really a trap, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” There are a couple of issues at work here. The Romans claim that Caesar is the son of god, and they require the Jews to pay their taxes with a special coin that carried the image of the divine Caesar. The Pharisees saw the use of this coin as a violation of the first and the second commandments. So they are trying to catch Jesus between a rock and a hard place; if he says to pay the tax, he is advocating paying tribute to another god, but if he says don’t, then that is treason against Rome. So Jesus answers them with two questions, asking to see the coin used for the tax. Jesus points out that it is the emperor’s image and likeness that is imprinted upon the coin, and he answers their original question by saying, “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s.”
Now, we’re Episcopalians, and we aren’t always so comfortable talking about money. But did you know that Jesus talks about money more than anything else except the kingdom of God? He talks about money more than he talks about heaven and hell combined; 11 of his 39 parables are about money. That should tell us something! There is a direct connection between our money and our relationship with God.
I went to a workshop not too long ago, where the speaker asked us each to consider the following question. What is your first memory of money? Think about it for a moment. What is your first memory of money? When I spent some time with that question, I discovered that my first memory of money is of the day that my grandfather took me to the bank to open up a bank account. He had been saving his change (I think it was quarters) that he’d take out of his pants pocket every night to help me buy a piano. I had been taking lessons, but my family didn’t have a piano for me to practice on, and so, on this one particular day, Pop took me down to Citizens Bank in Columbia, and we opened a bank account together. We got one of those little blue bank books they used to use, and it had both of our names on the account. After time and a whole bunch of Pop’s quarters, we were able to buy me a piano. It is a powerful memory for me, about ownership in this process, even though I was just a little child; it taught me about abundance and generosity and gratitude.
After the speaker at that conference asked us what our first memory of money was, he then asked us to think about what that memory says about how we understand God, because the two are intricately connected. Our understanding of money (as shaped by our earliest experiences and memories) tells us a great deal about our understanding of God. How we feel about and deal with money reflects what image we hold of God. I invite you to spend some time with these ideas this week and ponder the question, “What is my image of God?” And talk to someone about your earliest memory about money, at brunch today, at coffee hour, at some point in the week; it is a beautiful and strangely intimate practice to share another person’s memory, and it helps us to understand each other and ourselves on a deeper level.
We become like the God we adore. Like the coin in the gospel imprinted with the emperor’s image, our lives have the potential to become imprinted with the image and likeness of God. Every day of our lives, we make decisions about how we spend our money, our time, our attention, and those decisions either help us grow more deeply into the image and likeness of God or they push us away from that.
What image is imprinted upon you through the God you worship? Is it the image of the living God as manifest in Jesus Christ—the image of compassion, hope, generosity, forgiveness? Or is it the image of the world-- fear, scarcity, despair, and un-forgiveness? What God are you really worshipping in your choices every day?
To God you are worth as much today as you were worth the day that you were born! What will you do with that worth? How do you spend this one precious life which is yours to spend?

The readings for today can be found at
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp24_RCL.html

17th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 23A --The Runaway Bunny edition

2011-10-08T08:26:00.001-07:00

17th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 23A
October 9, 2011
Our readings this morning are just chock-full of parties! There’s the party that Aaron and the children of Israel throw while Moses is on sabbatical that results in the construction of the golden calf and Yahweh’s wrath burning hotly against the people. And there’s the wedding banquet that is thrown by the king in honor of his son’s wedding which results in the murder of the kings slaves and the first round of wedding guests and then also results in one of the second string guests getting cast into the outer darkness.
Now, we’re Episcopalians, and we all love a good party. So, my question for you today is who wants to come to this party?
What is the good news in this parable of judgment? A king is determined to throw a party—a wedding banquet for his son. So he makes out a guest list of all the nobles in the land, and when he sends his servants with the invitation, the would-be guests refuse to come, even going so far as to kill the servants. The king acts and wipes them all out, but he is still determined to give this party. So he tells his servants to go gather up everyone, the good and the bad, and invite them to the party. Now these folks he’s inviting, literally gathering up off the streets, do not have appropriate attire so custom dictates that the king provide them with wedding garments that are fitting for the occasion. Everything is going along well, until the king sees one wedding guest who has accepted the invitation but who is unwilling to dress the part (and who won’t even answer the king when he asks him why), so the king has the guest thrown out of the party into the outer darkness.
So, who wants to come to this party?
In her sermon, "Wedding Dress" from the book Home by Another Way, Barbara Brown Taylor writes about this party. I’ve changed her language slightly to make it more appropriate for this place, this party at which we find ourselves today.
“Everyone in Harrison County was invited to be here this morning, but as you can see, some of them had other things to do. Some are on the golf course and some are at work. It just so happens that, for our own good and bad reasons, this is the invitation we decided to accept this morning. But like the underdressed guest, some of us have rolled in here without thinking much about it. We have showed up with our spiritual shirttails hanging out, lining up at the buffet as if no one could see the ways in which we too have refused to change - refusing to surrender our fears and resentments, refusing to share our wealth, refusing to respect the dignity of every human being. These are the old clothes we wear to the king's banquet - the clothes we prefer to the wedding robe of new life.”
So, who really wants to come to this party?
I used to think that our relationship with God is like the children’s book—The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. There’s this little boy bunny who wakes up one day and arbitrarily tells his mother that he is going to run away; she tells him that she will chase after him, and so he constructs more and more elaborate disguises in an attempt to get away from her, but every time he changes, she changes into something so she can follow him. “I will become a sailboat to sail away from you,” he says, and she responds, “If you become a sailboat and sail away from me, ….I will become the wind and blow you where I want you to go.” Until finally, the mother’s love is so persistent that the little bunny decides to give up and stay at home with his mother. (And she gives him a carrot.)
Our Eucharistic Prayer C (that we will pray together in just a few minutes) says it this way: “From the primal elements you (God) brought forth the human race, and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill. You made us the rulers of creation. But we turned against you, and betrayed your trust; and we turned against one another. [Now here’s the runaway bunny part.] Again and again, you called us to return. Through prophets and sages you revealed your righteous Law. And in the fullness of time you sent your only Son, born of a woman, to fulfill your Law, to open for us the way of freedom and peace.”
It is saying that ultimately, God wins; love wins. And do get me wrong, I still believe that with all my heart. But while I used to be more focused on the ending, how God’s love always wins, now, I’m more interested in the running away-- why we do it and what it does to us. It’s the same reason someone would accept an invitation to a wedding banquet, but not be willing to wear the appropriate garb. Because these days I see, day after day, this running away, in my own life and in your lives too. I see this refusal to put on the wedding garment, which is obedience to God, because our own holey-worn-out clothes of our own wills and desires and priorities are just much more comfortable. It is so much easier and more comfortable to worship a god of our own creating that to worship the living God who holds us accountable for our refusal to give and receive grace.
Gregory of Nyssa, one of the church fathers, says, “Sin happens when we refuse to grow,” and we can spend so much of our energy in running away from God, in refusing to grow, that we make our own lives and the lives of those around us a hell on this earth, a hell of our own choosing.
So, who really wants to come to this party? God’s invitation is there, waiting for us to accept it. But once we get here, we must decide if we are willing to clothe ourselves in the wedding garments, if we are truly ready to put on our party clothes. Another question you might ask yourself this morning besides the one, ‘Do I really want to come this party?” is “what am I clothing myself in these days?” or “How am I allowing God to garb me?”
For the apostle Paul, we are called to put on the garments of rejoicing, of gentleness, of getting along with one another, of prayer and supplication, of the peace of God. We are called to put on the garments of truth, honor, justice, purity, excellence . And we are called to put on the fullness of Christ himself, who has taught us how to be in this world.
The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich says it this way: “Our good Lord is our clothing that for love wraps us up and winds us about, embracing us, beclosing and hanging about us, for tender love.”
So, who really wants to come to this party?

Here's a link to the readings for this Sunday.
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp23_RCL.html

16th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 22A

2011-10-02T04:25:00.000-07:00

16th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 22A
October 2, 2011
“On the 11th of September 1522 Sir Thomas More wrote a short letter to his daughter Margaret. Obviously she had asked him to send her some money, and in his reply More wrote, ‘You ask for money, my dear Margaret, with too much bashfulness and timidity, since you are asking from a father who is eager to give…As it is, I send only what you have asked, but would have added more…So the sooner you spend this money well, and the sooner you ask for more, you will be sure of pleasing your father.”i
This morning in our collect of the day, we pray to a God who is “always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve” and we ask God to pour upon us the abundance of God’s mercy…forgiving us and giving us those good things for which we feel unworthy to ask. It is important to remember this—what we are praying, what we are believing about God this day before we even begin to think about the readings for today.
Let’s start with the gospel. Today we hear Matthew’s version of Jesus’s parable of the wicked tenants, which is the second in a series of three parables that Jesus tells in the temple after he has ridden into Jerusalem in triumph, thrown the money changers out of the temple the day before and come back to teach the next day. These three parables are all set in the context of the chief priests and elders’ question to Jesus: “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?”
In this second of the three parables, Jesus tells about a landowner who planted a vineyard and then left it in the hands of some tenants and went away to another country. The wicked tenants don’t want to give the landlord the fruits of their labor in the vineyard, so when the landowner sends two different groups of slaves and then his own son, the tenants resort to more and more dramatic acts of rebellion, finally killing the son of the landowner in a ridiculous and unreasonable plan to inherit the vineyard themselves from a landowner who is still living and whose wrath they have now provoked.
In its original setting, the parable holds at its heart the idea of how Israel rejects God. It also may serve us this morning as an invitation to examine how we reject God.
How do we reject God? In the Old Testament reading, we see the people of Israel receiving the 10 commandments. God begins with not a commandment but a deep truth about God’s relationship with Israel out of which all the following laws flow: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other Gods before me.” In a part that is left out of our reading today, God tells the people that they shall not bow down to or worship other idols, “for I the Lord you God am a jealous God…” God is claiming the full affection and demanding full relationship with the children of Israel. And so we reject God (or at the very minimum, we two-time God) when we bow down to worship other idols. We do this when we give our hearts to something that is not of God. We do this when we order our lives and our priorities around something that is not God. When we try to divide our attention with God, we are rejecting God.
In Paul’s letter to the Philippians today, we see a glimpse of what has happened to Paul in his conversion, how he goes from pride in his own achievements to gratitude for an utterly gratuitous call to a completely new way of life. In the past, Paul has rejected God when he placed too much pride in his own achievements. And so do we also reject God.
We reject God when we let others tell us who we really are and do not listen to the God who knows us and loves us for our most true selves.
We reject God when we reject other people for reasons of our own; we reject others because they do not fit into our standards of what is good, appropriate and fitting, and when we define others as being less worthy, less human, less valuable than ourselves, then we are rejecting God.
We reject God when we do not value and believe in the goodness in which God has created each of us. We reject God when we cannot believe and trust that we are, in fact, good.
We reject God when we place our trust in the world’s scarcity that says you’ve got to hold onto and fight for what is yours because there is not enough to go around; we reject God when we do not give our hearts to God’s abundance that says, not only is there always enough, but there is radically more than enough—resources, love…-- for everyone.
We reject God when we live too much of our lives and our faith in the sacrifice of the cross—in the “no” and we do not include the surprising gift, the “yes” of the resurrection.
We reject God when we refuse to die to our old selves and are not accepting of God’s gift of renewal and new life.
We reject God when we are not grateful for all the good gifts God so freely gives.
In the book The Parables of Judgment, Robert Capon writes about this parable of Jesus and this phenomenon of how we continue to reject God and to reject God’s grace through Jesus Christ saying, “So it is with me, if I am honest. And so it is with you. The Father’s will for you—his whole will, his entire plan of salvation—is that you believe in Jesus, nothing more. He has already forgiven you, he has already reconciled you, he has already raised you up together with Jesus and made you sit together in heavenly places with him. And better yet, Jesus himself has already pronounced upon you the approving judgment of having done his Father’s will. But if you do not believe him—if you insist on walking up to the bar of judgment on your own faithless feet and arguing a case he has already dismissed—well, you will never hear the blessed silence of his un-condemnation over the infernal racket of your own voice…”ii
This morning, may God who is always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve inspire our hearts to
Choose God. Choose blessings. Choose abundance.

i. O’Driscoll, Herbert. Prayers for the Breaking of Bread: Meditations on the Collects of the Church Year. Cowley: Cambridge, 1991, p161.
ii. Capon, Robert. The Parables of Judgment. Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 1989, p110.

15th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 21A

2011-09-25T04:07:00.000-07:00

15th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 21
September 25, 2011
I want you to take a minute and imagine this scene. We are all sitting in here on an average Sunday, worshiping God in our usual custom, when a man enters Gulfport in a triumphant procession—a parade where crowds gather along the side of the roads and they proclaim him king as he comes into town. And then this man walks into our church and starts criticizing the ways that we make worship, conduct our business, help the poor, teach our children, and he starts tearing up the place, turning over tables, throwing prayer books and hymnals out of the backs of the pews and running people out of church. After he leaves, and we manage to recover ourselves, and we come back the next day to try to worship God, then he comes back. You can imagine that we would be somewhat wary and wanting to know why he is doing all of these things.
This is what has happened to the people in the temple in Jerusalem just prior to today’s gospel reading. Jesus has entered Jerusalem in a triumphant procession, with the people shouting “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” Jesus then proceeds directly to the temple where he turns over the tables of the money changers and drives out all who are buying and selling in the temple, and then he proceeds to heal the sick in the middle of the temple. Then he leaves and goes to the outskirts of town to spend the night, and he comes back to the temple the next morning. That’s where our reading for today picks up. When he shows back up in the temple, the chief priests and the elders know he is dangerous, and they know they do not want to provoke a similar scene as the day before. So they ask Jesus, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” It’s a reasonable question. Perhaps we would ask, “Why are you doing this?” So Jesus, like a good rabbi, answers their questions with a question, and when they do not answer, he tells them a parable, and he concludes the parable by telling them (us) that the tax collectors and the prostitutes, the drug dealers and the petty larcenists are going into the kingdom of heaven before them (us).
In our Wednesday night class this past week, we talked about authority, about what is authoritative for us as Anglicans and Episcopalians, what is authority for us as the people of St.Peter’s by-the-Sea and as individuals. John Westerhoff writes in his little book—A People Called Episcopalians: A Brief Introduction to our Peculiar Way of Life—that authority is the source of our life of faith that is grounded in God as revealed to us in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit; and he says that authority is essentially how we come to know the mind and the will of the triune God (6). Authority is how we come to know the mind and the will of God. So in our reading today, perhaps it might help us to look at the question the chief priests and elders ask Jesus as being—how do you know this that you are doing is a part of the mind and the will of God? And we see how Jesus answers that question.
So, how do we know the mind and the will of God? Paul has an interesting take on this in the portion of his letter to the Philippians that we read today. Paul is writing to the Philippians in this letter about a conflict that they are having between two women in the congregation—Euodia and Syntyche—and he is urging the two women and all of the people to “be of the same mind.” For Paul, this is what that “same mind” looks like: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself…” Paul is teaching them that to be of the same mind as Christ Jesus, they must be humble, they must be empty of their own selfish desires and ambitions and be filled with concern for the other. That is what it means to have the same mind as Christ Jesus. He ends this section by writing, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” Get yourself out of the way and allow God to work in you and through your work.
So Paul is saying that we know the mind of God through humility. We find our authority in humility. How does that work?
When the chief priests and the elders refuse to answer Jesus about where John the Baptist’s authority came from, he tells them a parable saying, “What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ He answered, ‘I will not’; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir’; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” They said, ‘The first.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you…’”
What is the dynamic that is going on with the two sons to make the one answer no and then change his mind and go and the other answer yes but not follow through? I imagine that after the father comes to the first son, and he tells his father he won’t go work for him in the vineyard; the son goes back to whatever he is doing, but he can’t stop thinking about his father and his father’s request. He knows his father needs his help to bring in the harvest of the vineyard; he remembers all the love and the support and the goodness he receives from his father, and so he gets over himself and his own preoccupations; he lets go of whatever plans he had that would prevent him from working in the vineyard, and he changes his mind and goes to work. The second son tells the father he will go work, but maybe he gets busy. He’s caught up in the middle of a drama in his own household, he has a major crises he needs to tend to; he’s just gotten to the best part of this novel he’s reading and just can’t put it down. He doesn’t give any thought to the father and the father’s request of him after he answers yes, and he is so preoccupied with his own affairs.
We can only know the mind of God when we make room for God through humility and self-emptying. Humility and self-emptying can only occur when we are focusing on the needs of the other and on the priorities of God.
When writing about this concept of self-emptying in Philippians, theologian William Greenway writes, “One does not ‘self-empty’ by focusing upon oneself. One is emptied of self to the degree one is overcome by the needs, pains, hopes, and desires of others. When concern for others takes one utterly beyond self-interest, beyond obsession with achievements and self-obsessing guilt over failures, beyond self, then one receives the comfort of an Easter ‘yes’ so overwhelming, unconditional, undeniable, and absolute that it is experienced as unfailing and forever—a yes more potent and enduring than any imaginable no”(Feasting on the Word, Greenway,114).
Humility is not comfortable, nor is seeking the mind of God easy. In both, we come into contact with our own brokenness, with our own pain and suffering and with the pain and suffering of the whole world. It is not work for the faint of heart, but through it we will receive the yes of the resurrection.
In closing, I share with you the words from the end of the little book, Falling Upward: Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Franciscan priest Richard Rohr that get to the heart of this understanding of humility and God’s invitation to us to participate in the mind and the will of God. Rohr writes, “Pain is part of the deal. If you don’t walk into [growth and spiritual maturity and the kingdom of God], it is you who do not want it. God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. So make sure you desire, desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true, and beautiful. All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring. God, like nature, abhors all vacuums, and rushes to fill them” (Rohr 160).

13th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 19A (10th Anniversary of 9/11/01)

2011-09-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

13th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 19A
September 11, 2011
It was my second day of seminary at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City. I was just beginning to fathom what I had done—having left behind my Mississippi home and family and moved to NYC (with my faithful cat) to follow God’s call into the priesthood.
I was in a small group session on this second morning of classes with some of my classmates, and we were discussing our first book we were reading as seminarians. It was a book titled Resurrection by a man named Rowan Williams—whom none of us had really heard of but who was soon to be named the next Archbishop of Canterbury. And it was a fascinating book about how Jesus’s resurrection and the Christian interpretation of the Easter gospel is the foundation of the Christian life, and the book explored new ways of interpreting the resurrection in our daily lives.
In this little book, Williams talks about how all of creation is caught in this cycle of victims and oppressors and how, periodically, the victims rise up, overthrow the oppressors, and then change places-- with the oppressors becoming the victims and the victims becoming the oppressors.
Williams says that it is Jesus’s crucifixion and his resurrection that finally breaks this cycle—for Jesus the victim does not become the oppressor. Rather, through his resurrection he offers forgiveness to those who crucified him and to those faithful disciples who abandoned and betrayed him, and he offers to all reconciliation and salvation.
It is a provocative little book, as Williams peels back the layers that have built up around the notion of resurrection and invites us to see Christ in the face of all victims—even those who perpetrate great crimes.
Our small group was in the thick of our mid-morning discussion on these issues when the chapel bells started ringing incessantly. Now we’d only been in class two days, but we knew this was odd. The chapel bells rang, as scheduled, three times a day for worship, and it was currently class time and not time for worship. We continued our discussion somewhat distractedly as our tutor, Chris Keller, a seasoned parish priest and PhD student, went to find out what was going on. When he came back, his face was stark white and he said to us, in a breathless kind of voice, “Someone has bombed the World Trade Center! We all need to go to the chapel!”
Confused and alarmed we headed to the seminary chapel where the others students, faculty, and staff were already gathered and praying the Great Litany in the BCP while the 1st Tower burned and chaos erupted less than two miles away.
For weeks following that horrible day, as the ashes blew over NYC and the smell of burned metal hung heavy in the air, I struggled to hold onto hope in the face of so much hatred and so much suffering.
And 10 years later, I still struggle. How do we follow the way of Christ in the face of this? How do we hold on to the hope of the resurrection in the face of evil and suffering? How do we preach about forgiveness on today of all days? How do we hope for healing of these old, deep wounds that we all carry around with us and that don’t ever seem to get healed?
My brothers and sisters, there is good news on this day. There is hope of resurrection. First, there seems to be chaos and destruction for the enemies of Israel and Yahweh in today’s Old Testament reading. It seems to be good news for us because our ancestors in the faith, the Children of Israel are saved from slavery under the Egyptians in one divisive act by God, as they walk through the Red Sea unharmed and then all of Pharaoh’s army and their horses drown in the Red Sea. But it’s rather a grisly picture if we take a moment and think of all those dead bodies floating in the Red Sea, and it’s certainly not good news for the army of Egypt. How can something that is good for one people and so terribly bad for another be good news in the Kingdom of God?
There’s an old Hasidic tale that says that the angels were rejoicing over the deliverance of Israel at the Red Sea. They were playing their harps, blowing their horns, singing and dancing and laughing with joy. When one angel noticed something and said to the others, “Look! The Creator of the Universe is sitting there weeping.” When the angels approached God and asked “Why are you weeping when Israel has been saved and delivered by your power?” The Maker of the Universe answered, “I am weeping for the dead Egyptians washed up on the shore—somebody’s sons, somebody’s husbands, somebody’s fathers.”i
The story of the God weeping over the Egyptians is our story too—the story of God weeping for those who died in the attacks on September 11th, 2001; it is the story of God weeping for the families who lost loved ones, mothers, fathers, and children. It is the story of God weeping over the deaths of those who have died in combat since then, fighting for peace. It is the story of God weeping over the deaths of the terrorists who perpetrated such evil and those who still seek to do others harm.
It is the story of God weeping for us, who cannot lay aside our own wounded-ness and fragmentation; it is God weeping for us who continue to hold onto old wrongs, old grievances rather than relinquish them to God, asking forgiveness for our own hardness of heart and offering our own forgiveness. The Maker of the Universe weeps for all of creation in our wounds and in our suffering whether we are the good guys or the bad guys, the winners or the losers, the victims or the oppressors. God weeps for all and longs for reconciliation with and forgiveness for all.
In this week’s reading from the Letter to the Romans, Paul writes, “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” Anybody recognize this passage from a service in the Prayer Book? I’ll give you a hint. (sing portion here: “For none of us has life in himself/ and none becomes his own master when he dies. For if we have life, we are alive in the Lord,/ and if we die, we die in the Lord. So, then, whether we live or die/ we are the Lord’s possession. I am resurrection and I am Life, says the Lord.”) It’s in the BCP on page 491--the opening anthem for our burial liturgy. It’s the liturgy of the church in which we find the most comfort, the most meaning in the Resurrection of our Lord; it is where we say that no matter what happens to each of us in this life, we find our hope in Christ’s resurrection which proves, once and for all, that God’s love is stronger than anything, even death. It is how we, as the Body of Christ, find hope and meaning in the midst of our sadness and suffering, by giving our hearts to the hope that the lives of those who are the Lord’s possession will always be the Lord’s possession.
In the gospel reading, Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, if a brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive?” Peter and the other disciples are embroiled in some minor dispute or offense among them stemming from their previous discussion of who is the greatest, and Jesus says to him, “Not seven times, but I tell you, seventy-seven times.” Do not ever cease in offering forgiveness, Jesus tells them. It’s important to remember what happens in the rest of Peter’s story—how he denies Jesus, abandons him in his most difficult hour, and after the resurrection, Jesus appears to Peter alone, and he forgives him and restores the relationship with him.
Peter tastes the grace of God in Jesus’s forgiveness, and he is formed and shaped by it; he carries this taste of grace into all other conflict he encounters in spreading the gospel of our Lord.
Finally, it is important on this day, to remember that not just our little lives and our individual hurts and wounds will one day be healed and reconciled. All of creation which now groans and longs for fulfillment, for its hurts and its wounds to be healed, will one day become a new creation through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is not something that happened once long ago. It continues to happen, continues to break into our reality and Christ’s resurrection continues to restore not just individuals but the whole big story of all of humanity.
So while you might not be yet healed of your deep wound, your deep sadness, your deep grief, through the Lord’s resurrection, you will be. And while all of humanity may not be healed of our deep wounds, our deep sadness, our deep grief, we will be, through the Lord’s resurrection.
Did you know that every Sunday in the church is a feast day? It is a celebration of the Lord’s resurrection! A sort of mini-Easter, every Sunday. Every week, we are an Easter people, a resurrection community. So even as we wait for the fulfillment of the resurrection in our lives and in our world, we celebrate Easter, we celebrate resurrection.
And we wait. We hope. We pray for healing. We taste the graciousness of God, and we invite others to taste God’s grace. We forgive others, again and again and again. We ask for our own forgiveness. We allow ourselves to be forgiven. And we allow ourselves to be healed.
i. Referenced in 9/6/11 Christian Century article “Living by the Word” by Theodore J. Wardlaw (18). Originally from Albert C. Winn’s sermon ‘A Way Out of No Way: Exodus 14:5-31’ published in Journal for Preachers.

12th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 18A

2011-09-06T11:51:00.001-07:00

12th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 18A
September 4, 2011

One of the blogs I occasionally read had a slight retelling of our gospel reading for this Sunday.
And Jesus said, “If another member of the church sins against you…just talk about them behind their back.”
“If another member of the church sins against you…just call a bunch of people in the church to complain about them. You may even want to start a letter-writing campaign against them.”
“If another member of the church sins against you…just send them a nasty email. Copy the clergy. And while you’re at it, cc the bishop…”
“If another member of the church sins against you…don’t say anything. Just avoid them. Unfriend them on Facebook. And if you can’t avoid them on Sundays, then just leave the church…” i
Hmmm. Maybe not…
Let’s go back and look at today’s gospel.
“If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” I don’t know. Seems like the first way might be easier. Let’s look at what’s going on in Matthew’s gospel in this section and in the surrounding sections.
Here is what scholars say about this passage. First, the NRSV does a disservice by translating the Greek to read “another member of the church.” And it is not certain that the words “sins against you” are in the original text either. A more accurate translation of this passage might be to say, “If a brother or sister sins, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone…” Second, we are reminded that sin in this text does not necessarily have all of the connotations that we put upon it. The word for sin in this text is an archery term which means “to miss the mark.” So now we have, “If a brother or sister misses the mark, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone…” Third, this section of Matthew’s gospel has been called the “Rule of Christ” “because [it] redefine[s] the goals of confrontation or intervention in seeking to rescue and forgive, to offer care in a spirit of humility.”ii Fourth, it is important to look at the context of this passage in Matthew’s gospel. This is only the second instance in the gospels where the term ‘church’ or ekklesia appears, and the first one, we heard two weeks ago, also in connection with the roles of binding and loosing. Fifth, this passage is nestled in between two other passages that shine light upon it, all within the context of the entirety of chapter 18, in which Jesus answers the disciples’ question about who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven by referencing a little child and in which Jesus speaks, again and again, about “little ones”. The passage just preceding today’s gospel is the parable of the lost sheep—in which Jesus tells of a shepherd who has 100 sheep and leaves the 99 to go chase down the one who has strayed. And this passage is followed by Peter’s question of how often we should forgive, and Jesus answers him that we should forgive in a radical abundance, over and over again.
So what do these points tell us about today’s gospel? They tell us that the writer of Matthew’s gospel is speaking to and about a family-the family that is the church universal and the family that is the local church. They tell us that the focus is not on punishment of the offenders but upon reconciliation. They tell us that “the Rule of Christ is to care for the offender or sinner and not necessarily to establish the rights of the offended”. They tell us that it is the “responsibility of the offended one to seek reconciliation.”iii They tell us that reconciliation is an important part of the work that the community of believers does together, and they tell us that one of the key elements in this process and in discipleship itself is humility.
If the church is to be a place of forgiveness, grace, and mercy (for which I believe we all long in our deepest heart of hearts), then we must treat one another with forgiveness, grace, and mercy. So much is at stake in this! We are not just individuals standing before God, we are the entire body of Christ, bound together by virtue of Christ’s love and saving work, bound together by our baptism, bound together by our need for forgiveness and reconciliation. We are in this together, and if we are not actively doing the work of reconciliation within, we are actively thwarting the kingdom of God which we try to proclaim. In his book, Forgiven and Forgiving, Bill Countryman writes, “So I can’t be the only forgiven one. God has forgiven everyone else in the same way and at the same moment as me. That’s a fundamental reality I have to live with. God’s forgiveness isn’t available to me as a separate, private arrangement. It’s available to me only as a part of this big package. This reality has consequences. If I want to withhold forgiveness from my neighbor, I’m effectively withholding it from myself, too. If I am willing for God to forgive my neighbor, I’m allowing God to forgive me, too. It’s all or nothing, everybody or nobody.”iv
The apostle Paul writes about this in today’s portion of his letter to the Romans, and he writes about our call to love, inviting us to “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” inviting us to “live honorably” and equating quarreling and jealousy with the sins of reveling, drunkenness, debauchery and licentiousness. Paul ends this passage by challenging the church to “Make no provision for the flesh.” For Paul, the flesh isn’t just our fleshly desires. The Flesh represents all the devices and desires by which we try to fortify ourselves—not with Jesus, but against Jesus and against our neighbor. ‘Make no provision for the flesh’ means ‘By God’s grace turn from your self-absorption.”v
It is hard and costly work, this work of reconciliation; this work of turning from our own self-absorption; this work of forgiveness; this work of growth in humility; this work of being in community; this work of loving our neighbor; this work of being the church. And yet, it is the way that we have chosen. It is why we are here, because we have been chosen by Christ, called out to follow him, and in response to his calling we choose to follow Christ; because we choose to follow a different way than the way of the world; because we choose the resurrection, we choose life, we choose the love of God above everything else.
May God give us the grace to do this work God has called us to. And may God help us to continue to choose the way of Jesus Christ, the way of forgiveness and reconciliation, above all else.
i From Rick Morley’s blog post “Before you Unfriend” at www.rickmorely.com
iiFrom Estrella B. Horning, ‘The Rule of Christ.’ as quoted in Feasting on the Word p 45.
iii Andrews, Dale P. Feasting on the Word p 47.
iv Countryman, William. Forgiven and Forgiving (Harrisburg, Pa: Morehouse, 1998), p 42.
v Bartlett, David. Feasting on the Word p 43.

