22nd Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 24C

22nd Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 24C October 20, 2013 On this day that we are baptizing Bailey Lipps, I’m feeling called to preach about something that often strikes fear into the heart of many a faithful Episcopalian. It is something that each of us promises to do when we are being baptized (or, as in Bailey’s case, something our parents promised on our behalf), and it is something that we all promise to do over and over again when we renew our own baptismal covenant. Are you ready to hear what this terrifying thing is? It is prayer. Prayer is something that we all know that we should be doing; it is something that we know is important. And yet, most of us Episcopalians don’t even know where to begin. I had the good fortune of being taught to pray by my father (who is the son of a Methodist minister) and a Jewish rabbi, but many, many years as an Episcopalian have made even me a little rusty. But do not fear. I have good news. Listen to what our Book of Common Prayer has to say about prayer. (This is on page 856, if you want to follow along.) “What is prayer?” “Prayer is responding to God, by thought and by deeds, with our without words.” (read it again). It is so simple, and yet it can be so very profound in how we understand prayer and our own life in prayer. Our prayer is a response to God. God’s Holy Spirit is already at work in us, so that when we pray, we are responding to God; Paul writes that our very urge to pray is actually prompted by the Holy Spirit, which is already at work praying within us, interceding “with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 9:26). That takes a lot of pressure off of us, doesn’t it? God is doing the initiating, and even calling forth the response from our own souls, and all we have to do is to show up and be open enough to pay attention to it all! The theologian and writer Frederick Buechner writes about prayer: “Everybody prays whether he thinks of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else's pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even more strange than the world. According to Jesus, by far the most important thing about praying is to keep at it. The images he uses to explain this are all rather comic, as though he thought it was rather comic to have to explain it at all. He says God is like a friend you go to borrow bread from at midnight. The friend tells you in effect to drop dead, but you go on knocking anyway until finally he gives you what you want so he can go back to bed again (Luke 11:5-8). Or God is like a crooked judge who refuses to hear the case of a certain poor widow, presumably because he knows there's nothing much in it for him. But she keeps on hounding him until finally he hears her case just to get her out of his hair (Luke 18:1-8). Even a stinker, Jesus says, won't give his own child a black eye when he asks for peanut butter and jelly, so how all the more will God when his children . . . (Matthew 7:9-11). Be importunate, Jesus says—not, one assumes, because you have to beat a path to God's door before he'll open it, but because until you beat the path maybe there's no way of getting to your door. "Ravish my heart," John Donne wrote. But God will not usually ravish. He will only court.” (Originally published in Wishful Thinking) Prayer is about being deliberate and paying attention to the ways that God is already at work in our lives, and then offering to God all the stuff of our lives in response to that, with gratitude. The writer Anne Lamott has written that there are three prayers that she prays over and over again: “Help”. “Thanks”. And “Wow.” (I think perhaps some of you Ole Miss fans have had a recent experience of praying all three of these within the span of the game last night!) So the good news about prayer? It’s nothing to be intimidated by. Persistence is important, and above all, remember that it’s the deep prayer of your soul has already been initiated for you by God, and the Holy Spirit, or the God in you, is already responding. All we have to do is show up, and pay attention. “Help. Thanks. Wow!”

