26th Sunday after Pentecost--Proper 28C

26th Sunday after Pentecost—Proper 28C November 17, 2013 I want to share with you something that not many people know about me: I love to read post-apocalyptic fiction. Adult, young adult, you name it; for some strange reason, I love to read stories about how society has completely broken down—due to wars or natural or man-made disasters—and as a result, society and government become oppressive and corrupt, and the hero or heroine fights to restore justice and peace and harmony. Most of these stories are very much about good versus evil in a world that has completely fallen apart, and the good usually triumphs. Not too long ago, I read a news story online about one for the more popular, young adult, post-apocalyptic series—The Hunger Games. (You may have heard of these or even read them; they’re in the process of making movies based on the books.) In this story, the districts have revolted against the government a century before, and their punishment is that every year each district has to hold a lottery to select a boy and a girl to send to fight other children in an arena. These children fight to the death until one is left remaining. The news story that I read stated that there was allegedly interest in building an amusement park based on this story. At first, I thought it was absolutely ridiculous, but then I started to understand the appeal of a place where, even though the world has gone horribly wrong, good still triumphs over evil. It’s something that I think we can all understand and relate to. All three scripture readings for today point to this reality. Each writer is dealing with what must seem like the end of the world; each writer must feel that they are living in a time after the apocalypse. The writer of Luke has seen the destruction of the temple and the end of peace at the hands of the Romans. The writer of Isaiah has seen the people of Israel taken into captivity and exile in the foreign land of Babylon. The writer of 2nd Thessalonians sees a community that is full of conflict and division as they wait anxiously for Jesus’s return and then dismay that is has not been fulfilled. Every generation has known the signs of the end times about which Jesus speaks. We have known the conflict and division that comes from wars and natural and man-made disasters. Just this past week, our world has been rocked by the news of the horrendous devastation in the Philippines from the typhoon. The estimate of dead continues to grow well beyond 10,000, and there is complete and widespread destruction. There is division and conflict in our own country about government spending and the Affordable Health Care Act. Even in our own lovely parish, we have seen signs of conflict and division as the Vestry has sought to have a conversation about whether or not we should pursue offering the liturgy for witnessing and blessing a life-long covenant or same sex blessing. For me, it has been the most difficult and challenging time in my 9 years of ordained ministry. I have witnessed conversations and encounters of open-heartedness and grace and I have witnessed conversations and encounters of hard-heartedness and meanness. I have been uplifted by the former and dismayed by the latter, and I have realized, once again, that most of us are a strange mix of both—depending on our best and worst moments. My brothers and sisters, in the midst of all this, I have grown so very weary. And then I read our reading from 2nd Thessalonians for this week, and it (and all the readings for this week) seemed to be an important reminder to me of the vocation and community of the people of God. “Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.” And that is really the heart of what we are trying to figure out here—what is right? One of the commentators writes about the gospel reading: “Suffering always means pain, disruption, separation, and incompleteness… ‘It can render us powerless and mute, push us to the borders of hopelessness and despair.’ The opportunity to testify during times of destruction is, in part, the audacity to muster courage in the face of fear, the boldness to speak in the face of suffering. Great suffering changes some people and defeats others, but for those who endure, their very souls are gained. Suffering provides an opportunity for those who have been changed to tell of their hope.”i The time has come for me to tell you of my hope and of what I believe it means to “do right”. I do not believe that homosexuality is a sin. I believe that God has created us all, called us good, and that sexuality is an important part of how God has created us. I do not believe in a God who would create people to be certain way and then condemn them for living into who God has created them to be. This may come as a surprise to many of y’all, but I am quite ambivalent on the issue of whether or not we should petition the bishop to offer same sex blessings here. Since General Convention of last year, I’ve had three different same sex couples, all who are or have been parishioners here, ask if I could perform this liturgy for them. But for me, at this particular moment in time, the liturgy has never been the most important thing. For me, doing what is right is more about living more fully into what it means for us to be an inclusive community, to truly try to live into our baptismal covenant of respecting the dignity of every human being and seeing in each other (and in all people) the image of God in which we have all been created. For so many people, the inclusivity of St. Peter’s has been why people come here and stay, and I have discovered that it is an important part of our identity and our mission—what makes St. Peter’s by-the-Sea different from other Episcopal churches on the Coast. But my brothers and sisters, I have learned from our process and this conflict that there is a very big difference between being an inclusive community and begrudgingly tolerating those who act differently than us. And for me, being an inclusive community is what it means for us to do what is right. It means bearing with one another in our differences. It means choosing love over division and meanness. It means recognizing that all of us are God’s children, longing to know and experience God’s love, and that God welcomes all of us to God’s table with those with whom we both agree and disagree. Doing what is right means recognizing that each and every one of us falls short of the glory of God; that there is no such thing as better and worse sin. Sin is what separates us from God and from each other. Doing what is right means following Jesus, who chose to be with people who were flawed and imperfect, who chose to minster to those who were on the fringes of society. It means following Jesus who challenged the religious system that sought to create a hierarchy of insiders versus outsiders, and it means modeling our lives on his example. I read an essay this week by a woman named Dierdre Sullivan titled “Always Go to the Funeral.” In this essay, Ms. Sullivan writes about how her father taught her to always go to the funeral and why. It gets to the heart of what it means to not grow weary in doing what is right. She writes, “‘Always go to the funeral’ means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don’t feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don’t really have to, and I definitely don’t want to. I’m talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn’t been good versus evil. It’s hardly so epic. Most days my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.”ii The reading from Isaiah today gives us a glimpse of a peaceable kingdom—where the lion shall lie down with the lamb and the serpent’s food shall be dust. It speaks of peace and fruitfulness and fulfillment for God’s people. And the most significant part is that this glimpse of the peaceable kingdom is not at all about what we do. It’s about what God does. All that we must do is trust that surely it is God who saves us; we must trust in him and not be afraid. But trusting God means trusting God, (and to an extent, trusting each other), and not relying on our own will. And in and with and through us, God will make of us a new creation. “Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.” i. from Feasting on the Word ii. www.npr.org Here are the readings for today: http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp28_RCL.html