10th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 16A

2011-08-29T14:25:00.001-07:00

10th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 16A
August 21, 2011

The week before last, I spent three days at Gray Center fulfilling some of my diocesan responsibilities in doing the work of the Commission on Ministry, of which I’ve been a part these last several years. The COM is established by Canon law, and functions in every Episcopal diocese with one purpose: to give the Bishop advice and recommendations about the leadership in the church –the raising up and training of priests and deacons, and everything related to their selection, training and continued well-being.
An essential part of our ministry is for us to remain in close contact with people in the ordination process—both people who are currently in seminary being trained and formed as priests, and people who are attending our diocesan Deacon’s school and being trained and formed to be deacons (while still facing all the demands of their day to day lives). It is rewarding work for me, as we ask questions of those being formed for ministry, and we listen carefully to their responses, often inviting them to go a little deeper. There is the highest level of trust among committee members, and I always come away from these meetings reminded of why I began my own journey into the ordained ministry, and it helps me to continue to reflect upon my own vocation as a priest (which has been my part these past 6 and 1/2 years) and how God continues to call me to grow into that.
Last week, we spent our time with 4 people (and their respective spouses) who are currently at seminary and 1 person who is about to enter the Deacon’s school, and we met with them to see how they are progressing on this spiritual journey and to learn from them how they are being formed for the priesthood and deaconate.
As you might imagine, spiritual formation is a rather tricky thing to assess in an individual, but we have found that is actually a fruitful endeavor to look at a person’s spiritual formation when that person has been open to being formed, when he or she has been doing the difficult work of self-reflection and prayer and sorting through external experiences and the internal working of God through the Holy Spirit.
But there are a handful of others whom we encounter from time to time who might win the “rock of ages” awardi that is awarded by a certain seminary professor every year to the member of his class who remains the most unmoved, most unchanged, most resistant to the process of spiritual formation. And those are the ones who are difficult to converse with about their spiritual formation because they refuse to admit it is happening, even though we know that they are being formed in some way, either for good or for ill.
We are changed and shaped and affected—for good and for ill—by what we encounter in this life. Paul writes to the Romans, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Very few people can truly be “the rock of ages;” we are either conformed to this world or transformed more and more into the image and likeness of Christ.
I like to think of this process of formation—whether it be priestly formation at seminary or Christian formation of all baptized into the image and likeness of Christ--like being a rock in a rock tumbler.ii How many of you have had any experience with rock tumblers?

One of my brothers had a rock tumbler, and we set it up in the formal living room (where no one ever went) just off my bedroom. Into this machine, my brother would put all these regular old rocks with some water and several different steps of abrasive and polishing agents. And he turned it on and just let it run for what seemed to me to be forever! as I could hear it just running and running—this motor sound and rocks tumbling around and around-- every night when I went to bed. And these rocks tumbled around and around in this machine and knocked up against each other over and over again, and when we finally opened it up, we discovered that some rocks had all their rough edges knocked off, worn down, smoothed out; but others had been broken to bits under the force of the tumbling or left with sharp pieces that had not been smoothed.
In our Gospel lesson today, we see Jesus asking his disciples a series of questions. Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am? And Peter, in a moment of God’s pure revelation, answers Jesus—“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus, in his delight at Peter’s answer, bestows upon Peter, a new name—the Rock—and he bestows upon Peter a blessing. We see in this story which is the middle of three Peter stories that our lectionary gives us in a four week span (starting with two weeks ago when Peter tried to walk on water and failed miserable and ending next week, when Jesus rebukes Peter and says, “get behind me Satan!”), that in Peter’s journey with Jesus, he is still very much a rock in the rock tumbler, as opposed to an unchangeable “rock of ages”. He’s still getting his rough edges knocked off and will continue to do so well after Jesus’s resurrection and ascension. And yet in this one moment, Jesus sees the strength of Peter’s character, his ability to be open to revelation, and his willingness to be formed by that. And it is those gifts that Jesus celebrates and blesses.
So what about us? What does this story have to teach us about our lives? We are all of us rocks tumbling around in this rock tumbler that is life, where the sharp jagged rocks of events and people have the very real potential to damage others and also the potential to shape and form us for the better. How do you name these sharp jagged rocks in the rock tumbler of your life? Is it failing health? Is it financial woes? Is it a weighty decision you must soon make? Is it a difficult person whom you keep bumping up against? Is it relationship problems? Is it doubt? Is it the loss of someone you love? Is the jagged rock in your rock tumbler your own self-loathing?
And then what do with this? What do we do when life or others keeps bumping up against us and wearing us down? We can be formed for good or for ill. So how do we keep from being ill-formed? We give ourselves over to the transformation that comes from God—“to the renewing of our minds so that we may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect”. And once we discern that, we hold fast to what is good.
If we are not being formed in the will of God, then we are being conformed to this world. And to be formed in the will of God, we must remain steadfast in striving toward transformation, giving our hearts fully to God’s will and not our own. We do this through regular corporate worship, through a willingness to grow and develop through Christian formation, in the reading and study of the scriptures, and in regular prayer; we do this through silence, through breaking bread together, through the regular giving of ourselves and our resources—our time, our attention, our money. We give our hearts to the way of Christ—practicing mercy, forgiveness, kindness, and an unflinching and steadfast stance in the face of injustice and evil and persecution.
How will you be formed this day? Will you be conformed to the way of the world, giving your heart to the pursuit of your own will, no matter what the cost? Or will you open yourself to transformation and give your heart to discerning the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect in your life—allowing yourself to be shaped and formed, polished and smoothed through the life of faith into the image and likeness of Christ?

9th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 15A

2011-08-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

9th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 15A
August 14, 2011
When I was driving up to Jackson on Wednesday, I noticed a church sign on the outskirts of Wiggins. It said, “When in doubt, don’t pout, just give Jesus a shout.” If only it were that neat and clean and simple!
But our gospel for today is very messy, even offensive and doesn’t quite fit into such a nice, neat formula for faithful living. In our gospel today, the very presence of the word “Canaanite” “stirs up memories of ancient foes—idol worshiping enemies over against whom the people of Israel defined themselves.” And in Matthew’s gospel it takes on an added complexity because the author of Matthew intentionally lists the Canaanite women Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth as a part of Jesus’s own geneology and a part of his family story.i So there’s already the presence of that messy mixture of associations with the people of Cana, and then, in our gospel portion for today, Jesus talks about eating and the bodily function that result, and he calls a woman who petitions him (via shout) to help her sick child a dog (which is a typical Jewish expression for Gentiles, but still quite offensive).
The two pieces of this gospel at first glance seem unrelated—Jesus is teaching the crowds about Jewish dietary law and ritual defilement and about how people should worry more about what is coming out of our hearts, and then Jesus takes a road trip into Canaanite country, where he encounters this woman who shouts at him, petitioning that he heal her demon possessed daughter. These two incidences may seem unrelated, but by placing them together, Matthew’s gospel and our lectionary indicate that there is some sort of connection. “In the first [part of today’s gospel] people who are socially accepted [the Pharisees] emphasize external differences [observance of the Jewish dietary laws] and miss the matters of the heart [what are truly impediments to our relationship with God and others—‘evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander…’] Whereas in the second [part], a woman who is socially marginalized breaks through external differences [of gender, culture, and cultural prejudices] to claim God’s mercy.”ii The encounter between Jesus and his disciples and the Canaanite woman becomes the illustrative parable of what Jesus is teaching the crowds in the first part of the gospel. And interestingly enough, in the second part, the disciples play the part of the Pharisees.
Today, I invite you to take some time and identify with the different characters in the story of the Canaanite woman. Let’s look at the woman first. This is a woman who is not bound by conventional social propriety or norms or even deep-rooted conflicts. She is brazen in her cry to Jesus, and she shouts at him, “Lord, have mercy.” It is a prayer that echoes down through the centuries and has been shouted and whispered by millions of lips—“the cry of the soul in extremis, a raw witness to the depth and misery of the human condition.”iii In the Greek phrase that is translated as “Lord, have mercy,” mercy is not a noun, a sympathetic feeling; mercy in the Greek is a verb. It is an action. This woman’s challenge is for Jesus to act, to do something.
On the other hand, the disciples in today’s gospel are very worried about propriety. First they complain, “Lord, you offended some Pharisees,” and then they complain, “Lord, send that woman away; she keeps shouting after us!” I wonder what it is that they are really worried about in their seeming obsession with propriety? What do they learn by witnessing Jesus’s encounter with the Canaanite woman?
And then there is Jesus, who is especially enigmatic in this lesson. Why is his first response to the woman silence? Is his understanding of his mission changed in this encounter?
In Matthew’s gospel, mercy is absolutely central to Jesus’s ministry. He quotes Hosea on two different occasions (9:14, 12:7) and says, “I desire mercy not sacrifice.”iv In his encounter with the Canaanite woman, Jesus models for us what this means. He shows us what God’s mercy looks like and that it is all inclusive. He shows us that we don’t get to decide who is good enough (or not) to receive God’s mercy. And what does he mean when he speaks about the woman’s great faith? What is she doing or saying that leads her to the healing which she seeks? (I think it is that she doesn’t care a whit that she is acting against propriety; she gives her heart fully to her demand for God’s mercy and that Jesus heal her daughter, regardless of all that separates them.)
Have you ever acted like that woman and cried out to Jesus, Lord, have mercy! Do something! Help me! What happened? Were you met with silence? When in your life have you been like the Canaanite woman, willing to defy all social convention and propriety to demand your share of God’s mercy?
When are we like the disciples and the Pharisees, more concerned with outward appearances than what is in the heart; more concerned with propriety than with mercy? What concerns of our own about propriety and what is seemly get in the way of the matters of our hearts? How do our concerns about what is seemly get in the way of the healing and transformation that God is offering us? How does our squeamishness impede our encounters with God?
Mercy and propriety seem to be at odds in this gospel, and in fact, they can at times be at odds in our own lives. It is much easier to let propriety rule our hearts than to let mercy rule. Propriety is fueled and dictated by culture, by tradition, by “the way that we’ve always done it.” Mercy is fueled by God’s intervention in our lives and the world; mercy is inspired by God’s invitation to look at others through God’s eyes, and to see others the way that God sees them, to love others the way that God loves them.
But to follow that call, we must be willing to go deeper, beyond the surface of things, to peel back the layers that we build up on our own hearts and the layers put there by our families, our culture, etc. When we encounter someone who makes us uncomfortable because of who they seem to be on the outside, we are invited to peel back the layer of what is outside and try to imagine what might be in that person’s heart. Could it be the hearts of the “other” harbor the same hopes and dreams, fears and sorrows as our own? Can it be that the heart of the other longs as deeply as our own for their share of God’s mercy? And what is it in our own hearts that makes us so afraid of the other? Are we afraid that there is not enough of God’s mercy to go around, so that we try to hoard it all for ourselves? Are we afraid that our place in the kingdom will be diminished by God’s inclusion of all God’s children?
In today’s gospel, Jesus shows us that he will not allow himself and his understanding of his mission to be an impediment between the Canaanite woman and God’s mercy. May we have the courage to follow this way he has set, and to go and do likewise.
Essential idea from Feasting on the Word: Theological Perspective by Iwan Russell-Jones, pp356-357.
From Feasting on the Word: Exegetical Perspective by Jae Won Lee, pp 357-361.
Essential idea from Feasting on the Word: Theological Perspective by Iwan Russell-Jones, pp358

8th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 14A

2011-08-09T13:27:00.000-07:00

8th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 14A
August 7, 2011
Jesus and Moses were out one day playing golf. They pull up to a hole in their cart, and they see that this hole had a water element. So Jesus pulls out his 5 iron and prepares to hit. Moses says, ‘I don’t know about that, Jesus. I think you should use your 4 iron here. Jesus replies, “No, I don’t think so, Moses. I’ve been watching a lot of Jack Nicklaus, and I think he’d use the 5 iron here.” Moses says, “Ok, Jesus, whatever you say.” So Jesus hits his ball with the 5 iron and it goes right into the water. Moses takes out his 4 iron and his ball sails over the water. So the two get into their cart and drive down to the water where Jesus is looking around for his ball. Not seeing it on the edge of the water, he proceeds to walk out across the water looking for his ball. Moses sits in the cart waiting when two other golfers drive up to him, and say, “Who does that guy think he is? Jesus?” Moses replies, “No, he thinks he’s Jack Nicklaus.” (I got that joke from Fred Hutchings, who got it from Bill Fellows. Any errors in its retelling are due to my own golfing ignorance).
Our gospel reading for today picks up immediately from where last week’s story of the Jesus’ feeding of the 5, 000 leaves off. And this story of Jesus walking on the water coming straight on the heels of the other is no accident in Matthew’s gospel. The writer of Matthew is drawing upon the identity of the people of Israel and we hear echoes of their stories of salvation in these stories of Jesus’s acts. In the feeding of the 5,000 we hear the echoes of God’s feeding of the children of Israel in the wilderness with manna, and in Jesus’s walking on water, we hear echoes of the salvation of the children of Israel through the parted waters of the Red Sea.
In Hebraic thought, water represents much more than a mere physical reality. It is unfathomable depths; it is the threat of darkness and chaos; it is the potential for drowning and the shadowy menace of the creatures that swim in its depths. For the children of Israel, water is that which is opposed to God’s order that is made manifest in creation and in the salvation of Israel. In the Old Testament, God is consistently triumphing over this chaos of water and trampling victoriously over that which seeks to drown out God’s purposes.
In our reading for today, Jesus has withdrawn to a deserted place by himself, but the crowds have followed him and found him. And so he heals their sick and then he has compassion on them and feeds them. Immediately after he feeds them, he sends everyone away, including the disciples, who he sends on ahead of him in the boat to the other side. And Jesus stays there on the mountain by himself to pray. Meanwhile, back in the boat, the disciples find themselves battered by the wind and the waves, and in the wee hours of the morning, they see Jesus walking toward them on the water. It’s not until this point in the story that these seasoned fishermen truly become afraid. They know wind and water and how to deal with it, but they have no idea what to do with this figure walking on the water. They think Jesus is a ghost, and they don’t seem to recognize them. He speaks to them, and says, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” (the Greek here can also be translated “I am”—the name that God gives to Moses.)
And this is the part that really captures my imagination. The disciples are all unified in their fear and are cowering in the boat. Peter is ostensibly just as afraid as the rest, and yet he asks Jesus to reveal himself to them by commanding Peter to get out of the boat to come to him. I wonder….What is it exactly that separates Peter from the others in their fear? What is it that prompts Peter to get out of the boat?
Just this past week, I read the November book club selection—The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein. It’s a great book about a family that goes through a lot together, and the entire story is narrated by a character named Enzo, who just happens to be the family dog. Enzo spends a lot of his free time watching racing on tv while his people are away, and he learns about racing from his owner, who is an aspiring race-car driver. Enzo’s owner, Denny, tells him that the secret to successful racing is found in the statement: “that which you manifest if before you.” Enzo spends some time wrestling with this notion and the concept that we manifest our own destiny, and then he translates it into meaning: “the car goes where the eyes go.” In racing, if a person loses concentration for one moment, if his eyes lose their focus, then the car can quickly and easily follow and it can mean the different between winning the race and crashing the car. The car goes where the eyes go.
That’s what got Peter out of the boat. That’s what made the difference between his fear and his faith. And that is why he faltered. When he got out of the boat, his eyes were on Jesus. When he walked those first timid steps across the water, his eyes were on Jesus. When he took his eyes off Jesus and became again aware of the wind and the waves and his own fear, he began to falter and to sink. And Jesus reached out his hand to him, called Peter’s eyes and his heart back to Jesus, and he walked back to the boat with him. “The car goes where the eyes go”.
All of us experience fear. The fear of the chaos of the world around us, the darkness of the hearts of people who live in this world with us, our nation drowning under our over-spending and our debt and our political gridlocks and power plays. The fear of not having enough. The fear of not being able to take care of ourselves as we age, not being able to take care of those who depend upon us. The fear of all the bad things lurking out in the world that might happen to us or to the people whom we love…. (Friday GMA report on how Dow plummeted 500 points, average 401K has lost $12,000—anchor must have said the word “fear” 12 times in 2 minutes).
Fear is rampant. What separates us, like Peter, from those who are paralyzed by their fears? What gets us out of bed early on a Sunday morning to gather here together in this boat amidst the storms of our lives? “The car goes where the eyes go”. We can overcome our fears when our eyes are fixed upon Jesus.
What does that mean for our eyes to be fixed upon Jesus? Living our lives, making our decisions based in hope, not in fear. Living our lives with the belief that the abundance of the kingdom of God is a reality and that the scarcity of the world is an illusion grounded in fear. It means being rooted in the peace and stability of God, who is I AM, and not being tossed here and yon by the fads and fears of others. It means treating all people with care and concern and respect, as fellow children of God, and not as tools to be used for our own agendas or devices. It means offering all of these things, hope, abundance, care, peace, good news, and love to all whom we encounter.
And when fear does get the better of us, which it may from time to time, Jesus is standing nearby with his hand outstretched, offering us grace and peace, and pulling us out of the waters that threaten to claim us, and helping us to remember. When we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, then Jesus becomes for us a window to God—who says, “Take heart. I am. Do not be afraid.”

4th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 10A

2011-07-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

4th Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 10A
There once was a man who ran a large charity, and one day he noticed that the banker who lived in town had never given any money to the charity. He called up the banker and said, ‘According to our records, you make $500,000 a year. And yet you’ve never given one penny to our charity.’ The banker replied, ‘Do your records also show that I have a very sick mother with very expensive medical bills?’ The man replied: ‘Oh! Sorry! I didn’t know.’ The banker continued, ‘Or do they show that my brother is unemployed or that my sister’s husband died leaving her a widow with three small children?’ ‘I…I…I’ the charity representative stammered in embarrassment. The banker continued, ‘If I don’t give them any money, what makes you think I’ll give any to your charity?”
“And Jesus told them many things in parables, saying: ‘Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had not depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had not root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!’”
Jesus’s parables are designed to challenge us and our understanding of reality. The challenge of today’s parable, even a bit of the shock of it, really, is found in its radical conclusion. There may be some times in our live when we need to focus on the different types of soil Jesus talks about in this parable, and we certainly know that we’ve all been all of those different types of soil when our souls our inhospitable to God’s word and to faith, we understand that there are times a areas of our lives in which God’s word, and faith do not, for whatever reasons, take root and yield; and it’s all too easy for us to judge ourselves and others according to the parable and the different types of soil and their harvest (or seeming lack thereof).
But the challenge of this parable today is the shocking, wasteful, indiscriminate character of God’s abundance. And this parable challenges us to believe in that, and to give our hearts to that abundance.
The actual parable ends with a miracle. Even after the sower sows seed so indiscriminately, the yield is not just sevenfold, which would be a really good year for a farmer. The harvest is not just tenfold, which would mean true abundance. It is not even just thirty-fold, which would feed an entire village for a whole year, but it is a harvest of a hundred-fold—which would allow the farmer to retire to a villa by the sea for the rest of his life. A hundredfold harvest is miraculous, radical abundance.
If the parable ended with the sevenfold harvest from good soil, then it would be sufficient and a good story of encouragement and hope. However, this parable is not simply cautiously optimistic; it is a promise of a radical kind of hope and the assurance of miraculous generosity, of true abundance.
In the book, Singing with the Comeback Choir, novelist Bebe Moore Campbell writes, “Some of us have that empty-barrel faith. Walking around expecting things to run out. Expecting that there isn’t enough air, enough water. Expecting that someone is going to do you wrong. The God I serve told me to expect the best, that there is enough for everybody.”
Do we live out of abundance, or do we live out scarcity?
Do we live our lives as if we have that empty-barrel faith, or do we live our lives as if we believe in God’s miraculous, radical, outrageous abundance?
Do we worship with a belief in abundance or a belief in scarcity. Do we give—our time, our attention, our money—according to a trust in God’s abundance or according to what the world teaches us about scarcity?
If we ask ourselves about stewardship in our lives—mindful that the definition of stewardship can be “all that you do with all that you have after you say ‘I believe,’ then we have to acknowledge that how we live (either out of scarcity or out of abundance) is directly related to how we believe (or as Ted Dawson says—what you give you heart to. Do you give your heart to this God of miraculous, reckless abundance or do you give your heart to empty barrel faith, that there will not be enough. Do you give your heart to abundance or to scarcity?
It is so easy to give our hearts to scarcity in this life, as the anxiety in our country steadily rises and the conflict and drama around our economic woes continues. It is easy to give our hearts to scarcity as here on the Coast, we cinch our belts up a little tighter every day.
The call of our Lord and our challenge this day, and every day, is to give our hearts, again and again, to abundance.

3rd Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 9A

2011-07-07T07:35:00.000-07:00

Proper 9A
July 3, 2011
There’s a portion of today’s gospel reading from Matthew that is a part of our DNA as Episcopalians and Anglicans. This scripture is actually printed somewhere in our Book of Common Prayer. Who knows where it is? “Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.” Matthew 11:28 It’s in our Rite One Eucharist on page 332 in between the confession of sin and absolution and the peace. What do you think that might be saying about the Anglican/Episcopal understanding of who God is? We believe that God doesn’t want us to feel badly about ourselves or our relationship with God. We believe that after we confess our sins and receive the assurance of God’s pardon, then we are invited by God to lay down the burdens that we might be carrying and to greet one another in peace and in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In today’s gospel reading, Jesus is offering an invitation about how to deepen our relationship with him and thus with God, and he is offering us a new way of being in the world, a new way of being his disciples. Jesus is offering us a way to be healthier, more whole, more fully who God has created us to be.
Let’s look at this image of the yoke; for most of us, it is an image out of the past to which we have little reason to relate. A yoke is a wooden beam that links two animals (oxen, mules, horses, water buffalo) together so that they may pull together on a load while working in pairs. It has connotations of subservience. In some ancient cultures, the defeated army was forced to walk under a yoke created by the spears and swords of the victor; so it can by a symbol of something oppressive or burdensome, or it can also be a symbol for people who are working together, like in a marriage or partnership. (Did any of you military folk walk under the arch of swords at your wedding? That’s actually a practice that combines both of these historical understandings of the yoke—the conquering army piece and the yoking through marriage.)
A yoke can be something that can potentially make a really heavy load bearable by sharing the weight and the work between two workers.
In today’s passage from Matthew, Jesus is inviting his followers (us) to willingly take his yoke upon us. If we do this, he promises us a contradiction. His yoke, he says, does not mean back-breaking labor. His yoke, he says is easy and the burden is light and by sharing it with him, he promises us that we will find rest for our souls. Doesn’t that sound just lovely?! So why on earth do we still feel so restless, so burdened, so anxious, so stressed, so very heart-broken?
There are two questions I’m going to ask you this morning, that I think will help us understand the gap between Jesus’s life-giving offer to us this morning and the way that we experience the world and our lives truly to be. The first question I ask you is “to what and to whom are you really and truly yoked?” To what and to whom are you really and truly yoked?
What are you attaching yourself to these days? We all know that we always bind ourselves, however subtly, to something: people, places, habits, possessions, beliefs, ways of being in the world, groups, resentments, old hurts, ideas, schedules, expectations…Some of these yokings can be healthy and life-giving for us, but some of them can be toxic, poisonous, burdens that are just too heavy for us to bear. As you sit there in your pew this morning, take a minute and ask yourself: “to whom and to what am I yoked right now? (significant pause)
“Have you sought these connections or do you allow them to be placed upon you by others? Do these connections deepen or deaden you? Do they draw you closer to Christ or farther away from him? Do they connect you with the power, freedom, and choice that God gives you, or do they diminish your power, freedom, and choice?” (Jan Richardson The Painted Prayerbook).
What am I attaching myself to these days? It’s a question worth revisiting again and again over the course of our lives.
Here’s my second question for you this morning. When you do accept Jesus’s invitation to take up his yoke and walk with him, what do you really think, believe, understand about the nature of your yoke-mate?
A former spiritual director of mine used to tell me all the time, “Pray to the God you long for, not the God you have received.” Think for a minute which one of these is the Jesus that you really find yourself yoked with?
Often times the God that we have received demands that each of us individuals be good enough, do more, be more loving to every person, be more righteous and working toward perfection. Often the God that we have received demands that we never rest (from anything, especially doing the work of Christ), that we live up to others expectations for us, that we be successful—whatever that means. And sometimes the God that we have received inhabits the primary position of judge.
I don’t know about you, but that is most certainly not the God that I long for in my deepest heart! The God that I long for tells me that I am already enough, no matter what I may do or become. The God I long for whispers to me that I don’t have to do anything more for God to love me more than I can ask or imagine. The God I long for loves me, forgives me, invites me to find my rest in gentle Jesus and offers to me (and all of God’s people) the gift of God’s peace. The God I long for is a God who is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (Psalm 103:8).
Which one of these Gods do you pray to? The God you have received or the God you long for? Which one of these Gods do you find yourself yoked to? And how might that affect not only your relationship with God but also how you experience God’s creation—the world and the people in it?
This morning, we are all invited to come forward to God’s table, to lay down all of our burdens at the foot of the cross of the Resurrected Christ, and to be fed and loved by the God for whom each of us desperately longs. And then we will go out into the world to love and serve and walk with the Lord.

Pentecost Year A

2011-06-12T04:16:00.000-07:00

Pentecost-Year A—VBS closing
June 12, 2011
In VBS this week, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the marvelous and wondrous works of the Lord.
We focused on 4 bible stories throughout the week, that had to do with our space themed VBS: God’s Galaxy Quest.
1. We talked about Creation—about how God created all that is—“the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth our island home.”
2. We talked about Moses and the children of Israel, how they followed God into the promised land out of slavery in Egypt and how God went before them in a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud.
3. We talked about how the wise men, the 3 kings followed a star to meet and worship the baby Jesus.
4. And we talked about the story of Pentecost—the reading from Acts that we just heard.

In each of these stories, God is actively present—present at creation as the one creating and as the Spirit-wind blowing over the face of the waters. God is present in fire—the pillar of fire for Moses and the children of Israel: present and actively leading them from slavery and fear into joy and freedom. God is present and active in the fiery star that the wise men followed, and God is present and active in the wind and fire at Pentecost.