21st Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 23C

21st Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 23C October 13, 2013 In today’s gospel passage, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. He is in an in-between time and at an in-between place. He encounters 10 lepers who, according to the holiness code in Leviticus (the religious law), have been made outcasts because of their illness. And they cry out to him, asking him to have mercy upon them. He answers them by telling them to go show themselves to the priests (another part of the holiness code through which lepers can be evaluated and if found to be disease-free, then reinstated into the community). And the writer tells us that as they go, they are made clean. And one of them (a Samaritan—a bitter religious rival of the Jews), upon seeing that he is clean, turns back, falls at Jesus’s feet and thanks him. Jesus asks him where the others are, and then he tells him to get up and go on his way, that the man’s faith has made him well (or whole or even literally his faith has saved him.) Then Luke’s gospel continues with a passage that we don’t hear at all in this lectionary cycle, but I think is very important and informative of how we look at this little story. Luke writes next, “Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For in fact, the Kingdom of God is among you.” Could it possibly be that the Kingdom of God is uncovered or revealed in and through gratitude? Oscar Wilde once said, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” For us followers of Jesus (or followers of the Way, as the early Christians were called), we seek to uncover, to discover this Kingdom of God that is already among us. For us, it’s not about pie in the sky when you die. It’s about healing and wholeness and fullness of life here and now. It’s about living, not just existing. This little story from Luke’s gospel today shows us how the Samaritan leper was blessed not once but twice—once when he was healed with all the others and then a second time when he returned to give Jesus his thanks and praise. The Samaritan leper received not only the blessing of healing which all the other lepers received (simply by being in the right place at the right time?). But when he returned to give thanks to Jesus, he received the blessing that comes from recognizing blessing and giving thanks—the blessing of wholeness and even perhaps of salvation. In that way, this little story shows that gratitude is the difference between living and just existing. Another writer writes about this experience of the second blessing of gratitude in this way: “Have you ever noticed just how powerful it is not only to receive blessing but also to name it and give thanks for it? Maybe you’re at dinner with family or friends, and it’s one of those meals, prepared with love and served and eaten deliberately, where time just stops for a little while and you’re all caught up and bound together by this nearly unfathomable sense of community and joy. And then you lean over to another, or maybe raise your glass in a toast, and say, ‘This is great. This time, this meal, you all. Thank you.’ And in seeing and giving thanks, the original blessing is somehow multiplied. You’ve been blessed a second time. Or maybe you were at the Grand Canyon (or some other wonderful spot), taking in the beauty of the vista, when you lean over to your companion and say, “This is so beautiful. I’m so glad you’re here to share it with me.” And again, the blessing is multiplied and you’ve been blessed yet again. Thanksgiving is like that. It springs from perception -- our ability to recognize blessing -- and articulation -- giving expression, no matter how inadequate it may seem at the time, of our gratitude for that blessing. And every time these two are combined -- sight and word -- giving thanks actually grants a second blessing.”i And well, that’s easy to say, isn’t it, but not quite so easy to do, especially when the world seems to be falling apart around us. Only 5% of the population of our entire country is satisfied with the work that congress is doing in this stalemate and government shut-down that is affecting so many lives. Individuals are struggling—financially; folks are sick or unhappy with the way their lives are turning out. It is not always our natural inclination to be grateful. I can’t help but wonder what it cost the Samaritan to not follow Jesus’s instructions and proceed with the others to the priest but rather to return and give thanks. Was his gratitude so overwhelming and overpowering that he could not help but give thanks? Or was it because his mother had taught him to say thank you? I suspect it is the first, but the curious thing about gratitude is that it doesn’t really matter how we get there. We receive the second blessing of gratitude whether it is something that wells up within us or whether it is something that we are deliberate in seeking out. In his book Reflections on the Psalms, C. S. Lewis observed the connection between gratitude and well being. He writes, “I noticed how the humblest and at the same time most balanced minds praised most: while the cranks, misfits, and malcontents praised least. Praise always seems to be inner health made audible.” Most of us want to be happy and healthy and whole. So how we do this? How do we cultivate, how do we practice gratitude? What does it take to be grateful for the blessings and healings of our