In our sacred stories, fire signals the presence and the action of God.
But we often don’t know what to do with this fire, what to make of it. When we were talking about the story of Moses on night at VBS, JT was telling the children about how God spoke to Moses out of a bush that was on fire. He said to them, “Now, what do you think you would do if God spoke to you out of a bush that was on fire?” And a tiny little girl raised her hand high and then answered, “I would call 911!” Out of the mouths of babes!

Today, this day of Pentecost is a day when we celebrate the presence and work of God in wind and fire, and it is also a day when we try to remember what our baptism in fire at Pentecost means and, even more importantly, what to do with it.

In the fire of Pentecost, God’s spirit is loose and at work in the world, and through the baptism in fire at Pentecost God’s spirit continues to create.
Through baptism, God makes of each of us a new creation, people who no longer live for ourselves alone but who live to love and serve God and to love and serve others.
In baptism, we are saying yes to God, this God who has created all that is has created us and named each of us as God’s own beloved. In baptism, we accept that we are God’s beloved; we accept that we, as individuals, are also examples of God’s marvelous works.

Each one of you is a little universe created by God and you are just as breathtaking, just as lovely, just as marvelous a part of God’s creation as the sun or all the stars in the night sky.

We affirm and accept this truth in our baptism (or our parents affirm and accept this for us), and then we reaffirm it again and again throughout our lives because sometimes it’s hard to remember—when we hear voices around us or inside us telling us over and over again—you’re not good enough, you’re not attractive enough, you’re not smart enough, or rich enough…Then we have to remember our baptism and what God is saying to us at that moment and then over and over again if we will but listen: (God is saying) “You are amazing! You are a part of my marvelous works, and I love you, just as you are, just as I have created you; I love you more than you can ever imagine!”

In baptism, God isn’t just reminding us that each of us is a part of God’s marvelous works. God is making a marvelous work of all of us together. In our baptism in the Spirit, God is making of us the Church, the body of Christ; together we are the hands and feet, the eyes and ears, even the mouth of Jesus.

As a part of our baptism, we are called to give voice to the marvelous works of God; we are called to tell about God’s deeds of power; and we are called to remember that each person whom we encounter in this marvelous world that God has created is a little universe, a marvelous and unique and wondrous work of God; and we are called to treat each other accordingly. We are called to treat one another with grace, gentleness, and even reverence, and when we do that, God’s Spirit refreshes us and creates in us new hope, new faith, new life.

The Sunday after the Ascension--Year A

2011-06-09T12:06:00.000-07:00

Easter 7A—Sunday after Ascension
June 5, 2011

You would think that after the resurrection, nothing would surprise them, these disciples who had walked with him, who had seen him heal so many and work so many wonders. But that day, outside on the mount called Olivet, they were most surprised to see their friend and master lifted up in a cloud toward heaven until he was taken out of their sight. They were so surprised that all they could do was stand there, with their mouths open, watching and wondering, until two men in white approach them and seem to break their spell.

We know something about that, don’t we? Sometimes life surprises us, catches us off guard, throws us a curve ball, and we are so surprised that we cannot know or remember how to proceed. Sometimes this surprise comes through a blessing, but sometimes it comes through a loss. Sometimes it is even God who surprises us.
So, when the disciples finally come to their senses, what do they do? They remember what Jesus has told them, to wait in Jerusalem, and so they do just that. They go back to Jerusalem, and they wait; they’re not even really sure what they’re waiting for. But still they wait.

For us, waiting is a lost art. In our high-speed, technologically advanced culture, we chafe at any waiting we are forced to do. We fidget and fuss, we fret and we grow anxious. We as a people have lost the art of waiting gracefully. So when we must do it, we often do it badly.

This part of the Easter season in which we find ourselves today has much to teach us about waiting gracefully. It is an in-between time, after Jesus has ascended to heaven and before the gift of the Holy Spirit, the comforter given at Pentecost. We long for the gift of the Spirit, for some solid definition of who and where we are and what we are supposed to be doing. But for today, at least, we are called to follow the example of the disciples. Today we are called to wait.

We see in the story from Acts, that waiting gracefully, waiting faithfully is also a part of Christian discipleship. It is as much a part of Christian action as service, stewardship, charity…For the disciples didn’t go back to that room and twiddle their thumbs. They went back and they waited in an intentional way. Two notable actions characterize the disciples’ waiting. They stay together; and they pray.

As they wait together, they physically manifest the reality that, even though Jesus is gone, they are all still in this together. And even before they are given the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and are made the Church, they are already acting like how the church is supposed to act. For that is what the church really is: a body of people who are in this thing together, people who no longer have to “go it alone,” who do not have to wait and agonize and battle anxiety alone but who have a whole host of others to wait with.
And as they wait, they pray. They turn their focus away from the work of waiting and they turn it toward God, the source of all good gifts. They pray because in their waiting they are reminded that they are truly powerless, but that in God, all things are held in God’s care and in God’s power and in God’s time.
So much of our lives are made up of the in-between times. Already we have received the gift of the Holy Spirit at our baptism, but God’s kingdom is not yet fulfilled.

In our baptism, we are called to be people who wait well and also who wait with one another. Take a moment and remember when the last time was that you waited well? When was the last time you waited with another? What characterized that time? Was it the support, the community? Was it prayer?

In this in-between time between Ascension and Pentecost, and in all the in-between times in our lives, may we hold together, wait with and bear with one another, and may we turn our eyes to God, the giver of all good things and the creator of hope; may God grant us the spirit cast all of our anxiety upon God, to remain steadfast in our faith that Christ himself will “restore, support, strengthen and establish us;” may God give us the grace to hold together and to wait gracefully, through prayer and in hope.

Easter 6A sermon

2011-06-01T09:40:00.001-07:00

Easter 6A
May 29, 2011
Sometimes in a week, a homily creeps up on me. It started this week with a seemingly random song going round in my head:
“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child/ sometimes I feel like a motherless child/. Sometimes, I feel like a motherless child/a long ways from home/ a long, long ways from home.”
In our gospel reading today, we see Jesus and his disciples right in the middle of the Last Supper. I can just imagine the looks on the faces of the disciples as Jesus tells them that he will not be with them much longer. They are the expressions of people who have known in the past what it is to feel like be a motherless child. And so he says to them, “I will not leave you orphaned.” You may feel like motherless children now, but this will not always be so. I will send you a comforter, and advocate, and you will belong to me and to each other through what has always bound us: love.
Some of us also know what it means to feel like a motherless child, to be left alone, abandoned, to feel we have become orphaned with no kin or care to be found. We can be surrounded by people at all times and in all places and still feel alone, orphaned, like motherless children. So where is the good news in today’s gospel for us? Where is this fulfillment of Jesus’s promise to not leave us as orphans?
The 12th century Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux writes about the four degrees of love. “There is the infantile stage of ‘love of self for the sake of self.’ ‘Give me that bottle!’ We may progress to the next stage of ‘love of the other for the sake of self.’ ‘Oh, you gave me that bottle.’ And so on to the more or less selfless stage of ‘love of the other for the sake of the other.’ This is the place of genuine human love, a reflection of the love of God, the place of altruism. But, says Bernard, there is a final stage which is heaven’s healing. This is the ‘love of self only for the sake of the Other.’ Knowing this love is to arrive at a true image of myself, a measure of the view God has of me, to see myself to some degree in the way the One who loves me into being sees me.”
The gift of today’s gospel is a reminder of Jesus’s commandment to us. As followers of Jesus’s way, we are called to give love freely, called to love God and to love others. But we are also called to receive love. We are called to receive the love of God that is freely offered to us, and we are called to receive love from other people.
This past week, I read an article by the Episcopal priest Sam Portaro called “Practicing a Life of Prayer.” In this article, Portaro writes about two spiritual practices that we can do in our everyday lives, to help us grow more deeply in our knowledge and love of God and each other. The first, he says, is to “pay attention.” This is not as easy as it sounds. We all know how much is competing for our attention, and Portaro challenges us to be more intentional about where we give our attention; being intentional about being a steward of the gift of attention that God has given me.” He writes that we have to ask ourselves the difficult questions about where and how we give our attention: “Am I paying attention to the people and concerns that have the greatest value for me that represent love for God, neighbor, and self? Am I giving the 1st fruits of my attention, the best of my attention to God? Or am I squandering it, throwing my precious attention away…” “When I pay attention, I don’t have to remind myself of God’s presence in my life; God is nearly always present and manifest, recognizable in the other, the one in whom and to whom I have paid my attention.”
The poet Marge Piercy wrote “Attention is love.” And I think she is right.
The second spiritual discipline that Portaro articulates is to “take care.” This phrase, which is often used as a casual farewell, is of profound weight in our spiritual practice. We are called to “receive, reach out, and seize hold of care” that is offered to us. This is hard for us. We don’t want to seem weak or needy or dependent. We do not want to have to rely on the care of another, and so often we resist care and concern and love when it is offered to us. But Portaro insists that this care is a gift from God through others, and that we are called by God to accept it. “Take the care that God holds out, offers in the hands of those who reach out to help. Take the care proffered in those friends God gives us who manifest God’s love in the flesh, the companions whoare there for us and with us in the inevitable dark night, those who believe in us, love us even when we find it hard to believe in or love ourselves. Take the care that comes running to the door and leaps into your arms, happy that you’re home, whether it’s the love of your child, or the love of your dog. Take the care that comes your way and receive it as the gift of God that it is…”
This morning, may you hear and believe the words of our Risen Lord: I do not leave you orphaned, as motherless children. God is with you, loving you more than you can ask or imagine. And God has given you brothers and sisters to love you and walk with you along the way, to give you encouragement and hope; to give and receive love, and to help you remember that you are not alone.

References:
“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Chile” hymn 169 from Lift Every Voice II .
From the Rt. Rev Jeffrey Lee’s article “On the Theology of Wellness” in Credo’s All Shall Be Well compilation.
From The Very Rev. Sam Portaro’s article “Pracitcing a Life of Prayer” in Credo’s All Shall Be Well compilation.

Easter 4A sermon

2011-05-14T18:44:00.000-07:00

Easter 4A
May 15, 2011
I want to begin my homily today with a little show and tell. This is my Mother’s day present that I got last week from my daughter MM (who’s six). My gift was made up of three different parts. First, a card made by Mary Margaret at school with a lovely, hand-written note inside. Second, a book, Just Mom and Me, which is made up of activities for mothers and daughters to do together. And finally, a dollar bill—just kind of thrown into the bag. So here’s what’s the coolest part of MM’s gift to me. It is made up of things that we both value: a book that honors our relationship, an expression of her artistic talent, and a dollar; and it is a true offering of her stewardship, made up of the three classic components: time (together doing the activities in the book), talent (in her art and writing), and treasure in the gift of a dollar that was given to her by the tooth fairy.

Senior Warden, Marie Porter, and I spent the weekend at the very first Bishop’s Annual Stewardship Summit (BASS), and we learned a wonderfully succinct definition of what stewardship is. Stewardship is “what you do with all that you have after you say ‘I believe.’”

Our passage in Acts is a beautiful snapshot of stewardship at its best in the life of faith, and it resonates with us because it is about people like us. It starts with the disciples, who had abandoned Jesus at his crucifixion, who are so scared of what might happen to them that they huddle together in one single room behind locked doors. But then, they encounter the Risen Lord, and he transforms their fear into hope, joy, and a passion to spread the good news of Jesus’ life and ministry, his death and resurrection. So these formerly scared disciples are given the gift of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and then Peter, who had been the most afraid of all of them, preaches to the crowd and 3,000 people are converted to the new faith and baptized into the body of Christ. These three thousand people then give themselves over to The Way of following Christ, “devoting themselves to the apostles teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” They give of their possessions and hold things in common, and they even sell their possessions and distribute the money to the common good, to help those who have need. What is most amazing about this picture of life in the early church is that these people, who are no better or stronger or smarter or richer or poorer or more faithful or less fearful than any of us give themselves to what they all have in common, not what distinguishes them from one another. And the people who knew them before and see how they have become transformed are amazed and give glory to God through the power of the resurrection to new life. And even more begin to join them.

Stewardship is what we do with all that we have after we have said that we believe; it’s how we spend and make our money; it is what we do with our time, our attention; it is how we make a difference in this world; it is how we give our heart, and how we trust God. There is nothing stopping us from being that community of faith in Acts, in giving ourselves to what we have in common not what distinguishes us. We know how it’s done—through a commitment that we all make in our baptism and in the renewal of our baptismal covenant. It is a commitment to devoting ourselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers, a commitment to giving our hearts to the Way of Jesus Christ above all else. Nothing stands in our way except our fear that there will not be enough, our fear that we will not be able to do it, that it will be too hard, that our friends will make fun of us, that it will infringe upon our own will for the way we live our lives. Nothing stands in our way except our fear. And my friends, if there is anything that was proven by Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, it is that in the Kingdom of God there is and always will be enough; that we have absolutely nothing to fear and absolutely everything to gain.

Think about the difference that we will make in this community, when we give of our love and attention and our money without fear, without scarcity; think of the difference we will make when we give ourselves and our hearts to what we have in common. And let us give thanks for those little ones among us who teach us about the abundance of God and how we might also give generously.

Easter 3A/Mother's Day

2011-05-08T04:18:00.000-07:00

The Reverend Melanie Dickson Lemburg
Easter 3A
May 8, 2011

I’d like to share with you today, some parts of one of my favorite poems: “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry. It’s an interesting poem that starts out by talking about the way of the world, and then it urges us to follow a different path.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Love the quick profit, the annual raise
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed…
…Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head.
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

There is much in that poem that captivates me, but during this Easter season, I am most especially drawn to that last line: “Practice resurrection”. Many of the ideas of the poem lead up to that notion of practicing resurrection, but my question for us is, how can we, in our daily lives this Easter season, practice resurrection?

In our gospel for today, we see one instance of practicing resurrection. Cleopas and his companion are leaving Jerusalem. They are, in effect, getting the heck out of dodge, trying to leave the events of the weekend far behind them. Their hearts are heavy and sad, and they encounter a stranger on the road. Even though their leader is dead and gone, his way of welcoming the stranger is ingrained upon them, and we see their reflection of it, in how they welcome the unrecognized risen Christ. So, before these two even know of the resurrection, we see them practicing resurrection in the way that they extend the hospitality of Christ, welcoming the stranger, offering food to the hungry and shelter to the traveler. It is because they, even in their sadness and preoccupation, are willing to open themselves to the other that they are able to walk with the Risen Christ to Emmaus; and at their invitation, he joins them for a meal, where he makes himself known to them in the breaking of the bread. For a moment, just think of what this story would look like if those two men hadn’t offered hospitality to the stranger….They would have never received the revelation that this man they had traveled 7 miles with was in fact the Risen Christ. Even the most cursory offer of hospitality opens the door to the gift of the revelation of the presence of God.

So what is hospitality? It took me preaching this sermon on Mother’s Day to begin to realize what motherhood in its various forms has taught me about hospitality. Now I’m not talking about how to set a nice table or make a big, elaborate, welcoming meal for a dinner party or giving hostess gifts when someone throws you a party. I’m talking about the essence of what it means to be a mother and to be mothered by another. That is what hospitality is all about. In motherhood, a person allows a stranger, a completely other person to take up residence in our bodies, our hearts, our souls, our imaginations. It means spending the rest of our lives nurturing and shaping them, not possession them or expecting certain things from them but spending time with them, appreciating them for their own gifts and inviting out of them the person that God has created and called them to be. That is true motherhood, and it is also true hospitality, and you don’t have to be a mother, biologically, to know it and to practice it. I’d be willing to bet it is what you appreciate the most of the people who have mothered you over the course of your life.

Why would we offer hospitality? It’s not because we have a beautiful building, great music. It’s not because we need or want more people, more bodies in the pews, more pledges to support the budget. We offer hospitality because we believe that the Risen Christ is among us and that he continues to reveal the truth of life, death, and resurrection in our own lives, in our own stories. Once we have tasted the power and the gift of this truth, we know that there are people out there who are dying of hunger for this taste of truth and hope that we have to offer. Yes, bad stuff happens. People get sick and die. But our lives are not without meaning. Our lives are not without purpose. When we look into the eyes of the stranger, Jesus helps us to see that truth in their face and to offer them a place among us in the story. We offer hospitality because the truth of today’s gospel story and the truth of our own experience teach us that in welcoming the stranger we find ourselves, again and again, surprised to suddenly recognize the face of the Risen Christ. And we offer hospitality because each of us knows, deep in our hearts, what it means to be the stranger, the one on the outside, longing for a place and a people to belong to.

How do we offer hospitality? In the terms of Berry’s poem, hospitality is not just about “practicing resurrection”; hospitality is also about “doing something that won’t compute…” The two disciples have walked with a stranger for 7 miles and when he begins to move on and continue his journey, they stop him and invite him with the simple words: “Stay with us.” It’s hard to imagine that these days-- meeting a fellow traveler and then inviting them home for supper and to spend the night…But what would that radical hospitality look like for us? We do it every Sunday—when a stranger enters our doors, we invite them into our home, this place that is sacred, so very holy to us; this place that has been built and rebuilt through blood, sweat, and tears. We feed them, and we invite them to stay with us because in and through them we may encounter the risen Christ. We open up a place for them in our hearts and in our imaginations, and we appreciate them for the place that God has offered us all together in this story of life, death, and resurrection.

So in this Easter season, do “something that doesn’t compute.” Welcome the stranger; embrace the outcast, the child, the one whom the world says has no value; feast with God’s children at God’s table; look for the Lord where you least expect him; gladly live into your place in the story; practice resurrection.

The Day of Resurrection: Sermon 2011

2011-04-25T08:13:00.000-07:00

The Day of Resurrection: Easter 2011
April 24, 2011
Once, long ago in a kingdom far away, there was a most unusual custom. In most kingdoms, when the ruler dies, his son or daughter succeeds to the throne after him. But in this kingdom, when a king died, a special bird called the “bird of good fortune” was released. This bird flew around in the air above the subjects in the land and the person upon whose head it finally landed became the next king.
In this kingdom, there was a slave who worked in the king’s palace. He was a musician who entertained the king and his family and guests by dressing in funny clothing -- a cap made of chicken feathers and a raggedy belt -- and playing music on a drum. The slave was not happy about his lot. He felt that it was degrading, and he prayed to be a free man.
It came to pass that the king died one day, and the “bird of good fortune” was released. It circled the sky for some time, while the people of the kingdom watched in anticipation. Finally, it came to rest on the head of the slave, nesting itself in his hat of chicken feathers. Immediately, and to his great surprise, he was declared king of the entire empire and, in an instant, the slave was transformed into a powerful sovereign.
The new king moved into the palace, donned his royal attire, and sat upon his throne. As his first royal decree, he had a tiny hut built next to the palace. The only furnishing in this little shack was a large mirror. Early every morning the new king entered this little shack, disappearing behind the door for a short time. Then he would emerge, lock the door behind him, and return to the palace. His ministers and advisors thought that this was very peculiar behavior but, after all, he was the king now and who would question the king?
As the years went by, the king passed many laws aimed at reducing, and finally eliminating all slavery and suffering. The changes were made so gradually that no one noticed them. The king was known to all for his kindness, his justice, and his compassion, as well as his strange habit of visiting the odd little hut early every morning.
One day, his closest advisor asked, “Your Majesty, what is it that you keep in that hut of yours?” The king led the advisor into the hut and showed him a burlap sack containing the chicken feather hat, the ragged belt, and the drum. “These,” he said, “are my most treasured possessions.”
“But these are reminders of slavery!” the advisor replied in disgust. These are not the possessions of a king, Your Majesty!”
“Ah, but they are,” replied the king. “You see, once I was a slave and now I am free. When you made me your king, I promised myself and God that I would never forget that I was once a slave lest I grow arrogant and haughty, and treat people as I was once treated. Every morning, I come here and dress as I was once forced to dress as a slave. I stare at myself in the mirror until tears come to my eyes and only then am I prepared to leave this hut and rule as a good king should. It is this memory which makes me the king I am. These are the most treasured possessions I have.”
Wonderful story, don’t you think? It is a Passover Tale told by Iraqi Jews; the original source has been lost from memory, so it’s passed on by word of mouth these days. It’s the story of a people who remember life as slaves, life under Pharaoh all those years ago when Moses led them out. It’s about looking honestly at who you are, looking at where you have been, and taking that next step towards who God is calling you to be.
Today we come to church on this most holy day of our year to look into the mirror of our faith, and we remember that we are slaves no more.
This is important because there are so many ways that we might be enslaved in this world of ours. Some people are slaves of fashion—the latest clothes, gadgets, cars. Some are slaves to our work, to success. Some are slaves to money. And so very many of us are slaves to our fear.
So today of all days, it is important to look into that mirror and to remember that we no longer have to be slaves to anything, not fear, not even death.
In Matthew’s gospel account of Jesus’s resurrection, we see those sad, grieving women, slaves to their sorrow, who are headed to Jesus’ tomb, and suddenly they are shaken by a great earthquake and the appearance of a messenger from God, who gives them the news that Jesus is no longer in the tomb but he has been raised. As they race off to tell the rest of the disciples the good news, they run smack dab into Jesus. And he says to them: “Greetings! Rejoice!” and then “Be not afraid!”
When is the last time someone told you “Don’t be afraid!” and you were able to believe it? Have you really and truly believed it since childhood, held in the arms of a loving adult and comforted? As we grow older, we experience the reality that Earnest Hemmingway articulated when he wrote, “Life breaks everyone”; and even if we are not completely broken, we certainly get worn down, more and more, as the years pass.
But not today! For today we look into the mirror and what do we see? We see people who were once slaves—to sin, to fear, to death. And we hear the words of our risen Lord echoing in our Alleluias: “Do not be afraid! Rejoice!” And today, we can believe it. For on this, the day of the Resurrection, we can look into that mirror and see hope. We see the truth of the resurrection—that God’s love is stronger than anything, even death.
Some of us need to look into this mirror more often, which is what we do every Sunday when we gather to worship. Every Sunday, we celebrate the feast of our Lord’s resurrection, and we hold up the mirror for each other and help one another remember: no matter what you may be going through in your life, no matter what sorrows or grief or burdens you carry with you into this place, no matter how the bonds of slavery seek to entangle you, we will hold up the mirror in front of you and help you remember that through Jesus’s resurrection, you are slaves no longer; we will hold up the mirror and help you remember that nothing can separate you from the love of God, the love that is stronger than absolutely everything, stronger than sorrows or grief or burdens or frustrations. We will hold up the mirror and remind you that you are held in the love of God that is stronger even than death.
“Rejoice. Be not afraid.” Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Alleluia!

Great Vigil of Easter sermon 2011

2011-04-25T08:12:00.000-07:00

Great Vigil of Easter
April 23, 2011

A Letter to Daniel Andrew Dickson upon the occasion of his baptism.
Dear Daniel,
On this most holy night, it is our custom to remember the stories of our faith and the works of God in our salvation. Since you are just a little shy of three on this occasion, I don’t know how much of this night you will actually remember as you grow older.
But it is my hope that you at least remember the dark of this night. All of your life, from this point forward, will be a dance between the light and the dark.
There will be times in your life, when you may feel that the darkness weighs upon you like the tomb, and you feel that you cannot go on. And it is in those times, especially, that I want you to remember the dark of this night.
Because the dark of this night is a different kind of dark. It is the deep and dazzling darkness of God. It is the blanket of darkness that stretched across creation at the beginning, the darkness that was split by the light when God spoke the command and claimed it as good. It is the darkness under which the Children of Israel walked through the parted waters of the Red Sea, the darkness through which God led them out of their slavery and into their salvation and their freedom.
This is the darkness, on this most holy night, that has been vanquished by our eternal king; it is the darkness of the tomb where Christ no longer lies; it is the darkness of the deep waters of baptism, through which you are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, the darkness through which you are made a new creation.
As you grow, may you remember this darkness and the truth of this night. Remember the promise that you do not have to be afraid of anything; that all you must do is stand firm and God will be present with you. Remember that darkness and fear and death no longer have any hold over you; that you have been given the gift of light, freedom, and eternal life on this most holy night.
Remember that the light of Christ shines continually to drive away all darkness, and that Christ, the Morning Star who knows no setting, shines always in your own heart.
Remember that in Christ’s resurrection, God has proven once and for all that light will always split the darkness and drive away the shadows of the grave. And may you always find reminders of this truth in your everyday life: in the full-bodied, whole-hearted play, that only children can accomplish and in the laughter that accompanies it; in your deep and abiding love for ketchup; in offerings of kindness; in a good song or a well-turned phrase; in a sunny, 72 degree Saturday; in breakfast for dinner or an afternoon nap. May these and so many more good things always remind you that the light always shines in the darkness.
And may you always remember the glorious truth of this night. No matter what you may encounter as you dance between light and darkness, remember that God loves you and has created you good, so good; and that in Christ’s resurrection, God’s love for you and for each of us has proven to be stronger than the darkness, stronger than anything, stronger even than death.

Your sister in Christ,
Melanie+

Good Friday sermon 2011

2011-04-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

Good Friday sermon
April 22, 2011

“Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.”
After everyone else had abandoned him, why were these women still there? Why are we here this day? What do we hope to gain from this sad observance?
One of my commentaries wrote of the Good Friday observance: “Everybody sings ‘O Come all Ye Faithful.’ Only the faithful sing ‘ O Sacred Head Sore Wounded’ or ‘At the cross her vigil keeping, stood the mournful mother weeping…’ This week, for better and worse, we are pretty much on our own. That is the cultural difference between Christmas and Holy Week—but why do the faithful, and to be honest, the wondering and questioning, and not-really-sure-at-all, come to a Good Friday service?”
Why are the women standing at the foot of the cross? Why do we stand here as well?
As Jesus’s mother stands at the foot of the cross with a small remnant of people, she must be weeping, grieving not only for the horrible suffering and death of her innocent son. She is also grieving for the loss of her hope, the loss of dreams for her own future and for her son; she is mourning the loss of her joyful expectations.
While not all of us have experience the profound grief of the loss of a child, all of us know something of this other loss. We too have lost hope; we too have had to bury our joyful expectation; we too have grieved the loss of our dreams for how life is supposed to turn out.
So why do we come here today? Is it to be a funeral for our lost hopes and dreams and expectations? That would hardly be Good Friday!
Today, the writer from the letter to the Hebrews reminds us that we are here to “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering,” “to approach the throne of grace with boldness that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need…” We know the end of the story, the great surprise of Easter, and even on this sad day, we can focus on the hope that is the gift of the resurrection.
And the gift of the cross this day is an invitation. We are invited to take all that we have lost, all for which we still mourn, and to lay it all at the foot of the cross, where it will no longer be lost, dead, gone. At the foot of the cross, all our lost hope can and will be redeemed. And that is why we are here this day.

In just a few moments, after the solemn collects, we will have what is known as the “veneration of the cross.” As we sit in silence and then sing about Mary’s grief and profound loss at the foot of the cross, you are invited to come forward to the cross or to kneel or sit in your pew, and to imagine that you are gathering up your loss, your grief, your frustrated expectations, your hopelessness, and that you are laying them down at the foot of the cross where they will be redeemed and given new life, new hope in the resurrection.

Lent 4A sermon

2011-04-04T11:32:00.000-07:00

4th Sunday in Lent Year A
April 3, 2011
I have been given a lovely gift this week, and I want to share it with you. Early in the week, before I’d even begun to think about this homily, I was looking for something to read. I found, on my bookshelf, a book that David’s aunt had sent to us two years ago; a book that she had read with her church during Lent that she had wanted to share with us. Well, I’d stuck it on my shelf and forgotten about it, until this week. The book is called Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy Lives, and it was written by Wayne Muller, an ordained minister and therapist.
I was hooked on this book from the second page with this paragraph: “A ‘successful’ life has become a violent enterprise. We make war on our own bodies, pushing them beyond the limits; war on our children, because we cannot find enough time to be with them when they are hurt and afraid, and need our company; war on our spirit, because we are too preoccupied to listen to the quiet voices that seek to nourish and refresh us; war on our communities, because we are fearfully protecting what we have, and do not feel safe enough to be kind and generous; war on the earth, because we cannot take the time to place our feet on the ground and allow it to feed us, to taste its blessings and give thanks” (2). “…As it all piles endlessly upon itself, the whole experience of being alive begins to melt into one enormous obligation. It becomes the standard greeting everywhere: I am so busy (2).” “With a few notable exceptions, the way problems are solved is frantically, desperately, reactively, and badly. Despite their well-meaning and generous souls, community and corporate leaders are infected with a fearful desperation that is corrosive to genuine helpfulness, justice or healing. As Br. David Steindl-Rast reminds us, the Chinese pictograph for ‘busy’ is composed to two characters: heart and killing” (3).
It is more than a little disturbing to me to hear the disease of my own life experience named in such a clear and concise way. And I know that I am not alone in living this rushed and harried and violent life that Muller writes about because I see the results of this life in the lives of others all the time—in the nurse at the doctor’s office, in the person on the phone, in some of you who so desperately want life to be different but who cannot break out of the system of busy-ness and violence in which you find yourselves caught.
What’s most interesting to me about this image of life that Mu ller articulates is that it is not unique to our age (although the developments of progress and technology have certainly intensified it). We can see glimpses of this violence in our gospel reading for today. What starts out as a conversation between Jesus and his disciples leads Jesus to heal a man who had been blind from birth. And then we see 33 chapters worth of resulting conflict and drama among the newly healed man, his family, his community of faith. It is a whole lot of talking and arguing and conflict and drama, all about authority and sin and legitimacy. And the man who was born blind just keeps telling his story: “I was sitting there, and the man called Jesus walked up and healed me of my blindness”. Eventually, he gets put out of the synagogue, exiled from his faith community, for telling his story. And Jesus finds him and offers him a new community of faith and a new way of life to go along with his new way of seeing the world.
We are very much like the man who was blind from birth who was healed by Jesus and given the beautiful gift of a new way of being in the world; as a result of this gift, this new way of seeing, he finds himself caught up in the drama and the violence of those around us. But he stayed faithful to the story, and after what I am sure was a most painful exile, he was rewarded by a glimpse of the glory of God in the person of Jesus Christ.
We are also very much like the Pharisees. We do violence to others when they speak the truth about the disease in the way of the world and the way of our lives. And we ostracize them; we refuse to listen, and we even squeeze them out.
Today, the 4th Sunday in Lent, is also known in our tradition as Laetare Sunday. It means Rejoice Sunday, and it was traditionally a time when the mood of Lent was somewhat lightened so that people could get a little bit of a reprieve and then journey on through the rest of Lent.
The gift that I received this week from the Holy Spirit’s encouragement to pick up this book on the Sabbath, I share with you this day, so that we may all rejoice together.
Our lives do not have to be like war. God does not want that for us, and God invites us, through Jesus Christ, to live into the wholeness that is already deep within us. Muller writes that we tap into that existing wholeness by remembering the Sabbath. He writes, “While Sabbath can refer to a single day of the week, Sabbath can also be a far-reaching, revolutionary tool for cultivating those precious human qualities that grow only in time. If busyness can become a kind of violence, we do not have to stretch our perception very far to see that Sabbath time—effortless, nourishing rest—can invite a healing of this violence (5). …Sabbath is a way of being in time where we remember who we are, remember what we know, and taste the gifts of spirit and eternity (6)…Sabbath is more than the absence of work; it is not just a day off, when we catch up on television or errands. It is the presence of something that arises when we consecrate a period of time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, or true. It is time consecrated with our attention, our mindfulness, honoring those quiet forces of grace or spirit that sustain and heal us (8).”
On this 4th Sunday in Lent, may remember who you are and what you know; may you easily receive the gifts of healing and Sabbath and new vision that our Lord has to offer you, and may you take the time to listen to your life, “to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, and true”, and be freed from the violence of the world and of our lives.

(Muller, Wayne. Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy Lives. Bantam: New York, 1999.)

"Sundays are Hard."

2011-03-28T10:10:00.001-07:00

We have a saying in our household. "Sunday's are hard!" They're hard because I have to get up extra early and am usually trying to read through (or finish) a sermon while I'm eating breakfast. Then I have to get the kids fed and dressed, and we head to church to make much of our day there. Once we get to church, things usually even out for us; the kids go to nursery or Sunday school or they spend some time with some of their special adult friends at church who are like our Sunday angels.

But for whatever reason, yesterday was particularly hard. I didn't have anything good for MM to wear to church, and so I had to lay out an outfit that she has never liked. We got into a huge argument about it, and she ended the argument by shouting, "I look ridiculous!" and storming off. Just before we left, she asked if she could take her favorite stuffed toy, "Kitty", to church with her. I told her no because she had taken it last week and almost forgotten it, and it had been a huge ordeal, and I just didn't feel like I could deal with it on this particular Sunday. Of course, that started another round of hystrionics, but I finally got everyone into the car and headed to church, feeling a little ragged around the edges.

I had managed to regain my composure and was mostly done with the 8:00 service. We had reached the part where I was giving communion out to everyone, and this is always one of my favorite times in the service. It is a thin place for me, when I get to look into the faces of these people who are entrusted to my care and share with them in this deep mystery. As I was making my way around the altar rail, I reached my children, who had come up for communion with one of their adult friends. And I received quite a shock! MM had plopped her "Kitty" (that was supposed to be left at home) right up on the altar rail next to her and was gesturing to it most proudly. I was livid! But I gave her and the rest of the people communion and finished the service.

In between services, we had quite a talk (witnessed, in part, by the choir), and her father and I doled out her punishement after we all got home from church.

But I've been thinking alot about the plight of preachers kids lately, and this instance brought it even more to my awareness.

At my Uncle Mike's funeral last week, I was struck when his pastor told the gathered congregation how Mike, a pastor's kid, had always been very deliberate in his care for his pastor and most especially his pastor's family. He spoke about how it had been a part of Mike's ministry because he knew what it was like to be a pastor's kid, and how his family had not always been very well taken care of.

So today, I give thanks for those people like my Uncle Mike, who minister to my children-making sure they get to communion, getting them donuts, dinner, something to drink, a snack after church when they're waiting on mom, giving them someone to sit with, looking out for them and making sure they don't get into trouble, and just taking care of these little orphans of the church. It is a gift to me to know that they are taken care of when I am busy taking care of others.

Lent 3A sermon

2011-03-28T10:07:00.000-07:00

The 3rd Sunday in Lent
March 27, 2011
Once, in the middle of a long, hot summer, I was faced with a dual disaster. During the same week, the air conditioners at work and in my apartment both stopped working; and boy, was it hot!
We muddled along as best as we could at both places, and we tried to stay in our normal rhythm of life, accomplishing the things we needed to accomplish. Until one morning, late in the week, I became ill. I was completely incapacitated with horrible physical symptoms, and only then did I realize in all my 24 year old wisdom that I was extremely dehydrated. I’d had no idea!
When I told my roommate what was going on, we went out and bought some Gatorade, and then we each went to our respective parents’ houses and stayed there until our landlord got our air-conditioner fixed.
If only all problems in life were so easily diagnosed and resolved!
In the reading from the Old Testament, we see the Israelites, who are wandering in the wilderness. God tells them to camp at a certain place, and they do, but there is no water there. As they realized this, they become thirstier and thirstier. They know that neither they nor their children nor their livestock will be able to live long in the wilderness without water, and they grow increasingly more hysterical, crying: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt to kills us and our children and our livestock with thirst?... “Is the Lord among us or not?” Give us proof of God’s presence, proof of God’s favor.
When Moses cries out to God for help, fearing that God’s people are about to stone him, God tells Moses—go ahead of the people with some elders with you as a witness. Take your staff with which you struck the Nile and changed the waters of Egypt into undrinkable water. I will go before you and stand upon the Rock at Horeb. When you strike the rock with your staff, my presence will summon forth the water from the rock for you and all the people to drink.
And so it was. But the story is not remembered by the fact that God saves the Israelites once again, calling water forth from the rock. It is remembered for the testing and questioning of the Israelites, who even after they have been given water, continue to ask, “Is the Lord among us or not.” The Israelites know that they are thirsty, that they need water, and they let their fear and their hysteria cloud their memories of how God has freed them from slavery with miracles and divine intervention, how God is going before them in a pillar of fire and in a cloud, leading them. They forget how God has been providing for them, even in the dry desert wasteland of the wilderness, and in their fear, they cannot see the saving works of God that are even right in front of them in that present moment.
How often do we get distracted, fearful, hysterical, blinded by our “thirst”, by our lack, by our scarcity? How often do we let our fear, our lack, our hysteria cloud our memories of all the times and all the ways God has saved us, of all the times when God has revealed God’s presence, always going before us in the wildernesses of our lives?
In today’s gospel reading, the Samaritan woman has gone to the well to draw water, and there she encounters Jesus. She knows that she needs water, but until she begins speaking to Jesus, she is not aware that she is thirsty, possibly even spiritually dehydrated, all dried up without hope, so that she is practically incapacitated.
The first thing that Jesus does for her is to ask her for a drink of water from the well, and his one small request does many things. First, it invites her into relationship, into conversation. He calls her out of her solitude and loneliness. Second, he begins to gradually reveal to her the truth about himself, and in that revelation, to shine the light of truth upon her deep, deep thirst which she had not recognized or acknowledged. Finally, in his first request, he reminds her and equips her with the truth of a gift. She is able to draw water out of the well because she has a bucket to do this. In Jesus’s encounter with this woman, he teaches her about the spring of eternal life, which will cure her deep thirst, and in his attention and love for her, he gives her a bucket so that she can draw water from that deep, deep well.
The Irish poet and theologian John O’Donohue wrote, “The blessings for which we hunger [and thirst] are not to be found in other places or people. These gifts can only be given to you by your self. They are at home at the hearth of your soul.”
On this day, Jesus is inviting you to acknowledge your thirst. He invites you to name your fear of your thirst and to recognize how it causes you to forget God and seek to quench your longing in ways that are not life giving.
On this day, Jesus is reminding you that you have, within you, a deep well from which you may draw the water of eternal life. It is fed by a spring that was created at your making, made holy at your baptism and that continues to be fueled and purified by the hope of God that pours into it through the Holy Spirit.
On this day, Jesus looks at you and loves you, and he reminds you that he has already given you your very own bucket, that you may lower into that deep, deep well to draw forth that sweet water of life whenever you thirst.
All you have to do is remember—remember your bucket, be mindful of your well, and hold fast to the hope that God goes before you in the wilderness.

Ash Wednesday 2011

2011-03-09T09:25:00.000-08:00

Ash Wednesday 2011
March 9, 2011

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Solemn words for this solemn, dreary day. The temptation of Ash Wednesday is to bear these words that remind us of our mortality and to carry our sinfulness as burdens upon our hearts. But that is not the truth of Ash Wednesday.

Over the last few years, I have been given a gift of a new way of thinking about Ash Wednesday through two different encounters. In the first, I was sitting with my daughter at the noon service while my husband preached and presided. She was probably only about two, and so I spent some time trying to prepare her about what was going to happen in the service. I told her how we would go to the altar rail, much like we do for communion, but instead of getting communion, we would get the sign of the cross, in ash, on our foreheads. I told her about how this reminded us of the cross that was made on our foreheads at our baptism, how it reminds us that no matter what happens, we belong to Christ. And I told her that she could get this cross, just like everyone else. So when the time came, we went forward to receive our ashes, and my daughter began to get upset because she didn’t receive communion. As we were walking down the main aisle of the church with her protesting that she didn’t get communion, I was trying to quietly remind her that she had gotten ashes, just like everyone else. To which she proclaimed: “Hurray! I love my ashes!”

And then, a couple of years ago, I was regularly visiting an elderly woman who was shut in. She told me that she loved Ash Wednesday, and so I was trying to get to see her to take her communion and ashes, but I was not able to get there on Wednesday. I did see her the next day, and when I offered her ashes, she told me that she already had gotten some. When I asked her how she had done that, she told me that her husband, to whom she had been married many, many years, had come home from our Ash Wednesday service at church, and she had asked him to press his forehead against hers. He did this, and it left the mark of his ash cross as a shadow upon her forehead as well.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. I have learned that there is a strange kind of comfort in those words, a strange kind of belonging. They are a reminder that we belong to God, and that we will return to God. They are a reminder that, through our belonging to God, we also belong to each other, and that not even the loneliness of death can destroy that belonging. They are a reminder that we continue to exist, in every moment of every day, because of God.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. These words are an invitation-- an invitation to allow God to transform our hearts this day and throughout this season. They are an invitation to allow God to create within each of us a clean heart, an invitation to come back to God with all of your heart…to let not your hearts be broken…for God is all tenderness and compassion. They are an invitation to admit our wrongs and to receive God’s forgiveness. They are an invitation to conversion, to returning to God through not just repentance but also through amending our lives to more closely follow the way of our Lord Jesus Christ. They are an invitation to go deeper into God, to allow our hearts to be stripped, by God’s spirit, of the layers of hardness that we have built up, to allow our hearts to be lightened of their burdens.

Despite its starkness and austerity, this season of Lent is not a time to be burdened by more stuff or obligations, nor a time to be burdened by the weight of our sins. All of that and more is wiped clean this day, as we are invited on this journey to go deeper into God.

The temptation for us this day, and all through Lent, is to let our religion take precedent over God, to try to fill our deep longing for God with the trappings and practices of the season and whatever we give up or take on. Those things can be ways that we move deeper into God, but they can also be layers that we try to add back onto our new, clean hearts, so that we don’t have to bear to stand before God with our undefended hearts.

So really, this is a good day. It is a day when our hearts can be unburdened of the lies that we tell ourselves and each other about our mortality; it is a day when we can be unburdened of the untruths we create our identities from; it is a day when we can be unburdened of the deadness in our lives; it is a day when we remember that we always belong to God, and that God always calls us back to that belonging.

And it is a day when we begin to move deeper into God with our newly unburdened hearts, that we may be transformed and purified to revel in the resurrection on Easter Day. It is a day when we are invited to listen carefully and hear the echoes of the Palm Sunday Hosannas in the ashes on our foreheads.

(Note: Thanks to my mother for her sharing of the image of the invitation of Lent to go deeper into God, and to the poem Ashes by Ann Weems for the image of the
echoes of the Hosannas of Palm Sunday in the ashes.)

Last Sunday after the Epiphany--Year A

2011-03-09T09:22:00.000-08:00

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany—Year A
March 6, 2011

Today is the last Sunday after the Epiphany—a season of light in which we celebrate the manifestation of the glory of God in the person of Jesus Christ. In our readings today we get a few more glimpses of the glory of God in Moses’ encounter with God on Sinai and in Jesus’ transfiguration as witnessed by his three disciples.

In our reading today from Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has already set his face toward Jerusalem when he takes his three closest disciples up the mountain with him where they witness his transfiguration. I wonder what those three disciples expected when they made that journey up the mountain with Jesus? Surely they didn’t expect to witness, first hand, the glory of God? Do any of us ever really expect to encounter the glory of God?

I think that we can relate to both the disciples and to Moses who witnessed God’s glory in slightly different ways. God calls Moses to come up the mountain to meet God and to wait indefinitely, not knowing when God will reveal God’s glory to Moses. And we get that, don’t we? We try to follow God’s call, but so much of our life is bound up in the waiting, and sometimes it is in how we wait that we live into God’s call in our lives.

And then sometimes the weight of God’s glory can steal upon a person, amidst both the holy and the mundane events of life. I have encountered the weight of God’s glory in the most mundane events—putting my children to bed, in a conversation or a meal; and I have encountered God’s glory in the holy moments—when you have shared details of your life stories with me, when I look into your shining faces as you kneel before God’s table. Sometimes God’s glory steals upon me when I witness people being able to set aside their own egos and agendas and to work together for the greater good.

Jesus’s three disciples were surprised by God’s glory in their trip up the mountain, and when God speaks to them, they are pressed to the ground under the weight of God’s glory and under the thrall of their own fear. They are raised up out of their fear by the glory of God as they encounter it anew in the touch of their friend and teacher and in his assurance to them: Do not be afraid. Then he leads them down the mountain and tells them to not speak of his glory until after many things have come to pass. And so they go about their lives.
One of the temptations that we face in this life, that we may encounter in the wilderness of this coming Lent, is the temptation to seek after our own glory, or in the absence of the evident presence of God’s glory, to try to manufacture some in our lives. We are like the children of Israel who see the initial signs of God’s glory up on Mt Sinai, but after Moses is away from them for 40 days and 40 nights, they begin to crave more evidence of glory, and so they attempt to manufacture their own, crafting the golden calf out of their gold.
So what is the good news in this? What are we to do when faced with the weight of God’s glory or when faced with the apparent lack of it?

Henri Nouwen wrote about how he struggled with the temptation of replacing God’s glory with his own, and he wrote about how he would pray and wrestle with the question of “how to live for the glory of God and not for your own glory.” Finally, he received some wise counsel from the abbot at the monastery where he was staying. Nouwen writes, “Well the first thing is to realize that you are the glory of God. In Genesis you can read: ‘Yahweh God fashioned man of dust from the soil. Then he breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and thus man became a living being’ (Gen 2:7). We live because we share God’s breath, God’s glory. The question is not so much, ‘How to live for the glory of God’ but ‘How to live who we are, how to make true our deepest self?’ With a smile [the abbot] said, ‘Take this as your koan: ‘I am the glory of God.’ Make that thought the center of your meditation so that it slowly becomes not a thought but a living reality. You are the place where God chose to dwell…and the spiritual life is nothing more or less than to …create the space where [God’s] glory can manifest itself. …Ask yourself ‘Where is the glory of God? If the glory of God is not there where I am, where else can it be?”
“You are the glory of God.” The glory of God is revealed this day, not just in our worship, but in each of you, in each of your lives. And the gift of its surprise this day, if we can hold fast to its truth, will carry us through the wilderness of Lent, through the times in our lives when we are called to wait, to carry out the ordinary rhythms of life. It will carry us through the times of inconsolable sorrow, of boredom, of weariness.

How might each of our lives be transfigured if we can hold fast to the truth of this day—that each of us is a part of God’s glory and that it is never far away from us. It is always there, waiting to surprise us?
“You are the glory of God.” What a powerful statement! One that may make us wish to fall to the floor under the weight of its burden and our own fears. What must be expected of us if we are truly the glory of God? What must we do to live into that?

We make manifest the glory of God when we actively follow the way of Jesus in our lives: when we comfort the poor, pity the afflicted, when we offer hope and healing to those who have little, when we deliberately treat others with kindness and mercy. We live into the glory of God that is within us when we forgive others, when we choose life over death, blessings over curses. We become the glory of God when we live for others and not for ourselves alone; when we consider the impact that the way we live our lives and spend our money has on other people in our own society and around the world. We live into the glory of God when we hold fast to the hope of the resurrection, even in the darkest moments of our lives. We make space for the glory of God in our lives when we love God and when we love others.

Let us pray. O God, who before the passion of your only¬begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain: Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

7th Sunday after Epiphany Year A

2011-02-20T04:12:00.001-08:00

7th Sunday after Epiphany
February 20, 2011
There once was a woman who had been married for 28 years. She and her husband had gotten a divorce because he had been having an affair with a much younger woman. He went on to re-marry this younger woman, and they and the former wife were all present at a social engagement. Through the whole evening, the ex-wife spent her time sending venomous looks toward the happy couple and rehashing all of the details of her betrayal with the person sitting next to her at dinner. Finally, when she was leaving, she said to her dinner companion, “Now you can understand why I am so happy to be rid of him!” Her dinner companion countered: “But you are not rid of him! In fact, you are more married to him right now than you have ever been. In fact, you are his prisoner. Until you forgive him you have completely bound yourself to him and to his new wife…” The woman responded: “I’ll never give him the satisfaction. Forgive him? I’ll see him burn in hell first, even if I have to go down there with him to stoke the fire.”
There was another man who was a young African student of theology studying in the United States. He received word, one night, that men in uniforms armed with guns, grenades, swords and clubs had entered his home village in Rwanda and killed about 70 people there, many of whom were his friends, neighbors, church members and included most of his family. At first this young man wanted to wreak vengeance upon those who had murdered all those dearest to him. But as he studied and prayed and prayed some more, he became convicted that God was calling him to a ministry of forgiveness and reconciliation in his home country of Rwanda, and he knew that he had to begin by forgiving those who had killed all those whom he loved.
How are some people able to forgive when they are injured while others are consumed by their desire for vengeance, even when it poisons their own life?
How do we live into God’s command to be holy? A people who are set apart, a people who forgive and do not seek vengeance? How do we, as disciples of Jesus Christ, choose life and organize our lives around the missions of love of the other and peace? How do we live into his seemingly impossible command to “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”?
In our Old Testament reading for today, which is the only time our Revised Common Lectionary has us read anything from Leviticus, we get a glimpse of the heart of the Torah, what is known as the holiness code. “The Lord spoke to Moses saying: ‘Speak to all the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy…’ ‘You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord’.”
And in our gospel, we have Jesus’s continued teaching for his disciples in this week’s portion of the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous…”
Both of these readings are so very powerful and challenging to us because they are portraits of the very heart of God. They show that God acts out of love and concern for the other; that God chooses peace and harmony over vengeance and retribution. They show us that God loves the unlovable, suffers the worst that humanity can offer, and then rises to forgive us.
These reading remind us that God calls us to holiness, to being set apart from the way that the world works; Jesus calls us to discipleship, to perfection, to being complete in God; and in this call, we are, once again, asked to make a choice: to choose life over death, blessings over curses, reconciliation over retribution, peace over vengeance, the way of Jesus (the way of the cross) over the way of the world.
“You shall be holy…” God tells God’s people. It is both a command and a promise of fulfillment. We cannot be holy on our own. The very nature of holiness is that it belongs to God, and for anything to be holy other than God, then it must be somehow marked by God. In Christ’s humanity, God’s holiness was pleased to dwell, and when we are baptized into Jesus Christ, we are “marked as Christ’s own forever;” we share in his holiness. The goal of the children of God, the goal of discipleship in Jesus Christ, therefore, is imitating God. It is loving how God loves.
I am the Lord…God says again and again to the children of Israel in the reading for today. It is God’s refrain in this call to holiness, and it serves to remind us that we cannot live into God’s call for us, we cannot live into Jesus’s call for our discipleship, when we are focused on ourselves. We must look at God Incarnate, we must look to Jesus Christ as the model for holiness, as the model for peace, as the model for our lives, as the model for how we love as God loves; and we must work to imitate him. In that process of imitation, the Holy Spirit will transform us, more and more, into the image and likeness of Christ. And in that way, we become, every day, more and more holy.
There once were two parents of a five year old little boy. One day this boy slipped away from his nanny and went to the nearby small military base to play with ‘his’ soldiers. On that day, one of the soldiers put the boy up on a horse-drawn bread wagon, and let him go for a ride. As they were passing through a gate on a bumpy cobblestone path, the boy leaned sideways and his head got stuck between the door post and the wagon. The horses kept going. The boy died on the way to the hospital, a son lost to parents who adored him. When the soldier whose carelessness had caused the little boy’s death went to court, the boy’s parents insisted that they would not press charges saying, “Why should one more mother be plunged into grief, this time because the life of her son, a good boy but careless in a crucial moment, was ruined by the hands of justice.” After the solider was discharged from the army and went home unpunished, the father of the little boy would make the two day journey to visit the young soldier because he said he was concerned for the soldier and wanted to talk to him once more of God’s love, which is greater than our accusing hearts, and of the parents’ forgiveness.
Those two parents were able to forgive the soldier because they looked to God and remembered how God had forgiven them. It was not an easy choice; choosing life never is, and they lived with the pain of their loss their entire lives. But they embraced God’s call to holiness in their lives. They lived into the call of their discipleship in our Lord Jesus Christ as they loved the unlovable in imitation of God.
May we have the courage to go and do likewise.

6th Sunday after Epiphany sermon Year A

2011-02-15T08:14:00.000-08:00

6th Sunday after Epiphany—Year A
February 13, 2011
There is nothing like death to help give us perspective on life and how we are living it. Moses shares some of his own insight with us and the Children of Israel as he faces his own impending death on the outskirts of the Promised Land and as the Children of Israel prepare to enter the Promised Land and begin their new life there.
“Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and adversity…I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life.”
There at the end of his life, Moses encounters the reality that most of us are not able to choose the manner of our death, but that our lives are made up of millions of opportunities in which we are allowed to choose between adversity and prosperity, curses and blessings, death and life.
In his valedictory sermon, Moses doesn’t just tell the Children of Israel to choose between life and death, blessings and curses. He tells them how they may choose death or choose life. You choose death, he says, when your hearts turn away from God; when you do not listen to God, when you do not obey; you choose death when you bow down and serve other gods.
You choose life, he says, when you love the Lord your God. You choose life when you walk in God’s ways and when you observe God’s commandments. You choose life when you hold fast to God.
Jesus’s message in today’s portion of the Sermon on the Mount is a much harsher and hyperbolic way of articulating this choice between death and life. “Let your word be ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no,’” Jesus tells his disciples. Others have said this in various ways: “You’re either for us or against us.” “Do… or do not….There is no try.”
Choose life.
Jesus speaks strong words about the choices people face over the course of their lives: the choices of nursing and nurturing our anger against one who has wronged us or one whom we have wronged versus doing the difficult work of forgiveness and reconciliation. In this he tells us to choose reconciliation, choose life. He speaks of the choice of lusting after another, of coveting aspects of another’s life versus being reconciled with the reality of our own lives and what we have, and again he urges us to choose reconciliation, to choose contentment, to choose life.
He speaks of divorce and urges people to work to preserve marriage, and he lays out again the choice between divorce versus reconciliation. When at all possible, choose reconciliation; choose life. Finally, he offers the choice between making false vows versus reconciliation between your values and your action, reconciliation between your words and your works. Choose reconciliation; choose life.
In his piece of the Sermon for today, Jesus says that the Way of God is the path of reconciliation; it includes being reconciled with ourselves, who we are, the reality of our lives, and being reconciled with others, rather than holding onto our anger, past wrongs or injustices. Choosing life means knowing and believing that no matter what we have done, God continues to reach out to us, that we do not have to live a life of curses, of adversity, of death; we may accept God’s forgiveness and our restored relationship as God’s beloved that we might choose life.
Again and again we are offered this choice, between death and life. It is the choice between living our lives for ourselves alone, not worrying about who we crush to get what we want versus striving for justice for all people and care for the poor, searching for something deeper than our own comfort. And we are urged to choose life. It is the choice between living our lives in a rush to meet deadlines that are, in the scheme of things, completely insignificant, and ordering our lives around those lesser things versus spending time with those who are dearest to us, and letting them know how precious they are in our sights. And we are urged to choose life.
It is the choice between shutting down our emotions, not dealing with the reality of grief and loss in our lives versus acknowledging our losses and grieving…. grieving well. And we are urged to choose life. It is the choice between shuttling our children through the countless round of sports and activities, expecting as much or more from them than we expect from ourselves versus spending some time every day playing with them, enjoying their childhood, and sharing in their joy that they so freely give. And we are urged to choose life.
It is the choice between being polite and saying what we think the other wants to hear, our tongues held captive by the fear of hurting feelings versus speaking the truth in love when the truth begs to be told. And we are urged to choose life. It is the choice between making all our decisions, living our lives based on fear versus living our lives out of a deep and abiding hope that nothing can separate us from God’s love. And we are urged to choose hope, choose life.
It is the choice between bowing down and serving anything less than God: ideas that are not worthy, the demands and priorities of our culture, our own over- programmed calendars, our jobs, our loneliness, our despair, our own deep control needs and plans for how our lives should go versus holding fast to God, offering to God nothing less than our whole hearts during worship, praying, and giving thanks for all of God’s good gifts. And we are urged to choose life.
And here’s the really good news in all of this. We are always offered the choice, and even when we continue to choose death, for whatever reason, God can and will redeem that too, if we will let God. God can take the death that we choose, and God offers us in its place reconciliation… redemption…. resurrection.
It is the power and the hope of the resurrection: that God’s love is stronger than anything this world has to offer—stronger than our bad choices, stronger than evil and hate, stronger than anything. God’s love is stronger than death. So when we choose God, we choose life.
I discovered a quote from Garrison Keillor this week, that I will close with this morning: “Thank you God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.” Amen.