lives? It’s actually very simple. You can do this every morning to start your day or even multiple times throughout the day. Take a doodle card out of the pew in front of you (or any piece of paper will do). Take a few moments and think, right now, of 7 particular things—people, events, qualities, healings, gifts, even disasters—for which you are grateful (right now, in this moment). Write them down. (silence) How might things be different for you, for me, for us as a church, for our whole world, by our articulating often and loudly that gratitude? What happens inside when you give voice to that gratitude? At the offertory, you will be invited to come forward and place your thanksgivings in the collection bowls on the altar—your opportunity to thank God for those 7 good gifts in your life right now. (If you are not comfortable or able to come forward, then place your paper in the collection plate that the ushers will pass around). And then together, we will make Eucharist, thanksgiving, giving thanks to the Lord our God for all the good gifts God has given us. In conclusion, I will leave you with a quote from the medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart: “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was ‘thank you’ that would suffice.” i.David Lose from his blog: http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=2796

17th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 19C

17th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 19C September 15, 2013 A letter to Trace Cates upon the occasion of his baptism. Dear Trace, What a wonderful day for a baptism! As I shared with you previously, every Sunday is a feast day or celebration of the Lord’s Resurrection, and we can have baptisms on any given Sunday. But this Sunday is especially poignant for your baptism because of the way that your particular story intersects with the gospel reading chosen for today. In our reading, the righteous people are complaining to Jesus about the shady people that he is choosing to hang out with. In response to their complaints, Jesus tells them three parables, two of which we heard today. Which of you, he says to them, if you lost one sheep wouldn’t leave the 99 to go find the lost one, and then when you find it, wouldn’t you throw a big party to celebrate—costing much more than the one sheep is probably worth? And which of you, he continues, if you lost a coin wouldn’t exhaust all your time and energy until you found it, and then, once you found it, would throw a party for all your neighbors and friends, spending much more money than you had originally lost to celebrate its finding? Actually, I don’t know about you, but that probably is NOT what I would do in either case. It doesn’t really make much sense. So what is Jesus doing here? And then there’s the third parable in this series, told in response to the complaining of the religious folk. Jesus goes straight into that parable from our readings today saying, “There was a man who had two sons…” And he proceeds to tell his listeners how the younger son asks for his share of the father’s inheritance, runs off and squanders it. Until one day, when living in abject poverty, the son “comes to himself” and decides to go home and throw himself on his father’s mercy, admit that he really messed up his life. When the younger son returns home, he finds that his father is so overjoyed to see him, that even though he has squandered half of his father’s money, his father is going to throw him a huge party to celebrate his return. But the older son is bitter and jealous; he confronts the father, and he reminds the father that he is the one who has always been there at his father’s side—steady, responsible, dependable—and never once, did the father throw him a party. The father gently reminds him that all of the father’s wealth and resources has been his all along; he could have had a party anytime he wanted; and the father invites the older son to lay aside his hardness of heart and to come join the party. Three parables. Three parties. Especially appropriate on this day of your baptism! Because in your baptism today, you are acknowledging that even though God has named and claimed you as God’s beloved since your creation, still you have been somewhat lost, searching, longing for a place to call home. And God has searched for you, pursued you, waited night after night on the front porch staring into the distance, anticipating the time when you would “come to yourself” and return home to God. And when we renew our own baptismal vows with you today, we remember this about ourselves as well. No matter how long we may have been here, we all at some point, have been lost. And God has pursued us, found us, restored us, and celebrated us. Trace, today you make your promises to God that you will live your life a certain way, that you will open your heart to God and to others, and that you will return to God when you fall away or fall short. We renew these promises with you because it is the way that we also return to God after we have fallen away or fallen short. And then we will promise you that we will be your companions on the way; we will walk with you in your life with God, and you will walk with us, because the Christian life is not a solitary one. And then—we the Church are entrusted with the joyful task of throwing God’s party! It is the purest mission and calling of the church, a group of sinners who gather together and throw parties to celebrate the grace and love and forgiveness of God that we have received, and to invite others to join us in this celebration; because God’s grace and love and forgiveness is offered to all. Call it a homecoming of sorts! For each of us has been lost, and each of us has been searched for, pursued, anticipated, and restored by God in and through Jesus Christ. And in our baptism and every day after, may we have the grace to say, “Yes! Thank you, God!” Happy baptism day, Trace! And welcome home! We are so very glad that you have come to join us in God’s party! Your sister in Christ, Melanie+