5th Sunday after the Epiphany--Year A

2011-02-07T08:13:00.001-08:00

5th Sunday after the Epiphany
February 6, 2011
Two songs come to mind when hearing our gospel lesson for today. The first is one that many of us have been singing since our childhood. Our children sang it at the St. Nicholas feast a couple of months ago, and our choir presented us with a rousing version of it just a few weeks ago: This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.” Many of us have been taught all of our lives the importance of letting our lights shine.
While I worked at the Stewpot soup kitchen in Jackson, I encountered another song about our shining lights. It quickly became one of my favorite songs that we would sing in the noon day chapel service, and the pianist would sing the verses, and the congregation would sing the chorus, in the kind of call and response that is common in African American spiritual singing. The chorus goes “Let your light shine, shine, shine. Let your light shine, shine, shine. May be somebody down in the valley tryin’ to get home.” This gave us a reason for why it’s important to let our little lights from childhood shine, so that we could serve as little lighthouses to inspire others and help them find their way when they are lost.
I love both of these songs, and they both share important theological truths, but I think that they skip ahead of an important truth that we see in today’s gospel story.
Our story for today is the second part of Matthew’s depiction of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. In last week’s gospel, Jesus had been ministering to the crowds, and when he seems them following after him, he goes up the mountain, where his disciples follow him. He then sits down, and he begins his Sermon on the Mount, with the beatitudes. What is especially important to remember about our story today, the continuation of that Sermon on the Mount, is that Jesus is not teaching the masses in the sermon; rather he is preaching to his small group of disciples, his closest, most dedicated followers. He is teaching what it means to be his disciple, and he preaches that to them and to us across the centuries.
Notice, that the first thing he tells us today is not what we are supposed to do. First, he tells us who we are. “You are the salt of the earth…” Salt in its very essence is a preservative. It enhances the flavor of what is already, innately there. That is who we are as disciples of Jesus. “You are the light of the world…” Light illumines and dispels the darkness. It reveals what is hidden, and its very essence is to shine.
First, before he tells us what we are to do, he tells us who we are. We are the light of the world because we are baptized into Christ Jesus who is the true light of the world. We are salt because Jesus is the truest, purest salt, and we are a part of him. Martin Luther once said that we are not called to be Christians. In our baptism we are baptized into Christ, and thus we are called to be little Christs to all the world. That’s how Paul can say to the Corinthians that “we have the mind of Christ.” And it’s how Jesus can say—you are salt; you are light; because I am salt and I am light and you are a part of me.
It’s only after he tells us who we are that he tells us what to do. You are salt, so you must keep your saltiness; do not let it be bleached out by your cares and concerns and burdens nor by the priorities of the world. You are light, he says, so you must “let you light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”
There is a certain amount of effort and work required in being salty, in letting our lights shine, but primarily the work of salt and light is in the remembering: I am salt; I am light; I am baptized into Christ Jesus, and I continue to be transformed into his image and likeness when I remember who I am and when I try to live more fully into that.
We have to be in touch with our identity in Christ, and we have to remember it over and over again to live into the work of who Christ calls us to be, before we can be those who help enhance the gifts of what is already there or those who shine the light to reveal the hope and the good news for a hurting and broken world. It is a continued process of remembering, of falling away and coming back; of reshaping our own wills, desires, priorities according to the “mind of Christ” that dwells within us.
You are the salt of the earth, the light of the world. Remember it weekly when you are fed in the Eucharist, in daily prayer and in reconnecting with our Lord who calls you. And only then can you live into the call of your saltiness, your call of being the light and “Let your light shine, shine, shine. Let your light shine, shine, shine. May be somebody down in the valley tryin’ to get home.”

Christmas Eve sermon 2010

2011-01-11T09:22:00.000-08:00

The Reverend Melanie Dickson Lemburg
The Eve of Christ’s Nativity—Year A
December 24, 2010

“The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
on them light has shined.”

The darkness hangs
Like a shroud over the world.
In its depth and its silence
It numbs and paralyzes
Oppresses and subdues.

Until suddenly
The messengers of God appear
In the darkness
With a blinding, brilliant light
Throwing us ordinary mortals
Into chaos and fear.

“Do not be afraid!” they proclaim.
We bring you good news and joy—
Your savior is born this night,
And you will call him
“God with us.”
And even the stars sing with them in their glory.

And then we have a choice to make,
To stay in the dark
Which is no longer quite so comfortable for us
Now that we have been blinded
By light
And had a taste
Of glory.

Or to listen to these small stirrings of hope
In our hearts
And to search out and to seek
The source of the joy
The source of the glory
The source of the light.

And wonder of wonders,
We find it this night,
As they told us we would,
This baby who is
God with us,
This baby come with glory
Falling all around him,
Dripping of glory as if
The stars themselves had bathed him…

This baby who is
The reality of
God’s love for us,
The proof of God’s zeal,
The fruit of God’s desire
For us—
And the fulfillment of our deepest longings:
(To be loved and to love—
to be made lovely and to have our every day ordinary lives bathed in glory…)

Into the darkness and chaos of our lives
Comes a God who is wild and free
A God who does new things
A God whose love and zeal for us
Whose pursuit of us leads to
God becoming human, becoming vulnerable.
Such is the magnitude of God’s zeal
Such is the glory of God’s love…

And on this night we realize that
God’s love is a vulnerable love,
As vulnerable as a new born child.
As vulnerable as all love is vulnerable.

But even yet we cling to darkness….
As we see the Love of God
Swaddled and lying in straw.
And we are invited to choose Light.

We cling to darkness
As we see the Love of God
Hanging and dying
Arms open to embrace the world.
And we are invited to choose Light.

We cling to darkness
As we see an empty tomb.
And in the absence of light, in the silence of God
We hear the echo that
Love, this vulnerable love,
Is stronger than death.
And we are invited to choose Light.

As we see on this night
Our God with us,
Who leaps in joy
So that neither cross nor cradle
Can contain him,

Whose mystery bursts forth
From his bed and from his tomb
The mystery of birth, of life, and even death
(For even at his birth, his future is present)
The mystery of the power of his love
That shatters even the darkness of death…
We are being offered the light of the world, the one light that can truly lighten our darkness
And it is in this
That our hope is born.

From this night forward,
May we never be content to
Dwell again in the dark,
May our new hope spill over into everything
That we are
And that we do,
May we dance and sing with the stars and the angels,
Allowing our joy to shine forth,
And may we forever live
In this one moment,
On this one night,
When all of our deepest longings
Have been fulfilled.

First Sunday after Epiphany--baptismal letter

2011-01-11T09:21:00.001-08:00

A letter to Alexandria Marie Denley upon the occasion of her baptism.
Dear Alex,
Today is an important and exciting day in your life and in your life of faith. Today you are baptized into Christ’s body which means that you will be a new creation, a new Alex. You will have new brothers and sisters in this church and in all baptized people who promise to walk with you and to help you in this new journey. You will make promises about how you will try to live your life, modeling your actions, your choices, your words upon the teachings of Jesus, who taught that we must love everyone, be kind to everyone, and especially help those who are poor, elderly, and sick. You will teach us things, and we will teach you things, and we will all be better off because we are in this thing together.
You have already taught me something, and I want to share it with you and these people here today. When we met a few weeks ago to talk about your baptism, there was a lot going on around us. I was distracted, you were probably a little restless, your parents were distracted because you were restless. We were there meeting together because it was important, because it was what we were supposed to be doing, because it was something that we had promised to do…a part of our responsibility, a part of our duty.
But do you remember what happened toward the end of our time together? It is something that I will never forget! I asked you if you wanted to hear the story about Jesus, this story into which you are being baptized this day, and you said yes.
I told you the story—how he was born, how he was baptized and proclaimed as God’s beloved son, how he lived his life: preaching, teaching, healing; how he showed people the way to God and taught us that it’s important to love each other and to help each other. I told you how he had a group of friends and they would eat together, and I told you about the special meal, their last meal that they had the night before Jesus died, and about how we remember and share in that meal together every Sunday.
And then I told you about how he died, nailed to a cross, and I will never forget how so very still you became, looking at me with big, round eyes.
I told you how his friends were so very heartbroken, and they buried him, rolling a big, heavy stone in front of the opening of his tomb. And then they came back later to do the burial rites, and guess what they found! The stone had been moved, the tomb was empty, and there was a messenger there who told his friends, “He is not here! He is risen!”
“ ‘He is risen?’” You said. “What on earth does that mean?”
That’s exactly what they said! I told you. It means that God’s love is stronger than anything, even death, and that we can live our lives in the freedom that gives us, that even when we die, it is not the end, but just another part of our journey back to God. And I finished the story, telling you how Jesus was there with them again until he was taken up to heaven and how he sent the Holy Spirit, to whisper in their hearts, to be present with them and to help them. And they spent the rest of their lives telling people the amazing thing that had happened to them, and that is what we are supposed to do too.
Do you remember how the four of us sat there in silence for several minutes, in wonder of the holiness of what we had experienced together?
That time with you taught me and helped me to remember that sometimes when we offer love because it is what we are supposed to do, because it is our duty, our responsibility as Christians, what we have promised to do in our baptism, then God takes that duty, that love that we offer, and God transforms it—like the bread and the wine—so that it becomes so much richer, fuller, broader, greater than a love that is born from duty. It becomes a brush with Mystery; pure grace; it becomes one brief glimpse of the face of God.
And so this day, when you make your baptismal vows, your promises to God, and on every day in the future when you renew them, may you remember that you are God’s beloved child, and you are marked as Christ’s own forever. May you remember that you need not be afraid of anything because God’s love is stronger than anything, even death. May you remember that you have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit, which will help you pray and will whisper in your heart and help you know what to do and even give you strength and courage. May you remember, during those times in your life, when darkness weighs upon you like a tomb, that the light of Christ, our Savior who is the light of the world, shines within you and will light your way in the dark.
May you remember that every time that you lift your shining face to God with your hands outstretched to receive the bread and the wine, that you are being fed the body and blood of Jesus who loves you, so you may go out into the world to share that love with others. May you delight in doing your duty, and may the God who loves you as God’s own child transform your duty into a love through which you see the face of God.
Your sister in Christ,
Melanie+

First Sunday after Epiphany--early service sermon

2011-01-11T09:19:00.000-08:00

First Sunday after the Epiphany Year A
January 9, 2011
This past week, I spent some time with a fellow priest talking about the challenges of Jesus’s call to love which echoes again and again throughout the gospels. She was lamenting the challenge of loving and being loving when that warm, fuzzy loving feeling just isn’t there. As the week went by, I thought more and more about that conversation. How do we love people when they aren’t being particularly lovable?
I thought about my own life, and particularly about what motherhood has taught me about love. Many times in life, I act in a loving manner because that is what I have vowed and promised to do—in my baptism vows, in my marriage vows, in my ordination vows. There are many times in life when I love other people only because of these vows; I love out of duty.
Sometimes the only way we can love is out of sheer duty. And sometimes when we offer love and acts of love out of this sense of duty, God takes that duty that we offer, and God transforms it—like the bread and the wine—so that it becomes so much richer, fuller, broader, greater than a love that is born from duty. And it becomes a brush with Mystery; pure grace; it becomes one brief glimpse of the face of God.
A few weeks ago, I had an appointment at the church one evening with a 10 year old and her parents. The parents wanted the child to be baptized, and I was doing her baptismal instruction to prepare all of them for her baptism (which is actually taking place later this morning). I will confess that I had some trouble being there that night. My childcare had fallen through and both my kids were at the church with me, pretty much unsupervised and running around with the other kids who were at the church that night. I was more than a little distracted.
But I was there because it was what I was supposed to do, what I had promised to do. The 10 year old had been restless and a little fidgety during our time together, and her parents were embarrassed and distracted by her restlessness, and I was searching for a way to make this a meaningful engaging experience for her. So finally, I asked her if she wanted to hear the story of Jesus, and she agreed.
I told her the story—how he was born, how he lived his life, preaching, teaching, healing; how he showed people the way to God and taught us that it’s important to love each other and help each other. I told her of how he had a group of friends who went around with him and how they would eat together, how they ate together one last time the night before he died and how we remember that special meal and share in it every Sunday with communion.
And then I told her about how he died, nailed to a cross, and she became so very still with big round eyes. I told her how his friends were so very heartbroken, and they took him and buried him, rolling a big, heavy stone in front of the opening of his tomb, and then they came back a few days later to do the burial rites, and guess what they found! The stone had been moved, the tomb was empty, and a messenger was there who told them, “He is not here! He is risen!”
“’He is risen?’” She said. “What on earth does that mean?”
That’s exactly what they said! I told her. It means that God’s love is stronger than anything, even death, and that we are invited to share in that gift and live our lives with freedom because we know that we will be with God when we die. And I finished the story, telling her that Jesus was again with them until he was taken up to heaven and he sent the Holy Spirit to whisper in their hearts and be present with them to help them. And they spent the rest of their lives telling people about the amazing thing that happened. And that is what we are supposed to do too.
When I finished, the four of us sat there in silence for a few minutes, stunned by the holiness of what we had just experienced together.
Sometimes when we offer love, even out of a sense of duty, God takes that love and transforms it, filling it to overflowing with God’s presence.
On this day, when you renew your own baptismal vows, may you remember this duty out of which love may flow. May you remember that you have been baptized and named as God’s beloved child, and that you are called to act accordingly. May you find delight in doing your duty, and may God who loves you as God’s own child transform your duty into a love in which you see the face of God.

Advent 4

2010-12-22T09:27:00.000-08:00

Advent 4
December 19, 2010
On this fourth Sunday of Advent, we light our 4th candle and we remember the angels—God’s messengers of peace and good news. And on this last Sunday of Advent, I invite you to once again take a few moments of silence and get in touch with your longing. Close your eyes for these moments of silence, if you would like, and ask yourself, “For what do I long?”
Our gospel reading from Matthew today gives voice to one of the longings of our hearts. We long for dreams, for vision and the promise of God.
Our reading for today is one in a series of 4 dreams in Matthew that are all key components to Matthew’s telling of the story of Jesus’s birth, and these 4 dreams are central to the very survival of the baby Jesus. After today’s dream, Joseph is visited by the angel in his dreams twice more as he is warned to take Mary and Jesus and flee to Egypt when Herod orders the slaughter of all the young male Hebrew children and then told that it is safe to return from Egypt. (The other dream in Matthew is when an angel comes to the wise men and tells them to avoid Herod on their way out of town, as he is desperate for information on Jesus’s whereabouts so he may eliminate him.)
In today’s dream, Joseph has discovered that Mary is with child and has seemingly broken both cultural expectations and the betrothal covenant. Being a kind, righteous man, Joseph forms a plan to divorce Mary, which is the culturally expected thing to do in such a situation, but he plans to do it quietly so to minimize the harm it may cause her. As far as plans go, it is a reasonable plan.
But then the angel comes to Joseph in his dream and explains to Joseph what is going on. The angel, God’s messenger, gives Joseph a glimpse of God’s vision—that the child that Mary shall bear will be “Emmanuel—God with us.” And the angel gives Joseph a new plan to follow: to take Mary as his wife and name the child, thus recognizing him as Joseph’s own son.
It is when Joseph wakes up that I think the truly remarkable happens. When Joseph awakens, he has a choice. He can follow his own carefully laid out plan that fits in with his culture’s expectations. Or he can follow the dream of God, the vision, the promise of God with us.
Like Joseph, we long for the dream of God, for tangible glimpses of God’s vision, God’s promise of God with us.
We long for surety, for answers about many things, including which direction to follow in life to be the people God calls us to be, and we make our own plans as to how to achieve that. We live within our own culture’s expectations, and we live our lives the best we can when often the way before us seems murky and even dark. And what we wouldn’t give sometimes for an angel in a dream telling us clearly what to do, for just a glimpse of the vision of God to help us on our path.
This season we remember and celebrate that God is with us. And I wonder how often in our lives this God-with-us offers us God’s messengers, the dreams and the visions for which we long, but we cannot recognize these glimpses of God’s dream, we cannot heed them, cannot follow because we are too attached to our own plans, our own or our culture’s expectations?
Today we give thanks for Joseph, a righteous man who was not afraid to put aside his own plans to follow God’s dream and whose courageous choice opened the way for the gift of God with us.

Advent 3

2010-12-22T09:23:00.000-08:00

3rd Sunday of Advent
December 12, 2010
Advent is a season for remembering. In the lighting of our Advent candles, we remember the message of the prophets, quiet Bethlehem where Christ was born, and we remember the shepherds who first heard the good news of God with us. Today we light the pink candle on our Advent wreath on this Rejoicing Sunday.
Advent is a time of waiting and expectation, of both hope and longing. Last week, I invited you to become acquainted with your own longing this Advent season, and I will once again invite you into a space of silence and reflection, but before I offer you my Advent question, I want to acknowledge something.
It is easy for me to stand up here over these four weeks and ask you the question, “For what do you long?” but getting in touch with and befriending our longing is not easy work. Many of us spend much of our time, our energy, our lives convincing ourselves that everything is fine, that life is good, that we are content and that we have everything we could possibly want or need, and we fill our lives with busyness, bustling from task to task, from idea to idea in an attempt to dampen our restlessness. But underneath all our busyness, underneath it all dwells our lonely longing heart.
This past Monday, it was well past my bedtime, and I couldn’t sleep (which is very unusual for me—usually I collapse into sleep moments after my head hits the pillow). This particular night, I was restless, so I got out of bed and went and sat in my favorite chair with my journal. And I was still restless, so finally it occurred to me that perhaps I needed to spend some time with my own Advent question—for what do you long? So I asked and I waited and I listened. It did not take long for the Holy Spirit to whisper in my prayers and give name to my longing that night; it was a longing for solitude, for space and time to be quiet and to have absolutely no one and nothing in between my soul and God.
So now I invite you to close your eyes if you want and to spend a few moments in silence listening to the Holy Spirit as you ask yourself this morning: “for what do you long?”
Our scriptures give voice again this week to the longing of the people of God, and this week, all three readings give us different glimpses of longing for home; each in its own way is a snapshot of a homesick people.
The reading from Isaiah gives us a kaleidoscope of beautiful images of a new home that is both the new promise of God and the lovely dream of a homesick, exiled people.
The writer of the book of James is more of a realist who advises a sort of spiritual “buckling down” in the face of homesickness and longing, trials and persecutions, that we may endure patiently until the Lord comes again and restores our home for us.
And the gospel of Matthew gives us a glimpse of the imprisoned John the Baptist, who is homesick for his mission and ministry and who longs for answers and for inclusion in the new home and new kingdom that Jesus is creating.
In his book The Longing for Home, the writer and theologian Frederick Buechner writes about a powerful moment in a church service when he was a lost young man listening to his next door neighbor and mentor, the Reverend George Buttrick preach a sermon one Sunday morning. Buechner writes, “It was toward the middle of December, I think, that he said something in a sermon that has always stayed with me. He said that on the previous Sunday, as he was leaving the church to go home, he happened to overhear somebody out on the steps asking somebody else, “Are you going home for Christmas?” and I can almost see Buttrick with his glasses glittering in the lectern light as he peered out at all those people listening to him in that large, dim sanctuary and asked it again—“Are you going home for Christmas?”—and asked it in some sort of way that brought tears to my eyes and made it almost unnecessary for him to move on to his answer to the question, which was that home, finally, is the manger in Bethlehem, the place where at midnight even the oxen kneel.” Buechner continues, “Home is where Christ is was what Buttrick said that winter morning and when the next autumn I found myself to my great surprise putting aside whatever career I thought I might have as a writer and going to Union Seminary instead at least partly because of the tears that kept coming to my eyes, I don’t believe that I consciously thought that home was what I was going there in search of, but I believe that was the truth of it.” (24-25)
On some level, all of us long for home and go in search of it in various ways; for some of us it is the home of our memory which we try to recreate in some ways in the present, or perhaps it is the home of a distant dream, a place that no longer or has never existed. The church father, St. Augustine wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God, and it is true that while we are in this life, we will always be longing for home, longing for God. But a friend recently reminded me that even while we long for our spiritual home, long for God, God is present with us in our very longing. It is the reality, the promise, and the hope for which we both rejoice this day and prepare to kneel before at the manger on Christmas eve. God with us. In Christ our true home is always present.

Advent II

2010-12-06T07:10:00.000-08:00

Advent 2A
December 5, 2010
The season of Advent is my favorite season of the church, and it is also the most counter cultural. While the world around us rushes to decorate, to cook, to shop with a frantic and frenetic energy, we are called to wait, to be still, to be silent, to listen. The other day I was listening to an Advent cd in my car—hymns like what we are singing in church today—hymns that give voice to our longing and our expectation; and I went into a department store and encountered a riot of Christmas decorations, a long line with grumpy shoppers, and the sounds of Jingle Bells playing too loudly and at a tempo that was 5 times faster than normal and which made it quite frazzled and frantic.
This Advent, if you find a space for silence and for waiting, for hope and for longing nowhere else, I promise that you will find it here.
For the rest of this season, I want us to consider one question: “For what do you long?” What is the deepest hunger of the deepest part of your heart?
Take a moment of silence now, breath, listen, and dwell with your longing. For what do you long this day?
This Advent we will dwell with our own longing and we will listen to our scriptures as they give voice to our deepest longing.
Today’s scriptures name two of our deepest longings. We as God’s people long for hope, and we long for harmony.
Hope is a gift from the God of steadfastness and encouragement, and it flows freely through our relationship with God and the scriptures. I’ll never forget the time that I was teaching an Inquirer’s class, and I quoted, almost off-handedly, a passage from a book to them that said the scriptures are “the love story between God and humanity. They tell us where we have been, who we are, and where we’re going.” When I looked up at the people I was teaching, I saw that they each looked like they’d been hit in the head with something, and I realized what a profound concept this is. The scriptures tell us what we already know: that we are people who spend a lot of our days wandering in the wilderness, longing for someone to love us and help us. And when we pay attention, we see that God is with us, loving us, helping us, and offering us the gift of God’s hope, which is the fruit of our trust in God.
The other longing that our scriptures name today is the longing for harmony. We see in Isaiah God’s ancient promise of harmony for all God’s creation and the vision of God in which we are invited to participate. Harmony means our willingness to encounter God’s welcome to each one of us, encountering God’s wide embrace which means that all belong in the heart of God. When we know this and believe it, then we act accordingly to others, and we take our place in the vision of God, even as we give others the invitation to join us there.
Another way that we find the fulfillment for our longing for harmony and participation in the vision of God is to remember that we human beings exist not for the fulfillment of ourselves but for the glory of God. When we are all working for the glory of God, then we are more likely to dwell within the vision of God’s peace.
Thomas Merton once said that life is a perpetual advent. This Advent season, may you not be afraid to dwell a bit with your longing, may you make peace with it, and “may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Thanksgiving Sermon

2010-12-06T07:09:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving sermon
November 21, 2010
I don’t know about y’all but we at St. Peter’s have been talking a lot about first fruits lately. I would imagine that we are not unique in this utilizing of October and November as a time for the annual stewardship drive. And in that time of stewardship, we have spent some time talking about first fruits, how it is important to give to God off the top of our lives rather than out of what happens to be left-over. This is emphasized in our passage from Deuteronomy this evening, how God has saved the people of Israel and brought them out of slavery and exile in Egypt and has brought them into the land of promise that is their inheritance as God’s people. Because of this special relationship with God, the people are instructed to give the first fruits of the ground to God. It is an act of thanksgiving, an act of relationship, an act of remembering all that God has done for them and responding.
I would imagine that it was pretty easy to do this, that first year. After all, we know that it is not a hard task to be thankful to God when the milk and honey of the land is flowing freely. It is easy to be thankful when all is going well, and my heart is practically overflowing with thanksgiving to God for the glory of creation, when the skies are brilliant blue and the sunlight sparkles on the sound. It is easy to be thankful when my household is running smoothly, kids and husband are happy and healthy, and the kids are acting sweetly. (In fact, my moment of deepest thanksgiving every day is inevitably when I am putting each child to bed.)
It is easy to feel thankful when all is going well. But what about when it is not? How do we give God the first fruit that is thanksgiving when our hearts are heavy or burdened, when we don’t really feel that we have anything for which to be thankful?
There’s a great scene in the lovely book the Life of Pi by Yann Martel, that gets to the heart of thanksgiving. Pi Patel, the hero of the novel, is a 16 year old boy from India, who practices Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam and who has the gift of seeking out and holding up the kernel of what is best in all of them. Through a strange series of circumstances, Pi finds himself stranded in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a 450 pound Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker. Pi is forced to use every ounce of his reason and skill to survive, and he often relies on his faith to provide meaning and comfort in his bleak situation.
In the following passage, Pi speaks of his reliance on his faith over the course of his journey, and it is a faith that is strengthened and upheld by a spirit of thanksgiving:
“I practiced religious rituals that I adapted to the circumstances—solitary Masses without priests or consecrated hosts…They brought me comfort, that is certain. But it was hard, oh it was hard. Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love—but sometimes it was so hard to love. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation, and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up.
At such moments, I tried to elevate myself. I would touch the turban I had made with the remnants of my shirt and I would say aloud ‘THIS IS GOD’S HAT!’
I would pat my pants and say aloud ‘THIS IS GOD’S ATTIRE!’
I would point to Richard Parker and say aloud ‘THIS IS GOD’S CAT!’
I would point to the lifeboat and say aloud ‘THIS IS GOD’S ARK!’
I would space my hands wide and say aloud ‘THESE ARE GOD’S WIDE ACRES!’
I would point at the sky and say aloud ‘THIS IS GOD’S EAR!’
And in this way I would remind myself of creation and of my place in it.
But God’s hat was always unraveling. God’s pants were falling apart. God’s cat was a constant danger. God’s ark was a jail. God’s wide acres were slowly killing me. God’s ear didn’t seem to be listening.
Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out… I thank God it always passed. A school of fish appeared around the net or a knot cried out to be reknotted. Or I thought of my family, of how they were spared this terrible agony. The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shrinking point of light in my heart. I would go on loving.”
Just as love is a choice, an action, so may we also choose thanksgiving, even when our hearts are not feeling particularly thankful.
One of the most powerful things I have ever experienced was my first time attending the noon-day chapel service at Stewpot Soup Kitchen in Jackson. I had just started working there, fresh out of college, and the leadership of Stewpot had decided a while before that people needed to be fed spiritually as well as physically. And so they started holding an ecumenical worship service 30 minutes before the noon meal, and people were invited but not required to attend. Well, the service was usually packed full, as it was on this first day I attended. At one point in the service, the leader went around the room asking each and every person to name one thing he or she was thankful for on that particular day. He asked the homeless people, the mothers struggling to raise their children without enough money to buy food or clothing—name one thing for which you are thankful. He asked the mentally disabled who aimlessly wandered the streets of Jackson in an attempt to escape their abysmal group homes, and he asked the senior citizens who had to choose whether they could buy food or medications with their limited incomes—name one thing for which you are thankful. As I sat there, curious about what these worn-down people could possibly be thankful for, I was overwhelmed by the sincerity and simplicity of their responses. Every person found at least one thing to be grateful for that day, and many of them responded simply, “I am grateful that God woke me up this morning and gave me this new day.” It quickly became evident to me that they understood and believed that everything, every day is a new creation with new possibilities and new ways to love, that all that is has been given by God. And they were grateful. I will never forget the lesson that those beautiful, broken people taught me that day: at any point in our lives, any person can choose to find at least one reason to be thankful for God.
I think that too often we think that thanksgiving is an emotion that must well up out of our over-full hearts. And friends, that just isn’t the case. Thanksgiving is love in action. It is a choice that we make to live our lives a certain way. Pi Patel recognized this even as he was stuck in abysmal circumstances, he remembered that all that he had been given was really God’s and even though bad things were happening to him, he chose to carry on with his life and to carry on trying to love God. My friends at Stewpot had made the choice to be thankful as well; in the midst of their own oppressive situations, they recognized that all that they had, including their very lives, was a gift from God, and so they chose to respond to God and their neighbors with love.
And so this night we gather to break bread together, and to help each other remember that Thanksgiving is choosing a path, a way of living our lives, recognizing that all that we are and all that we have comes from God, and offering love as our first fruits, our thankful response.

Last Sunday after Pentecost--Christ the King

2010-12-06T07:08:00.000-08:00

Christ the King Sunday—Proper 29C
November 21, 2010
Today is the last Sunday after Pentecost, last Sunday in our season of ordinary time, and the last Sunday of the church year. In our church, this Sunday is designed to lift up the theme of Christ as King, and then we move next Sunday into the season of Advent with its themes of waiting and hope, of expectation and longing.
So what does it mean to say that Christ is King on this day?
Our readings give us three depictions of kingship that are startling in their differences. For Jeremiah, a true king is one who is responsible for the people and should not allow them to be scattered through ruin and disaster. True kingship is the promise of one who will not only gather those who are scattered but he will also fulfill the kingly task of bringing all people together and be present with all people.
In the hymn to Christ, the writer of Colossians gives us a poetic smattering of images of Christ’s kingship: his glorious power, his inheritance of light, the image of the invisible God, first born of all creation; “he is before all things and in him all things hold together;” in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him God reconciled all things to God. It is a high and lofty expression of what it means to see Christ as King.
Then suddenly we find ourselves right in the middle of Jesus’s crucifixion from Luke’s gospel, and we see him being mocked by his tormenters and ridiculed in his kingship. We witness his humiliation, and his sublime power as he forgives again and again and again. And we see him honor the thief’s request and his confession of faith as he grants him a place in his kingdom.
So how do these three different pictures of Christ’s kingship come together for us to inform us and help us in our relationship with God?
I think it’s important to remember this day that in the earthly realm, the function of a king is symbolic. A king rules over a particular place or a particular ethnic group. For someone to be a king, he needs to have a people. And what we celebrate this Sunday of the year is that Christ has made of us his people.
As most of you know, I grew up here in Mississippi. David, on the other hand, grew up in Northwest Arkansas, and so he was not familiar with a lot of our Southern culture as it is lived out here. When we first moved to Mississippi, he was baffled by the Southern ritual of “who are your people.” You know the one I’m talking about. You get a couple of people together who are just meeting for the first time, and they want to know who your people are—that means a family name and a location. Here in the South, your “people” is a biological unit. When we first moved here, David didn’t much care for this exercise. His people weren’t in or from Mississippi, and so he didn’t see the point in it. But for those of us who live here, it’s a way of connecting to people, of understanding who they are, where they come from and seeing how their life patterns may be interconnected with ours by knowing the same people. This is what Christ does for us, and we lift that up today. He gives us that common relative, that connection through which we can relate to one another.
We are scattered and fragmented, and we are called back into wholeness, back into God by Christ who brings all together. And we remember this day and give thanks that we are all made Christ’s people and united to each other in and through his forgiveness. We become related through his kingship, and we are bound together through our forgiven-ness.

Sunday after All Saints'

2010-11-08T10:54:00.000-08:00

Sunday after All Saints’
Baptismal letter
November 7, 2010
A letter for those about to be baptized (and for those renewing their own baptismal covenant).
Dear Mason, Alejandro, and Amelia,
This day we do something very strange. We take you three, beautiful children, and we drown you in the waters of baptism and bury you in the death of Christ. We do this so that you may no longer belong to yourselves, or even to your parents. We baptize you so that all may remember that no matter what happens to you over the course of your life, you are blessed, and you belong to God.
On this day of your baptism, as your parents and godparents make promises on your behalf, we make one all encompassing promise to you. We promise to support you; we promise to help you remember that no matter what happens, you belong to God, to help you remember that you are blessed.
People are haunted and lost, but in our baptism, we are claimed as Christ’s own. We may feel that we have fallen out of belonging over the course of our lives, but when we renew the covenant, we remember that we are marked as Christ’s own forever and that he calls us to proclaim that good news to all whom we encounter.
The Wisdom of God who dwells within us is so often quiet and subtle, especially amidst the clamor of the world and of our own selfish desires. But we promise to remind you that she is there and to help you listen to her, that she may nurture and embrace, teach and guide you on the way and even overflow from your own heart to anoint others in the light of belonging.
We will help you remember that you belong to the communion of saints, which means that all those who have gone before us in the faith and who continue to grow in the love and service to God in eternity are also bound to us in faith and support us in prayer. Those whose lives of faith have shaped and influenced you in the past continue to be active in our present and future and we are held in their faith and in their prayers when we most need it. They have illumined for us the path of belonging, what it means to be God’s people. For we all belong to God.
We promise that when you suffer, for unfortunately ,you sweet, innocent dear ones, you will suffer, we promise to help you find meaning and hope in your suffering even as we remind you that in Christ’s wounded body, we are bound in solidarity with all who suffer and we are called to do all in our power to prevent suffering and injustice in the future.
We promise that when you are most poor, we will help you find the treasure of the Kingdom of God which is already yours. When you are hungry, we will feed you and remind you that you dwell in the fullness that is God. When you are weeping, we will weep with you, and we will hold onto one another in the promise of God’s laughter. When you are hated or excluded, reviled or defamed because you belong to God, we will stand with you in that, and hold and uphold you in the peace of that belonging.
We promise to help you remember the hope to which you are called, to hold you to the standards of compassion and reconciliation and selflessness into which you are baptized this day, and we ask that you do the same for us.
We promise to help you remember the truth of your baptism, the truth of the resurrection: that God’s love is stronger than anything…even death; and that for those who belong to God, death is nothing to fear but is yet another passage on the way to deeper belonging to God.
And we promise to walk that way with you as your brothers and sisters, as your friends and companions, in this life and in the next.
Your sister in Christ, Melanie

20th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 23C sermon

2010-10-11T09:45:00.000-07:00

This sermon references the texts of Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7 and Luke 17:11-19.

20th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 23C
October 10, 2010

In thinking about gratitude this week, I was reminded of the scene from that old movie, Shenandoah. In the movie, Jimmy Stewart is a pacifist farmer in the midst of the civil war. He’s trying to raise 7 children without his wife’s presence, but with her strict instructions that they be raised as good Christians, so he prays dutifully over their bountiful dinner, “Lord, we cleared this land; we plowed it, sowed it, and harvested it. We cooked the harvest. It wouldn’t be here; we wouldn’t be eating it, if we hadn’t done it all ourselves. We worked dog-bone for every crumb all ourselves, but we thank you just the same anyway, Lord, for this food we are about to eat. Amen.” And I wonder, when compared with this week’s gospel story, is this gratitude?
I think that there is a certain part of gratitude that has to do with duty. I wish I had a dollar for every time I do something for one of my children and then I always say, “Now what do you say to me???” (And what are they supposed to say?) Thank you! In the South, we know that saying “thank you” is just what you do; and so we do it because we are supposed to.
But our gospel lesson for today gives us another piece of the picture of what gratitude is. 10 lepers are walking by Jesus out in the middle of nowhere. They all cry out to him, “Jesus, Master, Have mercy on us.” He tells them to go show themselves to the priests and on the way, they discovered that they have been healed of their skin affliction. One person, upon realizing that he had been healed, turns back and falls at Jesus’s feet and tells him thank you. Jesus tells the man to get up and go on his way, for his faith has saved him. It’s important to note that the writer of the gospel of Luke situates this story of the healing of the 10 lepers and the one grateful one who returned, right in the middle of a chapter on discipleship. It is discipleship that moves gratitude from being about duty into being about our relationship with God.
Does God need our gratitude? No. But we need to be grateful. It is the natural state of the creature toward the creator, and every Sunday, we are reminded that it is a part of DNA as people of faith: “lift up your hearts!” We lift them up to the Lord!” Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right to give God thanks and praise. It is right, and a good, and joyful thing, always and everywhere” to praise and give thanks to God. Our sacred meal of remembrance is called Eucharist which means Thanksgiving. It is not just what we do, but it is also who we are. We are people of gratitude.
Sometimes it is so easy to lift up grateful hearts before God. When the weather is like it has been, I am so much more mindful of being grateful to God than in the dog days of summer. Several years ago, it was beautiful weather (like today) and Mary Margaret and I were going to go on a walk. She was very excited about the prospect and was buzzing around while I got us ready and finally got her into her stroller. Then she said to me, “Wait, Mommy. I need to do something.” So I waited; and she prayed: “God is great, God is good. Let us thank God for this walk. Amen.”
But there are other times in our lives, when the weather is not so nice, when the diagnosis isn’t what we had hoped, when the old wounds refuse to heal, when the news is not good or when life is just plain hard. And as disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to be grateful to God, even then. How are we grateful then, when it feels that we have very little for which to be grateful?
You have heard the words of the false prophet, Hannaniah, Jeremiah writes to the children of Israel who have been taken away from their home in Israel into captivity in Babylon. Hannaniah is telling you that you will be coming home soon, but I am the true prophet of the Lord, and I am telling you that you will not be coming home soon. So here’s what God wants you to do. Even though you are homesick and grieving, even though you long to return to the land of your ancestors and heritage, God is calling you to get on with your lives, there in Babylon. Build houses and live in them. Plant a garden, marry off your children, make friends with the Babylonians. Get on with your life. And even if you are not grateful, you say thank you anyway; because you are still God’s people, even after everything. You practice gratitude, and as you practice, the Holy Spirit will transform your burden of duty into joyful gratitude. And you will be healed (but maybe not in the way you expect).
Like faith, gratitude is not about feeling. It is about practice. If you do not feel that you can be grateful, then live gratefully. Let us pray. God is great. God is good. Let us thank God for this day. Amen.

19th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 22C sermon

2010-10-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

19th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 22C
October 3, 2010

Luke 17:5-10
The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!" The Lord replied, "If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, `Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you. "Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, `Come here at once and take your place at the table'? Would you not rather say to him, `Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink'? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, `We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!'"

I will never forget the day in CPE-the chaplaincy training program that most clergy have to complete before ordination—when one of my colleagues was kicked out of our program by our supervisor. His name was Miles, and he was from a more fundamentalist tradition. He had been serving as chaplain in the ICU floor of our hospital, and the head nurse reported him to our supervisor because he told the daughter of a man who was dying in the ICU that if she only had more faith, then her father would get better.
This is one of our worst nightmares, one of our most shadowy, dark, secret fears. If only I had more faith then the bad things wouldn’t happen to me; if only I had more faith, then maybe a miracle would occur. If only I had more faith, then I would know what to say when faced with such tragedy and sorrow.
Even the disciples, when faced with Jesus’s description of the demands and challenges of discipleship, whisper in their hearts, “Oh, if only I had more faith, then maybe I could accomplish this.” And then, overcome by their fears and terrors, they cry out to Jesus: “Increase our faith!”
So often we read Jesus’s response like my former colleague Miles: “if only you had the smallest seed of faith, then you’d be able to accomplish miracles.” But these are not the words of Jesus to his friends, friends that he is preparing to give his life for. And these are not his words for us, we who are needy, discouraged, disheartened, and grieving.
“Why, you don’t need more faith,” Jesus tells us. “All you need is this teeniest, tiniest little bit. You already have what you need. God has already given you what you need. Do not worry about how much faith you have. Instead, live faithfully. Do your duty, what you are called by God to be and to do. Even the tiniest bit of faith is enough to do extraordinary things, but it must be put into practice.”
Faith is not just saying “I believe.” It is living as if “I believe that…” I believe that God is still at work in the world; I believe that all the suffering will one day be redeemed; I believe that love is stronger than anything, even death. Faith is so much more than just showing up and going through the motions. Practicing our faith means picking a spot to be rooted in and to grow in that spot, in giving, in prayer, in good works.
Faith is looking unflinchingly into the face of suffering, in our own lives, in our relationships, in the world, and it is saying that this suffering is the way of the cross and that even this darkness can and will be redeemed in and through Christ’s resurrection, no matter what happens.
Faith is holding onto the faith that has been passed on to us, by our mothers and our grandmothers and all the saints who have come before us, and it is trusting them and their faith when we feel we cannot trust our own.
And it is clinging to the faith and the hope of the people of God, who cry out to God in their suffering across the ages in echoes of loneliness, despair, grief, utter bereavement, spiritual and physical homelessness, and suffering, and who cling to the steadfast love and mercy of God who is fully present in and with our loneliness, despair, grief, utter bereavement, spiritual and physical homelessness, and suffering.
“In my heart there is no faith—no love—no trust—there is so much pain—the pain of longing, the pain of not being wanted. I want God with all the powers of my soul—and yet there between us—there is terrible separation.” These words were written by a famous person of faith in the 20th century, and they may sounds hauntingly familiar to many of us. They were published a few years ago in the book Come My Light, which is composed of excerpts of letters written by Mother Teresa in letters to spiritual advisers over a period of 45 years in which she directed the Missionaries of Charity, the order of Roman Catholic nuns she founded. Though she longed for joy in her faith, she knew that her feelings were not the point. What is importance is the practice.
You already have what you need. God has already given you what you need. Do not worry about how much faith you have. Instead, live faithfully. Do your duty, what you are called by God to be and to do. Even the tiniest bit of faith is enough to do extraordinary things, but it must be put into practice.

17th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 20C

2010-09-20T09:12:00.000-07:00

The 17th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 20C
September 19, 2010
Today's gospel reading includes one of Jesus's most challenging parables. It is both challenging to read and challening to preach. Why would Jesus make an example for godly living so unsavory as it is in the person of the dishonest manager? Also, the ending is completely unsatisfactory. We want to see the scoundrel get justice in the end. But that’s not what happens.
So beyond being completely confusing and unsatisfactory, what does this parable have to offer us today? After Jesus tells the story of the dishonest manager, how he tried to repair his swindling by reducing the debts of those indebted to the rich man, he makes a comparison between the “children of this age” who are represented by the dishonest manager and the “children of light” who are presumably the followers of Jesus, his disciples that he is telling the story to (and us). He commends the dishonest steward because he uses all the resources that he has at his disposal, all the things that have been entrusted to him, all his master’s treasures, to bring about a particular vision, that is to save his own skin. The dishonest manager has an understanding of his master, as well as of the people he is working with, and he uses all of that awareness to try to get himself out of trouble.
So one of the questions this parable raises for me is what does it mean to be the children of light? What are the treasures of God that are entrusted to us? How are we called to live into God’s vision for the kingdom?
I think being children of the light means being bearers of the good news. It means that we live within the world but do not live our lives according to the values of the world. It means that we live our lives centered in Christ and his teachings, not putting ourselves at the center but rather putting Jesus and other people at the center. It means using our resources and our energy to work with God to bring all of creation into God’s kingdom. The treasures of the children of light are those things that Jesus has taught us to hold dear. At the heart of it all is God’s love which is freely given to us and which we are called to share with others, above anything that we may gain for ourselves, above even our own lives. The vision of the kingdom of God which we are called to bear witness to is a kingdom where love and relationship with God and others is of greatest importance, where everything else works toward this vision. And the deepest treasure of this vision, the deepest treasure of both love and relationship is forgiveness. That’s what the dishonest manager understood and used to his advantage. How much more are we, the children of light, called to understand and to use this treasure in doing the work of God’s kingdom?
So I had made my peace with this difficult parable, and then God sprung another one on me. I was drinking my coffee and reading the paper on Friday morning, when I saw a picture of the man who I had met at the church a mere few days before the angel statue was stolen from the church grounds back in March. He had introduced himself as Joe, and he was the one I always suspected of being the perpetrator of the theft, and there he was pictured in the paper along with a story about a copper-theft ring that has just been busted in Jackson County. Well, I was quite excited and set the wheels of justice in motion, contacting our wardens, who then contacted the local authorities. Well, the wheels of justice are slowly turning, and nothing further has happened in this at this time, except that this story from real life then started bumping up against Jesus’s parable for me, and it started causing me some real discomfort, and it made me start asking questions.
What is the call of the children of light in this particular situation? Here we have a person who has hurt us tremendously, probably for his own selfish gain. He stole a piece of our history that was precious to us, precious because of who it represents and also because it symbolizes a piece of our church, a piece of our past that weathered the storm and was restored. And he made a complete fool of us and our hospitality, showing up in broad daylight and asking questions about the angel statue, even getting a tour of the church. Personally, I’m really angry at Joe, and I’d like to see them lock him away and throw away the key. But that is the way of the world, and it is the concern of our justice system. I fully support our justice system and trust that process, and I will do all in my power to support it. But, to borrow a phrase from our more Protestant brothers and sisters, I find myself, in this situation, to be “convicted by the gospel.” If we really believe that we are the children of light and we are called to live our lives according to the priorities of God and God’s kingdom, then how are we called to lift up the priorities of love and relationship in this particular situation with this particular individual ? What would forgiveness for this individual look like for us? How might we even begin to go about it?
Let me share with you something that happened to my family when I was growing up, because it is part of my challenge with this Joe situation. When I was a teenager, my family was the victim of multiple house burglaries. At first, they took money and all of our jewelry, mostly sentimental pieces like the gold locket that had been my great-aunt/godmother’s and my leather-bound, gold embossed Bible with my name on it. When they came back, they took the tv and VCR and other larger items, anything they could carry with them. We got the bigger items back after finding them at a local pawn shop, but we never recovered the sentimental items. Eventually, my dad was called down to the Canton Police department, and he looked into the faces of two teenage boys who were responsible for causing my family such hurt and fear. The boys were dealt with according to the law, and we went on with our lives.
Years later, my dad participated in a Kairos event. For those of you who don’t know, Karios is a weekend of spiritual renewal similar to Happening, or Cursillio, but it is held in prison, and the pilgrims are convicts. My dad and the others on the team had spent a lot of time praying before they put on the weekend, praying for themselves and for those they were going to encounter and when dad was there at the prison doing the Kairos weekend, he met one of those two teenage boys who had robbed our house. The young man remembered my dad, and he told my dad about how he had felt when he was handcuffed to the chair in the Canton Police Department and he had to look into the face of the man whose family he had robbed repeatedly. And then, in that prison, where he was doing time for a completely different crime, that man asked my father for forgiveness for what he had done to our family, and my dad, by the grace of God, was able to grant it.
So I don’t know where God is calling us in this thing with Joe, but I know that we need to begin somewhere.
And that somewhere is that we begin by praying. Paul’s first letter to Timothy says, “First of all, then I urge that supplications, prayer, intercessions and thanksgivings be made for everyone”. Don’t just pray for those you like, Paul says, or those who are sick. Pray for everyone, even those who hurt you. And then he challenges us to remember that Christ Jesus “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” and who, therefore, did not just give himself for the children of light but “as a ransom for all,” even someone so self-centered as would steal from a church. So we pray for Joe; and we pray for ourselves, that God may give us the grace and the power to act, not as children of this world, but as children of the light, who are working to help fulfill God’s vision for God’s kingdom.
Let us pray. Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

16th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 19C

2010-09-13T06:46:00.000-07:00

The 16th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 19C
September 12, 2010
Our gospel lesson for today is 2 out of a series of three parables that Jesus tells in Luke’s chapter 15. Luke starts off by setting the scene saying that “the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus.” As a result of this, the Scribes and Pharisees, the religious insiders, begin grumbling… “What kind of person is this Jesus of Nazareth who’s willing to consort with such a disreputable bunch?…”
When Jesus hears them, he tells the two parables that we heard today and then upon their heels, he tells the parable of the prodigal son, which we don’t get to hear today.
“Which one of you…” Jesus says, wouldn’t go after a lost sheep or search for a lost coin? So, I’m going to need a little help with this part from the kids… We have, somewhere in our nave, a little lost sheep and one lone lost coin, and I need you to walk around quietly and see if you can find them….
(Jeopardy music…)
(When they find it, have a bit of the Hallelujah chorus sung or get crowd to cheer)
Now in just a few moments, we will have a banquet of bread and wine to celebrate the recovery of the lost…
You know, the temptation of this parable for some of us may be to associate with God who searches out the lost, as we in the church are called to do—seek out the lost. (Or some of us may even associate with the lost that are found by God.)
But I bet few of us naturally associate with the Scribes and Pharisees who were grumbling about being included with such riff raff.
But listen to what Jesus says: “Which one of you” would leave 99 safe, healthy sheep to go into the wilderness to find one lost sheep, and then have a party when you found it? “And which one of you” would spend all this time and effort and energy turning your house inside out to find a lost coin and then spend money to throw a party to celebrate?
Not me! It doesn’t make any sense! It seems at the best extravagant and wasteful and at the worst, foolish.
In these parables, Jesus is very clearly telling us (and the Scribes and Pharisees): God’s economy and your economy are very different; God’s priorities and yours are not the same.
But I think the most important issue today is that God calls the righteous, the religious insiders, the older brothers who have never strayed, but who have always been where we were supposed to be and done what we were supposed to do, god calls us to come to the celebration, even though we may not approve of God’s ways, of God’s extravagance, of God’s mercy.
Because these parables are not just about the lengths to which God will go to save the lost. They are also about how the righteous, the religious, the faithful respond to God’s gift of mercy to other people.
Remember just a few moments ago when we were all so happy, so relieved that the children found a fake coin and a stuffed sheep?
How do we respond in real life, in our church, in the world when we see God finding the lost? When we see God’s mercy at work in the life of one whom we don’t judge to be worthy of God’s mercy? What will we say when God says to us: “Come to my feast and rejoice with me, for I have found my child who was lost?”

13th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 18C sermon

2010-09-05T04:13:00.000-07:00

The 15th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 18C
September 5, 2010
When I was in seminary, I got to hear the former Stewardship officer for the Episcopal church, Terry Parsons speak. She told us, “People ask me all the time why they should tithe, or give 10% of their income back to God through the church. I always tell them, ‘well, the Old Testament tells us to give 10% to God; and Jesus tells us to give up everything, so I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the 10%.”
In today’s gospel, Jesus gives us no such loophole for following him. He tells the large crowds who are traveling along with him as he makes his way to Jerusalem that there are demands for being his disciples. They must hate their families; they must carry the cross and follow Jesus. The must count the cost of discipleship from the very beginning, and finally, if that weren’t enough, Jesus tells them “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” With the challenge set so high, I’m not sure many people could actually become one of Jesus’s disciples, nor am I sure that many would even want to. So where’s the good news in this gospel?
The other night, I watched a PBS documentary called Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio. It’s a documentary about Sambo Mockebee, a friend of my family’s in Canton and about how he created a program at Auburn University called the Rural Studio for which he was awarded a Macarthur Genius grant. The documentary shows footage of an interview with Sambo from before he died in which he is adamant that it is the duty of any professional to work to make the world a better place. His concept of the Rural Studio was his way of doing that through architecture; bringing Auburn students to live in rural Alabama to live in the midst of staggering poverty where they would use recycled materials, innovative architectural designs, and their own labor to build structures to improve the lives of individuals and the life of the community. They built (and continue to build) homes, a fire station, a church, a community center, a Boys’ and Girls’ Club and so much more; most of these structures cost between $8,000-10,000 to build.
In this process the students learn not only how to be architects but also how to make the world a better place, and Mockbee believed that once they were bitten by the bug of using their gifts to help people then they would return to that vocation at some point in their futures. He talked about how at the Rural Studio, the students and professors all worked, ate, and celebrated together, so that some of the normal hierarchies and divisions of academy have no place in that environment. He also talked about how in families, we have people who do ok for themselves and others who aren’t able to, and that as a family, we take care of those who need some extra help. This was foundational in his understanding of the mission of the Rural Studio: that these people who live in abject poverty in rural Alabama are a part of our family who need a little extra help from us.
One of the people that they built a house for was a man called “Music Man” who had lived in a decrepit trailer with no running water. He was known in the community for his love of music and his extensive stereo equipment, and in his interview for the documentary (which was provided with subtitles because his speech was so challenging to understand), Music Man told how he never really went to school but was self-educated through comic books.
At the end of the documentary, they showed the inside of Music Man’s new house, built by the students and faculty of the Rural Studio, and it was a thing of beauty, made from recycled wood with high lofty ceilings and lots of light, and it was absolutely filled to the brim with all of Music Man’s music equipment and with plastic grocery sacks filled with stuff covering every surface.
As I watched I was dismayed to see how this man had filled this beautiful open space with all that clutter, even as he spoke with great enthusiasm of how wonderful and life-changing it was to have access to his own well and running water and not to have to go to the spring to get water.
Then one of the former student architects offered this insight. He said that the goal of the project had never been to radically change the way that Music Man lived and maintained all his stuff, but it had been to make his life better, to take who he was and how he lived and to make it better by providing him a safe, secure place to live, running water, and (this is the part that really spoke to me) high vaulted ceilings to let in both light and air and to give his soul a place to soar above all the clutter and trappings of his life and his poverty.
Urban T. Holmes, who was an Episcopal priest and dean of the school of theology at Sewanee wrote in his book Spirituality for Ministry that there are two ways of looking at religion. Some people see religion as a way of escaping from the harsh facts of their existence, while others see religion as a means of living into the unpleasant actuality of our existence with reasonable hope.[1] That second option… is what Jesus’s call to discipleship today is about, and so in closing, I want to share with you what Sambo Mockbee’s story taught me about this call to discipleship this week.
Discipleship moves us beyond our comfortable ties to kinship to forge new relationships with others who walk this way of faith with us and even with others who may be separated across the radical divide of life circumstance and poverty. It challenges us to expand our understanding of who our family really is. It means sometimes swimming upstream against what culture tells us should be our loyalties, priorities and affections, and using the example of Jesus Christ to order the values of life and our priorities. Discipleship, like anything involves a cost. Cost is what we give up to acquire, accomplish, maintain or produce something. It involves a measure of sacrifice, effort and resources. So often we think nothing of paying the cost of the things, success, or status that the world tells us are important, but we balk at what we perceive to be the steep cost of discipleship.
Discipleship means evaluating our attachments and asking ourselves do we hold our attachments to people, places, things, money, power, success, or status above our attachment to God and our discipleship to Jesus Christ? Discipleship means “the ability to enjoy the world to the full because I am not anxious about losing a bit of it or acquiring a bit of it…[It] also consists of the recognition that I have within my own resources ample enough…to meet [life] creatively so that it builds me up into my own selfhood.”[2]
True discipleship or ministry or giving is not something that is justified in our minds on the basis of what we get from it—money, merit, friends, popularity, success, a good spiritual feeling, or even salvation. Following the Lord Jesus Christ as his disciple is something that we do for the sheer purpose of making the world a better place through the talents and skills and resources that we have to give, and it is an expression of faithful service to the God who created us and as a way of being in relationship with Jesus whom we know to be the way, the truth, and the life.
[1] Holmes, Urban T. Spirituality for Ministry. Morehouse: Harrisburg, 1982, p 67.
[2] Ibid. p 74. Quoting H.A. Williams on Poverty.

14th Sunday after Pentecost--August 29, 2010

2010-08-31T07:36:00.000-07:00

The Fifth Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

In between college and seminary, I worked at Stewpot, a soup kitchen and so much more in West Jackson, Mississippi. I'll never forget my first Monday lunch at Stewpot because it was my initiation into their curious Monday ritual. All the hungry, homeless, and elderly people who had gathered for the noon meal were seated at their tables waiting for lunch. One of my co-workers, Don London, would welcome them to lunch at Stewpot, and on Mondays he would ask them, "What do we say on Monday's at Stewpot?"
Someone or several someones in the crowd would reply, "We made it!" And Don would say, "That's right! What do we say on Mondays?" And others would yell, "We made it!" And he would ask again, "What do we say on Mondays?" And at least half of those blessed, downtrodden people in that lunchroom would yell in a strange kind of cheer or prayer, "We made it!"
After a couple of weeks of this strange ritual, I finally got up the nerve to ask someone what it was about. They told me that for the population that makes up the community at Stewpot, weekends are especially dangerous. For those who are in recovery from alcohol or drug addiction, the temptation to relapse can be particularly intense over the weekend. And for the elderly and homeless in that neighborhood, weekends were especially dangerous because there was more mischief going on in the streets.
So Mondays at Stewpot were a little celebration in which everyone was invited to celebrate that they survived the weekend to gather together for a meal again. "We made it" was an acknowledgement of the trials of the past , a shout of triumph for not being overcome by them, and a prayer of thanksgiving and hope for the future.
It was also an acknowledgement that not everyone did make it. Some did succumb to the drugs or the violence; some chose not to be there to eat; some were waiting to rejoin the community on Tuesday.
"We made it" was an acknowledgement of all that and a thanksgiving that we who were able had come together once again.
And so it is for us as well. Every Sunday is a feast day of our Lord's Resurrection, a day when those who are able, gather to be fed and to offer up our cry of acknowledgement of the sufferings and temptations of the past, of the times that we have failed, and our cry of thanksgiving and triumph and hope for the future. "We made it!"
This Sunday, this day of all days, it is especially true. In each of our lives, regardelss of where we are this day, what we have lost and suffered, we participate in Christ's death so that we participate and celebrate his resurrection.
And so, this Sunday, August 29th, this feast day of our Lord's resurrection, we gather together to feast on a foretaste of God's heavenly banquet, and we lift our voices together to say...
"We made it!"
What do we say today? "We made it!"
What do we say today? "We made it!"
Thanks be to God. Amen.