16th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 18C

16th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 18C September 8, 2013 Sacrifice—it almost has become a dirty word in our culture. Even the definition from Miriam-Webster is kind of scary: “an act or offering to a deity of something precious; especially the killing of a victim on an altar.” Yikes! Our lectionary crafters and the gospel writer of Luke seem to be unrelenting in confronting us with a Jesus who’s words are extreme, uncomfortable—words about hating those whom we hold dearest, words about counting the cost, taking up crosses, and yes, that unpopular notion of sacrifice. Even in the church, where we talk about Jesus’s sacrifice every single week, sacrifice has become almost taboo. Feminist and liberation theologians remind us that for a long time the concept of sacrifice was used to subjugate people—especially women and poor people and people of color, and the people who weren’t in power. We were told that it was our Christian duty to sacrifice, and for many, many years the church wielded that notion over people. Now, the church is afraid to talk about sacrifice because 1. It’s not popular, and 2. People have so much competing for their time and attention and resources, and we fear that such an unpopular notion will drive them away, back out into a world that eagerly touts the joys of easy convenience and instant gratification. But you know what? I’m not afraid of talking about sacrifice with you or with others because I see you, and you are already sacrificing. I see you parents who give up almost every weekend you have in order for your children to enjoy the benefits of competitive sports. I see you who work grueling hours at jobs that do not feed your soul so that you may have the money and the resources to do what you need to do. I see you older folks who live on fixed incomes and sometimes have to choose between food and medicines at the end of some months, or those of you who must choose what you are able to do and accomplish within the growing limits of your physical capabilities. I see you who wake up at ungodly early hours of the day to exercise; I see you who are attentive to what you put into your bodies in an effort to lose weight or to be healthy. And of course, being a part of a community such as the church often means choosing between our own ideologies and the needs of others. Yes, you all know much of sacrifice already. And why is it that you are making these difficult choices? It is because certain things, people, relationships are important to you. We sacrifice for what is most important or most valuable to us. Over and over again in the gospels, Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of God is here now, that eternal life begins now. This means that being a Christian—a follower or disciple of Jesus on the way isn’t about what we think or “believe.” It is about how we live and love and order our priorities, and it is about what we allow to possess us. “You sacrifice according to your priorities. And in today’s [gospel] passage Jesus is saying the Kingdom of God he proclaims and the kingdom life he exemplifies should be a priority, actually be the priority. So maybe we should contemporize Jesus’s parable and ask, ‘What parent wouldn’t count the cost before signing up for the traveling soccer team, and what new employee wouldn’t consider whether she is willing to work every weekend her first year?’ You are already making sacrifices in your lives, and Jesus tells us that Christian discipleship or the Christian life calls for the same.”i I’ve told you before that I had a rich experience a few months ago when I heard Bishop Greg Rickel speak about stewardship at Gray Center back in May. I was completely confronted when he talked about the incredible importance of telling the truth in our churches. He said to us, “How often do we say, “We didn’t have enough money, time, resources, energy to do_________(whatever, you fill in the blank). But the truth is really that we didn’t choose to spend our money, time, resources, energy to do that. And I was caught short, confronted by this important difference because I know this is so very true for my own life. How many times do I say in one week, “I didn’t have enough time to do that.” When really the truth is that I didn’t choose to spend my time that way. So the question that Jesus is inviting all of us to examine this week, with his challenging demanding words is “How do I choose to spend my life?” And the reality of God is that God takes whatever small portion of our lives that we offer to God and God multiplies it one thousand-fold. God accepts our scarcity and transforms it into abundance because abundance and fecundity is God’s nature. But deep down we still know that we have chosen to offer God only this tiny bit, when we have so much more that we are choosing to spend elsewhere. And we are ashamed, and that becomes even more of an impediment that we put between us and God. Jesus calls us beyond that. He calls us to examine our lives, the use of our time, those priorities and people we hold most dear. He invites us to say honestly—not I didn’t have enough…but rather this is what I chose. But he also invites us to sacrifice more for our relationship with God—because no matter how important these other people and priorities might seem to us now, when all pieces of this life are stripped away, it is only this—your uniquely created self and God. That is the most important thing there is. That is the essence of eternal life. So this day and this week, may we all be unafraid to speak the truth about our lives. To count the cost. To look at our lives, our calendars, our commitments, our titles, our relationships, our material goods, our checkbooks and to really and truly examine how we are spending our lives. And then let us prayerfully consider what God is inviting us to sacrifice in order to grow more deeply and more fully in the knowledge and love of God and in living a life of following Jesus. i. David Lose from his blog www.workingpreacher.org

14th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 16C

14th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 16C August 25, 2013 There was a crooked man who walked a crooked mile. He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile. He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse, And they all lived together in a little crooked house. I had the good fortune this week of getting to discuss today’s gospel reading with some of my colleagues here at St. Peter’s as we met for the Coast Clericus clergy gathering. One of our retired priests mentioned how today’s gospel reminds him of this little nursery rhyme from his childhood. I’ve been thinking about that all week, and I’ll speak more about that momentarily. In our gospel reading for today from Luke’s gospel, we see Jesus teaching in the synagogue on the Sabbath. While there he encounters a “crooked woman” one who has been bent over for 18 years. Jesus calls out to her, without her asking him for anything, and he tells her that she is healed from her crookedness. But then the leader of the synagogue starts up a fracas, about how Jesus has broken the commandment of not doing work on the Sabbath, and Jesus affirms the value of the woman and her need and right to be healed, despite how other people might interpret the law. Today’s story is interestingly situated. It falls in between the parable of the fig tree whose focus is on repentance, and the parable of the mustard seed and the leaven which are about the Kingdom of God and how to address discouragement or fear about what we feel we have when we believe we have failed. So what exactly is the word that is being spoken by this particular story that is situated between a call for repentance and an insight into the Kingdom of God? Another colleague talked about how we always have the temptation of reading the gospel stories and imagining that we are right there on Jesus’s side. But in this story, it is important for us to imaging ourselves on the side of the leader of the synagogue. The story of the crooked woman’s healing is an invitation to re-imagine and revision all the rules that we cling so tightly to through the light of Jesus’s compassion. “There was a crooked man who walked a crooked mile. He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile. He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse, And they all lived together in a little crooked house.” One of the truths that Jesus proclaims that has the capability of unbinding us all, is that each and every one of us lives with our own crookedness. As the nursery rhyme puts it, we are often drawn to be with and live with and worship with those whose crookedness matches our own, and we all live together in our little crooked house and are completely content. But then we encounter someone who is crooked in a different way than us—maybe she is a crooked woman in the synagogue, maybe it is someone who comes to church who doesn’t act how we think they should act…then we get all upset about their crookedness, paying absolutely no mind to our own. My friends, the good news is this. The light of Jesus’s compassionate judgment shines on each and every one us, and if we will pay attention, he will show us the ways in which we are crooked. Just like the woman in the synagogue, Jesus calls out to us and heals us of our crookedness before we even ask. And that healing often occurs when we bump up against someone else’s crookedness that is different from our own. It is why we, in the church, so desperately need each other, and especially need people who are different from us. Jesus uses each of us in the healing and the transformation of each other, if we but open our hearts up to it. So today, we are going to have extra time of silence after this sermon, in which I invite you to pray and ask Jesus to shine his compassionate judgment upon your own crookedness. When we get to the confession of sins in just a few moments, we will also have more time for you to prayerfully lay that crookedness down at Jesus’s feet. And when you think to judge someone else for their crookedness, remember that each of us lives quite happily in our own crooked house, and God loves each and every one of us too much …to let us stay there.