12th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 15C

2010-08-16T10:48:00.001-07:00

12th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 15
August 15, 2010
“Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard…” Well, it starts off nicely enough. A farmer has a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He showers it with great time and care and everything possible for it so that it will bear fruit. But when he goes to gather the grapes, he discovers that it has only yielded wild grapes, which are not the fruit he was looking for and for which he has no use. So he becomes angry and vows to remove the hedge and the wall so that the vineyard will be devoured by the wilderness. He will allow the briars and thorns to take over, and he will even go so far as to command the clouds to rain no more upon it. Just to finish out this love song, a different voice begins to sing the last verse, which tells us that the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel and the people of Judah…and they have disappointed the Lord’s expectations for them and will suffer accordingly.
So my question for us today is—how is this a love song? (Or to revert more to the language of the decade of my early childhood: “What kind of jive love song is this?”)
One of my joyful responsibilities as a parish priest is to spend time offering pre-marital counseling to couples who want to get married in this church. It is a duty that I thoroughly enjoy because in my time with the couple, I get to listen in on the love song that is their life together. However, our time together is not just all wine and roses. We talk about big topics and issues that will affect their marriage, and I try to help equip them with tools to deal with those issues. On the second time I meet with a couple, after I’ve gotten to know them a little bit and heard their stories, we meet and we talk about their expectations. I have this worksheet that they fill out with questions about their daily life and also any big plans that they have for the rest of their life together. It’s a multiple choice type thing, and it has questions like: “Who will take out the garbage? And the choices for answers are He will, She will, We both will, Neither will. Who will do the dishes? Who will work? Who will decide who’s job takes precedence when we move? He will, She will, We both will, Neither will. It’s kind of a silly little exercise, but it gets at something that is very important to realize about all relationships. With love comes expectations. It’s true about a marriage or a significant long term relationship. It’s true about a parent-child relationship, about a friendship. It’s even true about a relationship between a priest and her people. With love comes expectations. When expectations are met and fulfilled, trust is built. When they are not, then anger and hurt occurs, and trust is broken.
Now what is most challenging in today’s Isaiah passage is that it shows that God’s love is no exception to this. In this love song about the vineyard, everything that God does for that vineyard and every watchful expectation held springs forth from God’s love. It is love’s eager work. The passage says in three different verses (2,4, 7) that God expected, and the vineyard did not meet God’s expectations. And so God’s expectations for Israel also continue to be disappointed; God expects Israel to bear fruits worthy of their chosen status, namely justice and righteousness, but instead Israel does not deliver justice and righteousness for the poor and oppressed.
This is the part that is hard for us to talk about, is hard for us to hear. We have been reassured, over and over again, of God’s grace and God’s love that never ends, and we seldom hear that God’s love comes with expectations for us. We have been taught that we are entitled to all the benefits of love with none of its expectations and even demands. The demand, the expectation of God’s love is that we produce fruit, and not just any old willy-nilly wild fruit, but as John the Baptist says earlier in Luke’s gospel that we “produce fruit in keeping with repentance”.
Isaiah’s love song challenges us today to ask ourselves “what are the fruits of repentance and of God’s love that are missing from my life that God expects me to bear forth in this world?” Is it justice? Righteousness? Mercy? Compassion? Humility? Generosity? Joy? What are the fruits missing from our common life, the life of St. Peter’s by-the-Sea, that God expects from God’s church?
My brothers and sisters, we are called, as followers of Jesus Christ to a life of transformation and sacrifice, where we submit our own wild-grape-like desires to the love and expectation of our Lord that we might bear the fruit that God expects. We do this by spending time in prayer with God, not just talking but listening as God whispers to us like a lover what God expects of us. And we do this by following the way of Jesus Christ in all that we are and all that we do, continuously opening ourselves to be transformed by our encounters with others and with the love and grace of God. That is the love song that our Lord Jesus Christ sang and continues to sing in this world.
And the best news is this. That love song continues. It does not end on a note of disaster and discord. There are many, many verses in God’s love song, and it is God’s expectation that our lives be sung in harmony with the Creator of the love song and become verses of sublime beauty and love that we could never achieve when singing solo.

9th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 12C sermon

2010-08-02T16:23:00.000-07:00

9th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 12C
July 25, 2010
Take a moment this morning and remember the person or people who taught you to pray…
For me it was my dad, saying prayers with me at bedtime every night; it was my grandfather, closeted in his study in prayer and sermon writing on Saturday afternoons while all his wild grandchildren tore around his house and standing in front of his congregation in his black robe, head bowed in prayer, on Sunday mornings; it was a woman named Jane Schutt, who treated me with such respect, even though she was an old woman and I a small child; it was countless number of Sunday school teachers, VBS leaders, EYC leaders, camp staff, and clergy. Even today, I continue to learn how to pray from people I read, people I pray with, the people of this church as we join in prayer and worship, and my own children and the children of this church.
In our gospel today, we have the first prayer lesson for all believers, the beginning of praying with and in Jesus. In this lesson, we see that preayer is so much more than just our own private conversation with God. It certainly does include that, (as Thomas Merton puts it, prayer is the communion of our freedom with God’s freedom.”). When we pray, and especially when we pray the Lord’s prayer, our freedom is not only in communion with God but also with all the other followers of Christ who have come before us and will come after us.
Let us look then with fresh eyes at our first prayer and our first teacher.
In the gospel of Luke as well as in Acts, prayer is an integral part of the life of Jesus and his followers. In Luke, Jesus frequently withdraws to places to pray (5:16, 6:12, 9:18). He prays before he chooses his disciples (6:13-16), when he feeds the 5,000 (9:16), the night before he dies (22:39-44), and even from the cross (23:34, 46). The book so Acts also emphasizes that through prayer, believers participate in God’s commitment to bring forth God’s reign.
The United Methodist bishop, William Willemon, has this insight into the Lord’s prayer. “[Jesus] has a definite, peculiar notion of what constitutes prayer. Prayer is not whenever I spill my guts to God: prayer is when I obey Jesus and pray for the things that he teaches me to pray for and when I pray the way he prays. Prayer is bending my feelings, my desires, my thoughts and yearnings toward Jesus and what he wants me to feel, desire and think. In most churches I visit, a time of prayer is often preceded by a time of “Joys and Concerns.” I notice that in every congregation, the only concerns expressed are concerns for people in the congregation who are going through various health crises. Prayer becomes what we used to refer to as “Sick Call” in the army. Where on earth did we get this idea of prayer? Not from Jesus. He healed a few people from time to time, but he doesn’t pray for that. He prays for the coming of God’s kingdom, for bread (but only on a daily basis, not for a surplus) and for forgiveness for our trespasses. It’s curious that physical deterioration has become the contemporary North American church’s main concern in prayer. Jesus is most notable for teaching that we are to pray—not for recent gall bladder surgery—but for our enemies! To be a Christian, a disciple of Jesus, is to pray like Jesus. … A Christian is someone who talks to God about what the Lord’s Prayer talks with God about…. A Christian is someone who is engaged in lifelong training in how to pray like Jesus.”[1]
Are we brave enough to do that? Are we brave enough to ask that God’s kingdom come into our world, into our lives? Are we brave enough to ask for only enough bread for today? Are we brave enough to ask for forgiveness of our trespasses? Are we brave enough to pray for our enemies?
The good news is this. Even if we are not brave enough today, Jesus does not leave us as orphans. He continues to teach us how to pray, when we pray the words of the Lord’s prayer, when we pray in worship and at the Eucharist, when we pray in private. Whenever our freedom reaches out to touch God’s freedom, whenever we ask, “Lord, teach us how to pray”…Jesus answers by sending the Holy Spirit, who whispers in our souls and says, “When you pray, say…”
[1] Theolog: Blogging toward Sunday; William H. Willemon; The Christian Century; July 23, 2007. http://theolog.org/2007/07/blogging-toward-sunday_23.html

8 Pentecost--Proper 11C

2010-07-20T12:04:00.001-07:00

8 Pentecost--Proper 11C sermon
July 18, 2010
“There is a lovely story of a man exploring Africa [that is written in the book Anam Cara by John O’Donohue]. [The explorer] was in a desperate hurry on a journey through the jungle. He had three or four Africans helping him carry his equipment. They raced onward for about three days. At the end of the third day, the Africans sat down and would not move. He urged them to get up, telling them of the pressure he was under to reach his destination before a certain date. They refused to move. He could not understand this; after much persuasion, they still refused to move. Finally, he got one of them to admit the reason. This native said, ‘We have moved too quickly to reach here; now we need to wait to give our spirits a chance to catch up with us.’” (Anam Cara John O’Donohue Harper Collins: New York, 151)
In reading today’s gospel passage, it is of utmost importance to remember that this story of Mary and Martha and their encounter with Jesus is coming right on the heels of last week’s story in Luke’s gospel—the story of the lawyer whose encounter with Jesus resulted in Jesus telling the parable of the Good Samaritan. We must remember what that lawyer’s initial question to Jesus is, because that will help us in how we read this story. The lawyer has asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, and when Jesus asks him what is written in the law, the lawyer responds that it is “to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind and your neighbor as yourself.” The two then embark on a continued line of questioning about who is the lawyer’s neighbor and Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan; the lawyer answers Jesus’s question of who in the story is the victim’s neighbor; the lawyer answers “The one who showed him mercy,” and Jesus says to him, “Go and do likewise.”
Then our story for today picks up. So many people have read this story as the dichotomy between the active life and the spiritual life and they say that Jesus is clearly promoting contemplation over action. But I’m not so sure that’s what’s going on here. Maybe it’s partly because I feel really bad for Martha. It makes sense to me that she’s stressed out. She’s giving a dinner party, and she really wants things to be nice for Jesus and his companions. And there’s her sister sitting on the floor at his feet, when she could be up helping her.
I know what it’s like to be Martha, to have the million little items that need to have attention chasing around in your head like squirrels; to be so very busy and more than a little bit resentful and jealous of someone who has the leisure to sit at Jesus’s feet and just listen. But what’s important for me to hear in this gospel is this. Jesus does not gently scold Martha for being busy. Instead, he says to her, “Dear Martha, this isn’t about your sister; it’s about you. You are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.” He holds up a mirror before her to let her see that the problem isn’t that she is busy and her sister isn’t helping. Her real problem isn’t her sister. It is her. It is that she is worried and distracted by many things and there is need of only one thing.
What is this one thing? CS Lewis said it this way: “There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” Other theologians have written that “the chief act of man is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.” Perhaps most well known is scripture, how Luke articulates the one needed thing. It is “to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind….”
It’s what Martha is missing. She’s so caught up in her worry and distraction that she has lost sight of the Lord who is sitting right there in front of her, and she can’t even take time to talk to him without being caught up in her own worry and distraction. It’s what the explorer in Africa was missing when the Africans sat down in protest and refused to go. It is why we are here; it is what we are always looking for but which we cannot see for our worry and our distractions.
So what does it mean to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind? How do we glorify God and enjoy God forever?
We start with this one moment, this one time and place of Sunday morning. And we name those things which keep us worried and distracted from glorifying and enjoying God. Is it your health or your family or your finances? Is it your loneliness or your need for perfection? Is it your own vision of how things should be, which distracts you from fulfilling God’s vision? Is it that you are so drowning in the details of your life that you are not able to live and love freely? What are your worries and distractions? After we name them today, we are called to lay them at the feet of our Lord, before his altar, where he will then free us and feed, that we may spend our life glorifying and enjoying God.
And then, when we leave this place and go back into the world, back into our lives, we listen and pay attention to our lives. When we or someone close to us realizes that we have moved so quickly that we have left behind our souls, that we are worried and distracted by many things, and none of them is the one needed thing of loving and enjoying God, then we sit down for a while, lay down our baggage or worry and distraction, and we wait for our souls to catch up.

The 7th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 10C sermon

2010-07-15T09:05:00.000-07:00

7th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 10C
July 11, 2010
I wonder what it was like for the lawyer in today’s story from Luke’s gospel on the day after he had his conversation with Jesus? I imagine him tossing and turning most of the night as he relived the encounter and the story it provoked.
He would start with the beginning, how he started out to test Jesus, but in his effort to test him, he asked Jesus a question of deep concern to him, one that he thought he had already figured out: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
When Jesus posed his own question, the lawyer was pleased because he knew this one; he could even recite the Scripture by heart. “What is written in the law? Why it is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and to love your neighbor as yourself.”
He knew it was right when he answered, and Jesus affirmed him, patting him on the shoulder and telling him if he did this then he will live. But suddenly, in that moment, being right and knowing the law just weren’t enough anymore. Instead, he felt something. Was it doubt? Uncertainty? A fear that maybe he didn’t have this whole salvation thing figured out after all and sewn up in a nifty slogan? Maybe it was discomfort or a hunger for something more, something deeper? Suddenly, in his insecurity, he needed justification from this man that he had set out to test.
So he opened his mouth and asked Jesus the question that would truly change his life, transform and haunt him. “Who is my neighbor?”
Thinking back on that moment, he especially remembered the look on Jesus’s face. It was a such a strange and disarming mixture—with the glint of singleness of purpose in his eye coupled with the softness of love and compassion that framed his eyes and mouth like parentheses and the peace that stretched through the expanse of his brow and cheeks.
Then Jesus began to tell him the story of a man, much like himself, who was attacked by robbers while traveling a lonely road and who was beaten, robbed, and left in a bloody heap on the side of the road.
As he lay there, two men witnessed his suffering, his humiliation, and each passed by on the other side of the road. Finally a third man stopped and the lawyer again felt his initial unease as he heard Jesus say that this third man who stopped was a Samaritan. To good Jews, Samaritans were despised as being heretics and breakers of the ceremonial law. They were looked down upon and treated with great contempt.
He remembered his discomfort as Jesus described the familiarity of the Samaritan’s ministrations to the man, the care and affection that was poured out upon stranger by a stranger. He was even shocked at the lengths to which the Samaritan would go to help the man, how he not only paid money on the front end but promised repayment of whatever was spent on the man’s care, as if they were family—father and son or brothers, instead of bitter enemies.
He remembered the moment when Jesus asked him, “which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”
And he paused in his struggle to answer. He remembered thinking that if it were him lying bloody and helpless in a ditch, then he’d rather die than receive help from a Samaritan, let alone receive such an abundance of compassion. And he thought that he’d rather die than have to reciprocate such for one he despised.
So when Jesus asked him the question, again, he knew the answer, but this time he couldn’t simply say it. He couldn’t answer “the Samaritan” because it was just too hard, too impossible, and the words stuck in his throat. Instead of naming the hated Samaritan heretic as the one who was fulfilling the Jewish law, the lawyer found a loophole and answered, after his long, tortured pause: “The one who was a neighbor was the one who showed him mercy.”
And he would never forget until the end of his days how Jesus nodded and looked him squarely in the eyes and said, “Go and do likewise.”
It wasn’t until he was at home in his own bed that night trying to sleep when he realized that he had been transformed. When he’d thought he’d had all the answers, had the path to eternal life all figured out, suddenly Jesus sneaked up on him and he was faced with more and more questions about his life and his faith.
What is this mercy which Jesus has called me to replicate? And how do I show it to people whom I distrust, dislike, and even despise?
Again and again, he remembered Jesus face as he looked at him; he remembered all the times he had prayer to God asking for mercy…
And he knew in the deepest depths of his being what mercy is….that it’s not just the forgiveness of a debt or an offense or the flip side of justice. It’s about “blessing and unwarranted compassion as well as leniency. It’s about pardon, kindness, strength, and even rescue and generosity.”[1]
An offer of mercy, he discovered, is an offer of kindness, care, risk, and even intimacy, and it may be willingly and joyfully received in a way that transforms both the giver and the receiver, or it may be rejected. In mercy, we give of ourselves and we are unprotected, defenseless. Mercy is moving and active; it is intervening and interceding, and it always results in a change of relationship, a change of status.
“So that’s mercy,” thought the lawyer, “but how do I live into that? Where on earth do I start?”
And as he looked outside to see the pink edges of dawn creeping across the face of the world, he remembered Jesus’s parting words to him: “Go and do likewise.”
Go…and do likewise.
[1] Lord, Jennifer L. Reflections on the Lectionary. The Christian Century, June 29, 2010, p 19.

2010-06-23T09:41:00.000-07:00

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 7C
Elijah stands on the side of Mount Horeb, with his face wrapped in his mantle to meet the Lord who comes in the sound of sheer silence. And the Lord asks him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” As with all defining moments in life, so much has happened to bring Elijah to this point.
“King Ahab of Israel did more to provoke the anger of the Lord the God of Israel than had all the kings of Israel who went before him.” And his wife Jezebel? Well, really her name says it all. Ahab and Jezebel have led the people astray from following God. They have promoted the worship of Baal in Israel, and they have defied Israel’s covenant with her God. So Elijah goes to Ahab and tells him that God will send a drought on the land for 3 years, because Ahab is so bad, so corrupt. Well, Ahab doesn’t like that and he sets out to kill Elijah, but God takes care of Elijah. God finds Elijah a safe place to be and provides him food and water in the midst of a drought. Later, when that runs out, God sends Elijah to a widow and provides them all with a never-ending supply of meal and oil to make bread; God heeds Elijah’s prayer when he prays that God might spare the widow’s son who has died, and God restores the son to life.
In the third year of the drought, God sends Elijah back to Ahab. Elijah encounters Ahab’s servant Obadiah, who is a faithful worshipper of God and who tells Elijah that he has worked to save 100 prophets of God when Jezebel went on a recent killing spree and was murdering all the prophets. Elijah asks Obadiah to tell Ahab he wants to see him, but at first Obadiah refuses to do it. He tells Elijah that Ahab has been searching hi and low for him, and because Elijah has been so elusive, Obadiah fears that when he goes to tell Ahab that Elijah is there to see him, and he returns with Ahab, God will have whisked Elijah away to safety and Ahab will kill Obadiah. Elijah assures Obadiah that he wants to speak to Ahab, and when Elijah and Ahab are face to face, Elijah issues a challenge to Ahab. He invites him to assemble all Israel on the top of Mt Carmel along with 450 prophets of Baal.
Once they are all assembled, Elijah speaks to the people of Israel and challenges them to choose which god they will worship and serve: Baal or Yahweh. He then brings two bulls for sacrifice, one for the 450 prophets of Baal and one for himself; they prepare the bulls for offering and lay them on the wood, but they put no fire to it. Then each set of prophets is to pray to their god to answer by fire, and that god will prove to be the god of Israel. The people agree to this plan, because Elijah speaks it well and because it promises to be a good show.
Elijah lets the prophets of Baal go first, and from morning until noon, they cry out “O Baal, answer us!” But there is no voice, no answer. At noon, Elijah starts to mock them: “Maybe you should yell louder! Surely he’s a god; either he’s meditating, or he’s wandered away or he is on a journey, or perhaps he’s asleep and must be awakened!” They keep going until the time of the oblation, but there is no voice, no answer and no response. Then Elijah takes the stage. He invites the people to come closer to him, repairs the altar of the Lord that had been thrown down, and he makes a trench around it. He puts the wood in order, cuts the bull into pieces and pours water 3 times on the offering so that the water overflows and runs into the trench.
Then Elijah calls upon God, the God who has never yet failed him; the God who has repeatedly saved him from assassination from drought and from hunger, and he says, “ O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.” Then the fire of the Lord falls from heaven and consumes the offering, the wood, the stones, the dust, and even the water that was in the trench, and the people fall on their faces and proclaim that God is their only God. Elijah commands them to seize the 450 prophets of Baal and has them all killed.
After that amazing feat, Elijah tells Ahab to go eat and drink because God is about to end the 3 year drought with some rain, and Elijah goes back up on the mountain and bows himself down upon the earth and puts his face between his knees (from exhaustion or in prayer for rain?). When he comes down, it rains and both Ahab and Elijah head to Jezreel where Ahab has a palace. Elijah has won; the people have proclaimed that God is their God, and Ahab is no longer trying to kill Elijah. But when they get to Jezreel, Ahab tells Jezebel all that has happened, and Jezebel vows that she will see Elijah dead within the next 24 hours. At this point, something strange happens: Elijah’s nerve fails, and he flees into the wilderness, running as far south in the promised land as he possibly can.
It should be his finest hour. He has done what God asked him to do, turning the hearts of the people back to God, and he has accomplished it through some pretty decent showmanship on his part and some really cool pyrotechnics on God’s part. At this point, he should be feeling like the superhero of all prophets, but something in him fails, and he goes out into the wilderness and prays to die. Even then, even there, God sends angels with food and water, and they take care of Elijah, and they send him to Mount Horeb (which is Mount Sinai where Moses received the 10 commandments from God) so that Elijah can meet with God. Elijah spends the night in a cave on Mt Horeb, and then God asks him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
Elijah, like many prophets before and after him, speaks his peace to God saying: “ I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life to take it away.”
So God tells Elijah to go stand outside the cave on the side of the mountain before the Lord. First comes the wind, but God is not in the wind. Then comes the earthquake, but God is not in the earthquake. Then comes the fire (which God had just used to defeat the 450 prophets of Baal), but God is not in the fire, and then a sound of sheer silence. That’s when Elijah knows God is there, and he wraps his face in his mantle and goes out to stand before the God of Israel.
God says again to Elijah, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (Why does God ask him again? Is God giving him a chance to change his story or rethink his answer?)
And Elijah says again: “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life to take it away.”
And as God has always done in this relationship, God listens to Elijah and tells him, “Get back to work.” Here’s our new plan: no more pyrotechnics. You are going to anoint your successor and anoint new kings for Israel and Aram, these two whom I have named. And God will continue God’s work of salvation for Israel in a new and different way.
In Elijah’s story is good news for us as well. Elijah, the superhero prophet, who escapes death on multiple occasions and orchestrates a marvelous and show-stopping defeat of God’s enemies, has a crisis of faith in Jezreel right on the heels of his most marvelous victory. First, he is erroneously focused on being the only prophet of God left in the whole world, and he overestimates his importance in the overall scheme of God’s salvation of Israel. Second, he loses faith in God’s providence. God has taken care of him every step of the way; God has done everything that Elijah has asked of God, but in Jezreel, Elijah loses his nerve, he loses his faith.
But in spite of all this, God still takes care of Elijah. God still listens to Elijah and answers Elijah. God even issues a new call to Elijah for how Elijah can continue to be a part of God’s new plan for the salvation of Israel. God promises Elijah that there is a future for Elijah after the cave, when Elijah has said, It is enough. I can’t do this anymore. And God promises that there is a future for Israel through the abundance of God’s grace which makes the impossible possible and which is unceasing, untiring, unrelenting.
This is good news for us, who are not super-hero prophets. We too feel the effects of life beating us down. We too grow weary of following God’s call for us. We too are tempted to believe that we are all alone in facing whatever we are dealing with, we are the only ones who can do a certain thing; we are the only ones who are left. We too lose our nerve and run for it. We too come to a point in our lives when we say, “It is enough, God! I don’t want to do this anymore!”
And God who is always faithful, always providing, always listening and willing to answer, reminds us that we are not the center of the universe and the only piece of God’s plan of salvation, and then God issues a new call to us, a new way to participate in salvation and in God’s work in the world.
Take a moment this morning to listen to the silence of your own heart. Is God speaking to you, asking: "What are you doing here?" Is God issuing a new call to you, new work for you in the world?

A Prayer for Father's Day

2010-06-23T09:35:00.000-07:00

A Father’s Day Prayer
(adapted from a mediation written by Kirk Loadman-Copeland)
Holy God, whom we call Father, we give you thanks for the people who have been our earthly fathers in this life, and we pray for all sorts and conditions of fathers. For fathers who have striven to balance the demands of work, marriage, and children with an honest awareness of both joy and sacrifice. For fathers who, lacking a good model, have worked to become a good father. For fathers who by their own account were not always there for their children, but who continue to offer those children, now grown, their love and support. For fathers who have been wounded by the neglect and hostility of their children. For fathers who, despite divorce, have remained in their children's lives. For fathers whose children are adopted, and whose love and support has offered healing. For fathers who, as stepfathers, freely choose the obligation of fatherhood and earned their stepchildren's love and respect. For fathers who have lost a child to death, and continue to hold the child in their heart. For those men who have no children, but cherish the next generation as if they were their own. For those men who have "fathered" us in their role as mentors and guides. For those men who are about to become fathers; may they openly delight in their children. And for those fathers who have died, but live on in our memory and in the communion of your Saints, whose love continues to nurture us. All this we ask in the name of your beloved Son, who is both father and mother to us all. Amen.

3rd Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 6C

2010-06-23T09:34:00.000-07:00

3rd Sunday after Pentecost—
Proper 6C
This week, a good number of us have been gathering at the church each night and dressing up like pirates. It’s been Vacation Bible School, and both the adults and children have been learning from each other what it means to “Seek God’s Treasures.”
We’ve had a different Bible story each day that offers us a one word nugget of God’s treasure and how we seek it. We learned the story of Jonah and the whale and that God’s treasure is sought and found through obedience, in not running away when things get tough or don’t go our way.
We listened to the story of Moses who led the children of Israel to freedom from slavery in Egypt through the parted waters of the Red Sea with Pharaoh’s army chasing them down, and we learned that God’s treasure is sought and found through courage.
We heard the story of how Jesus first called the disciples and invited them to leave behind their fishing nets and follow him that they might become fishers of people, and we learned that God’s treasure is sought and found when we trust God and God’s call in our lives.
And we heard the story of Jesus walking on the water and how Peter started to join him until he grew afraid and began to sink, and we learned that God’s treasure can be sought and found through faith.
But those are just a few of the treasures that God has to offer us. (I want you to think for a minute: What are some of the other treasures of God that you have encountered in your life? )
In our gospel story today we see another example of how we seek (and find) God’s treasure. Jesus is eating dinner at a good, religious man’s house, and a woman appears. She is very sad because she knows she has done wrong, and she has not been seeking the treasures of God; so she weeps upon Jesus’s feet to show how sorry she is; and Jesus offers her a beautiful golden nugget of God’s treasure. He offers her forgiveness; he offers her a new beginning. And when the good, religious man protests and tells Jesus he shouldn’t have anything to do with the woman, Jesus tells the man that God’s forgiveness, God’s treasure is available to everyone who seeks it.
We all do things that are not good, that are not what God would have us do… God’s forgiveness, God’s new beginning is available to each and every one of us, no matter what we do. (Theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “There is no condition for forgiveness.” )
There’s another beautiful piece of God’s treasure that we especially need to remember this week. (It’s what Vacation Bible School is really all about, I think.) You know what else is God’s treasure? You. You are God’s treasure. Each one of you is created by God, made to love God and to be loved by God, and made to love other people. Each one of you is God’s treasure; you are so precious to God, and you are invited to live your life held in the hollow of God’s loving hand, held next to God’s very heart.
No matter what you have done, to hurt yourself or other people, you are offered God’s forgiveness and you, yourself are God’s treasure.
But when we claim this as truth for ourselves, then we must also recognize it as truth for each other: No person falls outside the forgiveness of God. And each person we come into contact with is treasured by God. So we have to remember this when we choose how to treat other people. We have to treat others as they are treasures of God, also.
So, everybody. One last lesson from Vacation Bible School this week. Repeat after me. I am God’s treasure…. (Now look at your neighbor: ) You are God’s treasure… Let us all seek God’s treasures.