13th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 15C

13th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 15C August 18, 2013 Luke 12:49-56 Jesus said, "I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law." He also said to the crowds, "When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, `It is going to rain'; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, `There will be scorching heat'; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" Let me just start out by saying that I do not like this reading from Luke’s gospel today, and I really did not want to preach on it. I do not like to think of a Jesus who is invoking fire and promising division and conflict. We have enough division and conflict in the world, in our everyday lives, Jesus, thank you very much! We come to church in search of peace and harmony! Just what are you trying to do to us? Well, let’s think about this for a minute before we get all panicky. Maybe Jesus has a perfectly good explanation for being so snarky! In this portion of Luke’s gospel, Jesus has ‘set his face toward Jerusalem.’ He knows where he is going and what is going to happen there. As we say in our modern way, “He is stressed!” He is wrestling with the subjugation of his will and desire for survival to God. He is surrounded by people who just don’t get it, and he is preparing to place himself in the intersection between fear and hope, between hatred and love. He knows that it will be incredibly painful and heartbreaking and lonely. When Jesus talks about the conflict that following him brings to families, he is undermining the most basic fabric of life in his time; the household or family is the most deeply valued social unit, around which all of society is ordered. By claiming to bring division and conflict instead of peace to that sacred institution, Jesus is threatening to undermine and obliterate the current social status quo. You know all those people who bemoan the undermining of traditional family values? Well, that is exactly what Jesus is about in the gospel reading for today. So what is a preacher with a husband and two kids, a rector who is charged with the care of the household of the church supposed to make of this troubling passage and this troubling Jesus? My dear ones, we in this parish find ourselves to be in one of these conflicted times that Jesus predicts for people who follow him. (Interestingly enough, I have discovered that these conflicted times most often occur here in the height of hurricane season, when people here are at our most anxious.) Over the past-almost four-years that I have been your priest, we have seen tremendous changes. Our average Sunday attendance, the best predictor of church growth has been steadily climbing and is higher now than it has ever been. Our giving has been steadily increasing, and last year saw the first year since 2007 that we ended the year with a budget surplus as opposed to about a $20,000 deficit, and that is thanks to your gratitude and generous response in your giving and thanks to a new creativity among the vestry that I have never witnessed or experienced in any other church I’ve been a part of. We are doing more things, offering more programs, formation offerings and opportunities to engage in ministry than at any other time in the life of the church. New people are coming; some are just showing up, being led here by the Holy Spirit; others are being invited by you because you are excited about being a part of this faith community and you are offering the words to your friends that harken all the way back to Jesus’s words of invitation to his first disciples, “Come and See!” I strongly believe that we as a church are growing more and more into who God is calling us to be. Yet in the midst of this change and growth and new life, we are experiencing conflict. Change is hard for many people; while some rejoice as St. Peter’s by-the-Sea becomes a more diverse and inclusive community, others feel challenged and conflicted in encountering people who are different from them. What once felt like a closely connected family for some now feels alarmingly unfamiliar (and maybe more than a little scary and even dangerous). So a handful of people have left—both recently and over the last couple of years. And it is heartbreaking and maybe a little frightening to see people leave who are our friends, people who have worshipped in these pews with us and broken bread with us and given money and untold hours of their lives in ministering beside us over many years; they are people who I both love and respect. Sadly, it was their choice to leave, and they have all been told that the doors here will always be open to them if they choose to return. I long, just as much as many of you, for this church to be a place of peace and harmony and to just be one big happy family. But perhaps those are not the most important aspects of who we are called to be as a community of faith and followers of Jesus. I read a quote from the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams where he was asked about spirituality and the life of faith, and he replied, “‘Speaking from the Christian tradition, the idea that being spiritual is just about having nice experiences is rather laughable. Most people who have written seriously about the life of the spirit in Christianity and Judaism spend a lot of their time telling you how absolutely bloody awful it is.’ Williams argued that true spirituality was not simply about fostering the inner life but was about the individual's interaction with others."i So even while I find Jesus’s words today to be a source of deep discomfort for me, they are also indicating that here and now, we are bumping up against the gospel, the good news. Jesus reminds us that the work of the Christian life and the work of the church is not toward peace and comfort and contentment. He reminds us that we are baptized not into a family but into his body—the very body which he prepares to hand over to be crucified—killed, murdered, dead—so that all may experience the transformation and the new life that can only come with resurrection. My brothers and sisters in Christ, we are not called to be a family. We are not called to be peaceful; we are not called to be happy; we are not called to be content. We are called to be transformed! And transformation often includes a refining fire that burns off the parts that hold us back, make us impure. It may not be easy or comfortable, but it may very well be the most life-giving, Spirit and grace-filled work that we ever do together here. We are called to be the body of Christ which means we are not all the same. We come from a variety of backgrounds, bringing a variety of gifts. Some of us have been Episcopalians our whole lives (or at least it seems that long) and have a deep ownership in this church, having helped rebuild it from the rubble; some of us have been so deeply wounded by other churches that we can only marvel that we have been able to find a church where we feel at home. And some are somewhere in between the two. We have so much to learn from each other, and there is room for everyone at God’s table. I read an interview recently with the Rev. Lillian Daniel who has recently written the book When Spiritual But Not Religious is Not Enough. In the book and the interview, she is going after people who talk about being spiritual but not religious, but her words are also an important part of the life of the church and an important reminder of the reality of why we gather week after week to worship together. She says, “Any idiot can find God alone in the sunset. It takes a certain maturity to find God in the person sitting next to you who not only voted for the wrong political party but has a baby who is crying while you’re trying to listen to the sermon. Community is where the religious rubber meets the road. People challenge us, ask hard questions, disagree, need things from us, require our forgiveness. It’s where we get to practice all the things we preach.”ii My brothers and sisters, we need to practice what we preach, here and now. It is time for us to stop talking about each other and to talk to each other. I wrestled with God mightily about whether or not I was going to preach this sermon, and well, I guess you see who won… It is my hope that rather than serving to emphasize division and conflict among us, this may be the beginning of an opportunity to have honest, open, respectful conversation about how we, all together, will be the body of Christ and do his work of loving, healing, and reconciling in this place. I.http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/15/rowan-williams-persecuted-christians-grow-up ii.http://jonathanmerritt.religionnews.com/2013/08/13/answering-the-spiritual-but-religious-an-interview-with-lillian-daniel/#sthash.BYS1QeYk.dpuf

11th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 13C

11th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 13C August 4, 2013 “Once, with great sadness, a lawyer who was on the brink of retirement told [someone] that he had spent his career in the midst of fights over inheritance that occur between siblings. And really, he said, they are fighting over their parents’ love. So the pain that Luke remembered in the short plea, ‘tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me’, is deep and ongoing among us. Luke remembers Jesus using the moment to define greed (the storing up of resources) as the opposite of living richly toward God.”i The theologian and scholar Walter Brueggeman says that “greed is born out of the idea of scarcity and scarcity is born out of anxiety and all three are acted upon in an abundant world. Abundance is denied, not trusted, forgotten in our culture.”ii I had a spiritual director once who used to say to me, “If you scratch the surface of anger, there is always something underneath.” I have learned over the course of time in paying attention to my own inner life and in walking with other people through their own lives of faith, that more often than not, that “something underneath” the anger is anxiety. So what are we supposed to do with our anxieties? The Franciscan priest Richard Rohr had a meditation this very week (on the day that I needed to hear it most) about where anxiety comes from and how people of faith deal with it. (Note that Rohr is heavily influenced by Carl Jung, which is why he uses some of the particular language that he uses in this meditation.) He writes, “Only the great self , the True Self, the God self can carry our anxieties. People who don’t pray basically cannot live the Gospel, because the self is not strong enough to contain and reveal our delusions