2nd Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 5C

2010-06-07T11:27:00.000-07:00

2nd Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 5C
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine with me. You are walking down a road in your own private funeral procession. You carry in your heart a secret burden; it is the burden of the loss of your dreams. It is the death of someone you hold dear; it is the loss of your independence as you grow older; it is the burden of never-ending work, of the constant demands of children, of an empty nest, of caring for an elderly parent. It is the burden of broken promises, of broken relationships. It is the burden of a lost job, of feelings of shame and worthlessness. It is the burden of always making things perfect. It is the burden of addiction; it is the burden of illness or the illness of someone you love. It is the burden of depression, of lost-ness, of loneliness. It is the burden of lost hope, of disappointment, of disillusionment.
Take a silent moment to examine and name your own secret burden, for we all walk through life carrying something.
As you stand there alone, under the weight of your grief, your secret burden, suddenly Jesus is there walking by. He looks at you, and he sees you; he sees your secret burden—your grief, your loss of hope. And he feels with you, and he walks up beside you and says in a whisper to your very heart: “do not weep.” Then he places his hand on you—on your head or cupping your face, on your shoulder or even a full embrace, and he speaks directly a command to your dead hope: “I say to you rise!”
Suddenly you feel it, your burden is not so heavy, and you feel the first stirrings of your hope, the green shoot of new life breaking forth out of the deepest darkness of your soul into the light of your awareness. It is your new life; your new hope. But you are afraid, because it is so sudden, and maybe you were not ready to set aside your grief, your burden; maybe you didn’t want your hope resurrected because you couldn’t bear the pain of being heart-broken and wounded all over again.
So you take a deep breath and your initial panic subsides, and you realize how good it feels to be free of your burden, how good it feels to be whole-hearted again. You realize the power and the gift of your newly-resurrected hope, and you taste in your soul a sweet dab of joy and freedom, like a dot of honey on your tongue.
This is the gift of Jesus’s compassion in your life. We are invited to come to God’s table, where we are looked at by Jesus in his infinite compassion, and we are invited to lay down our burdens there and to receive that compassion, to eat and drink it in until it heals our broken hearts and resurrects our dying hope. And then we are sent out from here and invited to share Jesus’s compassion with others. For when we show compassion and mercy to others, we are participating in Jesus’s own life-giving compassion. It is a resurrection compassion that gives dead hope new life and gives heavy hearts new joy.
May this be your gift this day. Amen.

Trinity Sunday Year C

2010-05-30T04:24:00.000-07:00

The Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg
Trinity Sunday Year C
May 30, 2010

In her book Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor tells several anecdotes to her Atlanta friends to explain her decision to leave a large Episcopal church in the city to take up the call as rector of a small church in a small town in northern Georgia. She writes, “When my friends in Atlanta asked me how things were going in north Georgia, I told them that I was living in a Flannery O’Connor story. I would spend one afternoon visiting a septuagenarian who lived in an octagonal house that her late husband had built for her, eating kiwis that she grew on her clothesline and listening to her reminiscences of Isadora Duncan. The next day I would take communion to a man who was back in the hospital for the third operation on his knee, which was crushed when his pickup truck rolled backward and pinned him against his trailer. After church on Trinity Sunday, I came out to my car to find a miniature Three Musketeers candy bar on the hood. Underneath it was a note from the deeply eccentric woman who lived across the street from the church. ‘One for all and all for one,’ the note read. ‘Happy Trinity Sunday.’[i]
So, Happy Trinity Sunday. Our readings for today speak of all the hosts of heaven singing Holy, holy to a great God seated upon a throne. They resound with might and eminence and mystery. Jesus speaks of the Spirit of Truth which will come to guide the disciples and us into all truth, and he reemphasizes his relationship with the Father and with the Spirit. But they also dance on the edge of poetry and lyric as they speak of that relationship:
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race."
I’d be willing to bet that in the course of your life, you’ve heard at least one theologically sound sermon on the doctrine of the Trinity, that consists of phrases like: “ that the one God exists in 3 persons and one substance—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is one, yet self-differentiated; the God who reveals Himself to humankind is one God equally in 3 distinct modes of existence, yet remains one through all eternity.”[ii] Or “that the Latin word personae which we translate as person (as in the 3 persons of the Trinity) is the same word used to talk about the masks that actors used to portray different characters in the theater.” Or perhaps even: St. Augustine compared the Son and the Holy Spirit to processes of human self-knowledge and self-love. He wrote that the Son came from an act of thinking on the part of the Father and the Spirit was a result of the mutual love of the Father and the Son.
But instead today, I want to talk about the implications of the Trinity in our daily life. What significance does it have for us? This has been a busy season in the life of the church. We had two funerals last week, and we are getting geared up for lots of work and some fun in our upcoming Iron Chef competition. In the midst of our busyness, in the midst of life, today we stop and remember the important truth that our God is a relational God, a God who created us specifically to be in relationship with God and whose three different aspects exist in a kind of playful, joyful dance that really makes God more accessible to us. We remember that all of God delights in us, too, and invites us to participate in this joyful, playful, delightful dance with God.
So instead of talking theology or doctrine today, let’s talk poetry. I once read a poem that captured the notion of Trinity for me in a new and different way, and in my rediscovery of it, it has captured my imagination about how my life with my family, my prayer life, and all aspects of how I am in this world in relationship to God and others could be different. It is called Playtime by Michael Hare Duke.

Playtime
It takes a kind of courage
To find time for play…

Thank God for the dreams
in which we mount our fiery imaginations
and ride off into the misty mountains.
Night takes to task the busy day;
but why am I ashamed to claim the right to conscious play
within the waking world?

When I can sit and let my mind catch fire
I understand how God sang for fun
calling out of nothing all creation.
Wagtails bounce and flip their feathers
salmon leap,
the world turns, the planets wheel,
tiny or vast
orchestrated into a joyful tune,
the models of all making.

Dreams, imagination and God’s laughter in creation
invite me out of my industrious solemnity,
to take the task of playing seriously
until my marred manhood
is recreated in the child I have denied.[iii]

Where have you encountered God’s laughter in creation in your life this week? (I have encountered it in the laughter of my children, in quiet times with my husband, in petting my old,sweet, needy, co-dependant Golden Retriever.) Where have you tasted God’s delight in your life? That is the Trinity at work in your life and in the world: indefinable, unbridled laughter and joy that cannot be contained and that delights in you and creates, redeems, and sustains all relationships. That is what we remember, celebrate, and savor this day.

So. Happy Trinity Sunday. Let’s have a little fun today and do something you may have never done before. Eat chocolate in church. I have mini Three Musketeers for everyone that I will pass out now, and I encourage you to eat yours while you pass the peace. May it feed you to look for God’s laughter in creation in your life in the coming week as you witness the delight of the Trinity at work in the world. All for one and one for all!
[i] Taylor, Barbara Brown. Leaving Church. Harper: San Francisco, 2006, o. 67.
[ii] Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. ed. F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone. Oxford: 1997, p 1641.
[iii] Playtime by Michael Hare Duke. Resources for Preaching and Worship Year C. Ed. Hanna Ward and Jennifer Wild. Westminster: Louisville, 2003, p 174.

Pentecost 2010

2010-05-23T04:37:00.000-07:00

Pentecost—Year C
May 23, 2010
A while ago, I read somewhere that there is a Jewish story about creation that says that God breathed out and created all that there is, and then God breathed in and retreated from creation, removing God’s self from what God had created. When I first heard this, I was very disturbed to think about God retreating from creation, but since then, I’ve come to understand that perhaps the crafters of the story were trying to show that God poured out God’s being, God’s abundance, God’s creativity, God’s joy upon creation and then God stepped back so that we could do with it what we would will. God breathes out and creates; God breathes in and grants freedom.
Today is the feast day of Pentecost, when we celebrate God’s gift of the Holy Spirit. In Acts we see the gift of the Spirit, the very breath of God, which comes upon the gathered community in a most ordinary moment in the extraordinary force of something like both wind and flame. God breathes out God’s Spirit upon them and that inspires in them unity despite ethnic differences when all testify in their own languages to the power of God and the good news of the resurrected Christ. After God breathes out God’s Spirit upon the gathered believers, Peter testifies to the crowd that gathers and looks upon them in both derision and wonder, and he shares with them the good news of God’s presence in the world through Jesus. The onlookers then ask: “What then should we do?”. Peter tells them, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call." God breathes out and creates; God breathes in and grants them freedom. About three thousand respond to the gift of the breath of God that day and join the ranks of the believers. Once captivated by the breath of God in God’s great exhalation at Pentecost, the followers of Jesus Christ live their lives within the rhythm of God’s breath: God exhales and creates meaning and purpose; God inhales and grants them space and freedom to respond how they will. The story of Pentecost concludes with the following choice made by the believers in the freedom of God’s Spirit: “They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” God breathed out and created their community; God breathed in and granted them freedom to respond in how they chose to live together. And they chose communion, gratitude, and generosity.
And so it is with us. In so many ways, God breathes God’s being, God’s abundance, God’s creativity, God’s joy out into our lives, and then God breathes in so that we may have the freedom to respond to the breath of God in our lives and in our world.
God breathes out and it is a gentle, cooling breeze to our beleaguered souls and bodies. How will we respond?
God breathes out and it is fire and wind that purge and refine us, making our impurities pure. How will we respond?
God breathes out and it is a brush of air that tickles us and plays with us, stealing something and making us chase it, and inviting us to laugh at our folly. How will we respond?
God breathes out, and suddenly we discover that God is breathing for us, filling our hearts and lungs with life when we have lost our own breath. How will we respond?
God breathes out and it is the stillness of the wilderness with no whisper of wind stirring, when we are desperate for a brush of wind or breath to give us respite and relief from the sun beating down upon us in the barren landscape. How will we respond?
God breathes out and it is the sweet breath of a new baby, the cool brush of a mother’s lips on a feverish forehead, the sweetness of a lover’s mouth poised for a kiss. How will we respond?
God breathes out and it is the violent wind of a storm that can fell mighty oaks, and it is a light breeze that allows a bumblebee to drift lazily along on a glorious summer day. How will we respond?
God breathes out into the waters of our baptism, into the bread and the wine, into our prayer and into our song. How will we respond?
God breathes out into our sorrow and our grief, into our loss, and even into death. How will we respond?
God breathes out and it is a bunch of red balloons tied to the wrists of children and sent out into the world as our model and our witness. How will we respond?
The breath of God has brought us, through various ways, to this place, to this community, and then it blows us back out into the world to share the good news of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and what that continues to mean for our lives. How will we respond?

Easter 6C sermon

2010-05-09T04:21:00.001-07:00

Easter 6C
May 9, 2010

When the weather is nice, I like to sit out on the shoo-fly to write my sermons. I often find myself looking out over the hundreds of cars driving by on Hwy 90, all that life that goes streaming by, and I look out at the broad, smooth expanse of the water. It’s a peaceful, holy place for me in spite of or perhaps in part because of all the traffic flowing by.
I’ve been thinking about peace a lot lately—thinking about what peace is in general and what it is specifically to me. Many people think that peace is the absence of conflict; it can be equated with tranquility, and for those of us with small children, it is often coupled with “quiet” (as in “Can I please just get five minutes of peace and quiet?”), and it is in short supply, especially at the end of the day. For me, both physically and spiritually, peace is a kind of deep breathing that dispels the tightness in my chest and belly and even the tightness in my soul that is anxiety, stress, and a fearful and troubled heart.
In our gospel reading for today, we see Jesus speaking to his disciples in the gospel of John’s rather long farewell discourse. He is responding to a question from one of the disciples, and even as he gives them the bad news that he is not going to be with them for much longer, he gives them the good news that God will be sending the Holy Spirit to teach and remind them. He also gives them the gift of his peace saying: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”
As I was thinking about this peace that Jesus gives his disciples (both his disciples then and us, his disciples now), I began to wonder…Is Jesus saying that his gift of peace is an antidote for troubled and fearful hearts? Or is he giving them the gift of his peace coupled with a command to them: “do not let your hearts be troubled…[or] afraid”? Is peace a free gift that will strengthen our hearts through its reception or is it an either/or situation—Jesus gives us peace in which we can choose to dwell or we can allow our hearts to be troubled and afraid?
As I was pondering this out on the shoo-fly, I thought about how I could banish the fear and trouble from my heart to make room for Jesus’s peace, and I began to imagine going after the fear and anxiety with a stick. I quickly realized that that’s not peace!
And then I remembered one of my new favorite songs from my Happening experience. It’s called Deep Peace by Kirk Dearmen; it’s a Celtic blessing and it brings me a little closer to this mystery that is peace. It goes: “Deep peace of the running wave to you, Deep peace of the silent starts/Deep peace of the flowing air to you. Deep peace of the quite Earth./ May peace, may peace, may peace fill your soul,/ Let peace, let peace, let peace make you whole.” [1]
Peace is a free gift of Jesus and it comes into our hearts when they are undefended and longing for peace
The Anglican priest Herbert O’Driscoll writes this about Jesus’s gift of peace in John 14:27: “The word Jesus would have used at that moment is shalom, a much richer and more complex term. ‘Peace’ in this sense does not mean tranquility, lack of challenge, or restfulness. We can experience the peace of Christ without any of these things. Experiencing the shalom of Christ is to taste moments when in an almost inexpressible way things seem to come together for us. The shalom of Christ comes when we experience the conviction that in Christ everything somehow makes sense.”[2]
Or, our hymnal says it slightly differently in hymn 661: “The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod. Yet let us pray for but one thing—the marvelous peace of God.”
The story from Acts gives us a picture of what this peace, this shalom of Jesus looks like. In the story, we see Paul being obedient to a vision that he has that compels him to travel to Europe. He ends up in Phillippi, and seemingly by chance, he finds himself on the outside of town near the river. There he encounters some women who’ve gathered there, and he sits down with them and begins to teach them. Among this group of women is Lydia, who is a wealthy, successful head of her own household in Phillippi. She is a dealer in purple cloth which only the wealthy could afford, so she had access to most of the movers and shakers in town and perhaps beyond. As she is listening to Paul, the writer of Acts says that “God opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul.” She and her whole household get baptized and then she urges Paul and his companions to come stay at her home with her.
What this story tells me is that in God’s shalom, nothing is a coincidence. It also shows me that when Lydia’s longing for a relationship with God encountered the grace of God, the offspring of that union were both peace and an abundance of generosity.
So what does that mean for us this day?
We too are offered the gift of Jesus’s peace, Jesus’s shalom into our hearts and lives. That does not mean that our lives will be conflict free. And it does not mean that we will always be perfectly tranquil. What it does mean is that we can rest in the assurance that in Christ, everything somehow makes sense. And it means that when our longing for God encounters the gift of God’s grace, then the results are both peace and generosity. In that way, we are made whole.
“Deep peace of the running wave to you, Deep peace of the silent starts/Deep peace of the flowing air to you. Deep peace of the quite Earth./ May peace, may peace, may peace fill your soul,/ Let peace, let peace, let peace make you whole.” [3]

[1] From Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi’s Camp Bratton Green Songbook: 1999 Expressions of Praise Music; CCLI song no. 2198338; CCLI license no. 2260158
[2] O’ Driscoll, Herbert. Prayers for the Breaking of Bread. Cowley: Cambridge, 1991. p 87.
[3] From Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi’s Camp Bratton Green Songbook: 1999 Expressions of Praise Music; CCLI song no. 2198338; CCLI license no. 2260158

Easter 5C sermon

2010-05-04T09:33:00.001-07:00

Easter 5C
May 2, 2010
Once upon a time, there was a man named Peter. Now Peter was a Jew, one of God’s chosen people of Israel who kept God’s laws about certain things, such as food and clothing and how they kept their bodies, as a sign of their special relationship with God. Peter had also witnessed some mysterious and life-changing events when he heeded the call of Jesus of Nazareth to leave behind his fishing business and to follow Jesus as he travelled around Judea. Because of what he had discovered through his friend Jesus, Peter dedicated his life to telling other people about who Jesus really was and how they could be a part of the salvation that Jesus offers to everybody.
While Peter was out doing this work, spreading the good news, he spent some time with a friend in another city. On this one particular day, Peter was waiting on his friend to fix him something to eat, and he fell into a trance. “He saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down, being lowered to the ground by its four corners. In it were all kinds of four footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a voice saying, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’” But Peter didn’t want to; yes, he was very hungry, but some of these animals were forbidden for him to eat by the laws of his faith. When Peter protested, the voice responded, “ ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane’. This happened three times, and the thing was suddenly taken up to heaven.”
As you can imagine, Peter was very puzzled as to what to make of the vision. But then some non-Jewish men showed up at the house looking for Peter, and while he was still thinking about the vision, the Spirit said to him, ‘ Get up, go down, and go with them without hesitation; for I have sent them.’” Now at this point, Peter had to make a decision. He could continue to hold fast to the laws and the beliefs that he had followed faithfully his whole life, trusting in himself that he was right and knew the way he was supposed to proceed. Or he could heed the call of God to do something different, to trust that God knew what he needed to be doing and would not lead him astray. So he went with the men.
Well, it turns out that one of their friends whose name was Cornelius had had a vision too, a vision about Peter and where to find him, so Cornelius had sent them to find Peter and to bring him back to his home. When Peter went into the house, he was breaking some of his peoples’ most sacred laws, the laws that helped them know that they were special to God and set apart from the people of other nations. And when it came time for Peter to speak, God opened Peter’s heart, and Peter said, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” And he told them about Jesus and how to be a part of the salvation that he offers to everyone. “While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word.” Now this was amazing! Up until now, only Jews had been given the gift of the Holy Spirit. Again, Peter had to make a choice. He could refuse to believe what he had witnessed because it was contrary to what he had believed, what he had known for so long, or he could respond to God’s gift of the Holy Spirit to these people and embrace them as his brothers and sisters in Christ, regardless of their heritage. So Peter and the other believers who were with him baptized everyone in the name of Jesus Christ, and he stayed with them for several days.
After a time, Peter returned to Jerusalem, where the people there had heard of all that happened to him while he was away. And, boy, were they angry! They criticized him for going to non-Jews and eating with them while he was away. But Peter didn’t yell or argue or spout theology; instead Peter told them the story….He told them of his vision, of God’s words to him, of the arrival of the three men and the spirit’s words to him about them; he told them about going to Cornelius’s house and about his own vision; he told them about how God had opened his heart and he began to speak and how the Holy Spirit fell upon the people there just as it had fallen upon Jesus’s disciples in the beginning. He said to them, “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us…who was I that I could hinder God?” When they heard this, there was dead silence. And they had a choice. They could choose to stick to their beliefs, to their position that Peter had done wrong. They could choose to not listen to this new way of being in relationship with God because it threatened them, and they knew that they were right. Or they could give themselves over to Peter’s story and his experiences with the presence of God; they could trust that God was leading all of them in this new direction, and they could follow willingly. And this is what they did, praising God and saying, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”
What Peter and the other followers of Jesus learned is that being a Christian is not about a one time conversion, from sin into new life. They learned that we are being called by God, again and again, to convert from following our own will, our own path, our own beliefs, to following God’s path, God’s will, and God’s salvation. They learned that even though they had been doing something for hundreds of years, God was calling them to do it a new way, and they had to choose to follow God’s new way. I wonder…What would have happened to the Christian movement if Peter had not allowed himself to be converted by God? What would have happened if his friends had not allowed themselves to be converted by Peter’s story?
I wonder….what would it be like if something like this happened to us today, those of us who live in a world where we are constantly subjected to the individual’s opinion of what is right, in almost every situation? I wonder…What would our lives be like if we let go of some of our certainty that we knew what was right, what was best, and allowed ourselves to be converted by God to God’s way? I wonder….What would our lives be like if we laid aside our certainty our own experience, our own voice should take precedence over all others, that we have all the answers to all the problems and everyone else is wrong (unless they think just like us), and we trusted the experience, the story of the other? I wonder…What would our lives be like if we believed that God can convert us through the stories and experiences of other people, and in that conversion, God’s love and salvation runs rampant through this world like wildfire?
I wonder…What would our homes, our work, our church, our friendships, our politics and government be like if we submitted our rightness, our will, our surety to God and allowed ourselves, our beliefs about everything to changed by God, and then act accordingly?
Would we finally be able to fulfill Jesus’s new commandment that we love one another as he has love us?
I wonder….?

Easter 2C sermon

2010-04-10T18:44:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that I am quite squeamish about today's gospel reading. There are numerous artisic renderings of the scene when Thomas encounters the Risen Christ, and I really have trouble spending much time with those also. There's the famous Caravaggio painting, where Thomas sticks his finger in the slit that is the wound in Jesus's side while the other disciples gather around looking, and there's even a banner that hangs on the belltower of St. Andrew's Cathedral that shows Thomas coming toward Jesus's wounded side with an outstretched finger (which one of my friends has dubbed the "Tickle me Jesus banner." )

So I thought about why this image makes me uncomfortable, and I think it is the same type of squeamishness that makes my stomach do a flip-flop when my daughter tells me how she ripped her loose tooth out at the lunch table in the cafeteria earlier this week. I don't really want to think about anybody probing anybody else's wounds, no matter how worthy the cause.

But I also think about my discomfort in the face of what this story has to offer us which is this. The Risen Christ is recognized by his disciples because of his wounds. The resurrection has not miraculously removed his hurt, his betrayal, his suffering. Even though he has defeated death, he still maintains its scars. When the Resurrected Christ first visits the disciples all together, he offers them his wounds as evidence of who he is.

Here's another way of saying it, that our bishop said at the ECW closing eucharist today. "When we give oursleves to God, we don't just offer our best; we offer God our all, our everything."

That includes our joy and our gifts and our hope and our new life, and it also includes our wounds and our scars, our suffering and our sorrow.

And notice what happens when Jesus has offered Thomas his wounds? Thomas replies with not only recongnition but with a statement of faith: "My Lord and my God!" It is the climax in the Gospel of John, and Thomas becomes the apostle who articulates the new faith, the good news after the resurrection.

But what happens to us when we offer God our all? Ernest Hemmingway has a line in one of his books that says, "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." As Christians, we believe that it is only through giving our all to God, offering to God all ourselves even our wounds as Christ did (to God and to his disciples), then God takes us and makes us a new creation, resurrected and remade and strong at our broken places.

In that way we become both believers and witnesses to the resurrection in our own lives and those who walk this way with us, and we become evangelists of the good news of God's salvation in our words and even more importantly in our very being.

ECW Spring Conference

2010-04-10T18:33:00.001-07:00

Today was my last day as chaplain to the Diocesan ECW (Episcopal Church Women). Giving it up was a decision that I wrestled with as I weighed the distance to travel, my responsibilites in my new parish and other diocesan commitments, the needs of my young family, and the many gifts that I receive from that work and that community.

This weekend, I got to spend time with the officers, many of whom have been in leadership since I began five years ago; I also got to spend time with some members of my former flock in McComb/Magnolia. As was to be expected, I stayed up way too late with them (and may have had a little more to drink that I otherwise would have), and we swapped stories of our lives and the people that we know and love together. I asked them for advice about my children, particularly my son's newfound skill of always putting his hand down his diaper, and I received multiple stories to illustrate that there's really nothing I can do about that and finally the sage words: "Oh, honey. He's a boy! They all do that!"

We also shared many stories of the fabulous Jeanne Barkley, about how she once left her bra on the table in a restaurant as a tip and about the outrageous things she would say and her amazing zest for life. We had some quiet moments that were our unspoken acknowledgement of how much we miss her presence in this life, and then we'd laugh some more about all the crazy stuff we did with her.

In addition to the community of ECW, my other favorite part of my time with them has been this. Never in my life in the church have I been anwhere else where we can pray the words of the Eucharist in all female voices. The first time I experienced, I was almost brought to tears, it was so powerful to be among a company of all women and being the church to and with one another.

I also like that on the occasions that we would have male speakers come in for our retreats, they seemed to soften in this company of all women, in ways that men in mixed company just don't act.

Tonight, I give thanks for my time with all of them, how they have helped shape me as a priest, as a person, and as a woman.

The Day of Resurrection 2010

2010-04-04T03:49:00.000-07:00

The Day of Resurrection Year C
April 4, 2010
In her book Practicing Resurrection, Nora Gallagher recalls a conversation with her friend Harriet who told her about sitting in church at the National Cathedral in Washington. During the course of a boring sermon the priest asked the congregation in unctuous tones, "Now what do you really want for Christmas this year?" "I nearly rose from my pew," she told Nora. "I was gathering myself up until I looked over at my sister who was giving me That Look, and I sat back down, but what I wanted to do was stand up and call out, 'I would really like to believe in the resurrection.'"
For many of us, this is also the deepest desire of our hearts, why we are here this morning. We want to believe in the resurrection.
Our gospel reading for today provides us with some help in this. I love all the resurrection stories, but this one may very well be my favorite because it truly captures the widest array of human emotions. First, there’s Mary Magdalene, arriving alone in the dark to discover the open grave. So she runs to the disciples, to Peter and the other, the one whom Jesus loved, and she reports to them what she thinks she has found. Then Peter and the other take off running toward the tomb to see for themselves, and this seems to dissolve into a contest, with the beloved disciple outrunning Peter and arriving first, but then Peter acting with his characteristic boldness and being the first person to actually enter the tomb. They look around and see nothing, except the empty grave clothes, with the head covering rolled neatly by itself (obviously the Risen Christ’s mother taught him well).
With this evidence, the gospeller tells us, the beloved disciple believed, but they did not yet understand. Then, the two men just leave and go home (“Nothin’ to see here, folks; go about your business…. “) leaving Mary Magdalene alone in her grief, weeping outside the tomb. As she happens to peer into the darkness of the tomb with the sun coming up behind her, she sees two angels, bookmarking the empty space, and they ask her why she is weeping. She seems unfazed by the appearance of the messengers of God and replies with a hopelessness and a despair that echo across the centuries, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”
After she says this, she turns away from the angels to see the Risen Christ, (who had laid aside his grave clothes and picked up some more clothes somewhere else, perhaps borrowing some from the gardener) and she does not recognize him. When he questions her, she pleads to know where Jesus’s body has been put, and finally, Jesus calls her name and she recognizes him. She goes to embrace him and he will not let her saying that the story is not yet complete and there is work still to be done, and he instructs her to go tell the disciples what she has witnessed. So she goes back to them and announces with joy, “I have seen the Lord,” and she tells them what Jesus has said to her.
This is what strikes me most about this story. There’s a lot of racing around, people trying to figure out what’s going on and what they can do, but in the face of the empty tomb, there is nothing for them to do. Peter goes home; Mary Magdalene stands outside, lost and grieving, sick at heart; and the beloved disciple believes even though he does not yet understand.
In the depths of her grief and desolation, Mary hears the Risen Christ call her name and in that one word that symbolizes their care for each other, the trust and the hope that she had placed in him that she believed was dead with him in the tomb, in hearing him speak her name, her hope is restored, and he returns her joy to her. Her belief in the resurrection is a pure gift of his presence and his call to her. Then he sends her out to tell the story, to spread the good news, for the story is still unfinished; he sends her out to spread the good news and to resurrect hope in the hearts of the disciples and people everywhere, to proclaim that death no longer has the ultimate power over us, that betrayal and murder, despair and desolation will not triumph in the face of the power of God’s love. The beloved disciple walks away from the empty tomb with no more evidence than the absence of a body and the empty grave clothes. And yet, he chooses to believe in the resurrection, even though he does not yet understand. Peter does even have that. He walks away from the empty tomb, and until he actually encounters the risen Christ later in the story, what he has is the belief of others, the faith of the others, the stories of the others. He must trust the choice of the beloved disciple to believe; he must trust the story of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with the risen Christ and her joy at hearing him call her name. Each one of these three disciples has a very different way that they believe in the resurrection.
This is why I believe in the resurrection. Because I choose to believe, to stake my life on it, even though I do not understand; Because I have heard the Risen Lord call my name through the depths of my sorrow and despair, and in his call, I have found my hope returned to me, and because I have witnessed this in the lives of others, again and again and again. Because the stories of our scriptures tell of an almost unbelievable transformation in the lives of Jesus’s disciples after his resurrection; those who were so afraid and misunderstanding become enlivened and emboldened, and they work ceaselessly to spread the good news throughout all the world; and because I have seen others’ whose lives have been radically transformed in a similar fashion: those who were once enslaved by the powers of darkness through greed, drug addiction, self-centeredness, and corruption have been called by name, forgiven and sent out, transformed, to do the work of the Risen Christ in this world.
And at the very heart of what we call belief is really hope: hope that Jesus really is who we’ve been saying he is over the course of all these years, hope that he has in fact proven once and for all that God’s love is stronger than sin and death, that he has, in fact, destroyed death, and that we will be included in that salvation.
I have stood beside the bed of those who were dying, and I watched as they gently entrusted their lives to hope in the resurrection; I have sat across my office from those who are wrestling with painful decisions, and I watched them discover peace through hope in the resurrection. I have been in the depths of despair, and through an unspoken prayer have been regifted with a small light of hope in heart that is hope in the resurrection.
Sometimes it is a gift of the Risen Lord, and sometimes it is a choice, the sheer force of our will, this belief, this hope. Sometimes we must rely on the choice and gift, the belief and the hope of others with whom we walk those whom we trust and love, and that is enough to carry us through. But above all, that is why we are here today. To walk this way with one another, to sing and rejoice together, to believe for and with one another, to jingle our bells, to sing, and to say again and again, in hope: “Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!”