and our fear. [He says that he is most often quoted for this line:] “If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it.” “Always someone else has to suffer because I don’t know how to suffer; that is what it comes down to. Jesus, you could say, came to show us how to suffer, how to carry ‘the legitimate pain of being human’ as C.G. Jung called it. Beware of running from yourself and your own legitimate suffering which is the price of being a human being in a limited world.”iii Both this week and last week, our lectionary has given us readings from the prophetic book of Hosea as our Old Testament reading. Hosea is one of the minor prophets who is speaking to his own people, the people of the Northern Kingdom after Israel divided in half. And Hosea is speaking during a time of great chaos and turmoil and anxiety. The Northern Kingdom at this point in history is at war with Assyria and in virtual anarchy. Hosea is called by God to take a prostitute as his wife (which we heard in last week’s reading), and eventually Gomer leaves him. But Hosea brings her back publicly after her infidelity. And this relationship with her is used as the image of the relationship between God and God’s people who have been unfaithful. Overall, the book of Hosea is quite tumultuous and speaks heavily about the ruin that is coming to Israel. But our reading for today is so very poignant; written from God’s perspective, we see the cost of God’s love. We see God’s memory of God’s child growing through the years, how God has observed and cared for God’s people. It is beautiful, nurturing language: “it was I who taught them to walk, I took them in my arms; but they did not know I healed them. I led them with the cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bend down to them and fed them.” And God knows the peoples’ anxiety, and God knows that disaster is coming. And we who often ask “how can God allow such horrible things to occur” (in our lives, in our world), should note that God asks this question of Godself no less than four times: How can I…” do this? And the answer is that God’s heart recoils and God’s compassion is kindled. God remembers Godself with the words, “for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” It is this God whom Jesus reveals and to whom we are invited and challenged to be rich toward—a God who is steadfast and loving, the Holy One in our midst. So what does it mean to be rich toward God? Being rich toward God isn’t about money, although money can certainly be a part of it. It’s about how we deal with our anxiety and our suffering; being rich toward God is about how we are in relationship with God and with each other. The writer of Colossians talks about this in the verses just after the ones we read this morning (in verses 12-17). It says that those who are rich toward God treat others with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. They bear with one another and forgive each other; they clothe themselves in love which binds everything together in perfect harmony. The peace of Christ rules in their hearts so that they are truly the one body to which they are called. They are thankful and proclaim their gratitude to others…It is the difference between being self-actualized and self-absorbed; it is the difference between being driven by anxiety versus being driven by hope, and it is the good news to which we are called this week. And so this is our particular good news in this particular place. Part of what it means for us to be a resurrection people. It means we trust in God’s love for all people; we trust in God’s faithfulness; and we will not let ourselves be bound by our anxiety or our fear or our scarcity. It means that we continue to be a living witness to God’s abundance that is never diminished, even when it is shared. One of my favorite saints, Dame Julian of Norwich, had a revelation of the abundance of God’s love. And she came out of that mystical experience and uttered words that have helped anchor anxious souls back in God all across the centuries. She experienced God’s love, and she wrote, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and every last thing shall be well.” These words are set to a little song that I often sing to my children at bedtime and even sometimes to folks who are especially anxious. I believe I have sung it in this pulpit before. But I want you all to learn it today, because it is the work of the church—the proclamation of the gospel—to sing the good news in a world that is consumed with anxiety and scarcity and fear. And it is the work of people of faith to pray to God, to manage our own anxiety, and live richly toward God. So I teach you this song today, and I promise to sing it to you when you are anxious, and I will ask you to do the same for me, for that is part of what it means to be the church together. (I’ll sing it through one full time, and then you can pick it up as you are comfortable on the second or third time through.) All shall be well; and all shall be well; and every last thing shall be well. i.Written by Nancy Rockwell in her blog The Bite in the Apple. http://biteintheapple.com/rich-toward-god/ ii.Ibid. iii.Richard Rohr’s daily meditation for Thursday, August 1, 2013 from www.cac.org Here are today's readings: http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp13_RCL.html