The Sunday after All Saints'--baptismal letter

The Sunday after All Saints’ Day November 3, 2013 A letter to Marlee Curtis upon the occasion of her baptism. Dear Marlee, You are being baptized on a most special day, today. It is the Sunday upon which we commemorate the Feast of All Saints’ Day, one of the major feasts in the life of the church and one of the days when it is especially appropriate for a baptism. On this day, you are being baptized into Jesus’s death and resurrection. Your parents and godparents are accepting for you your status as a beloved child of God. They are promising that you will live your life in a certain way, as a follower of Jesus. And then, after you are baptized, we will hand one of your godparents your baptismal candle and I will say to you, “Marlee, receive the light of Christ.” And that’s really what this day is all about; it's about how you will let the light of Christ, the light of God’s love for you and for others, how you let that shine forth in the way that you live your life. We celebrate this Sunday after All Saints’ as a major feast because this Sunday is about how other people’s lives and lights have shined forth in this world and have made it and our lives better. As another writer puts it, “These days [around All Saints’] are haunted for me in a good way; they offer an occasion to remember, to reflect, and to offer thanks for those who have shaped my path by the path they walk. These days remind us that in the body of Christ, death does not release us from being in community with one another.”i Today, Marlee, you are being baptized into the body of Christ. All who have been baptized, going all the way back to the first followers of Jesus, are also baptized into Christ’s body and into Christ’s resurrection. Today, we remember that those who have died are and will always be still alive and united with us in Christ’s body. Their light still shines in this world in the way that their faith has shaped ours. And we are aware that this is also true for all of us who have also received the light of Christ (as you will do today). Our light, our faith, our lives have the power to shine brightly with the truth of God’s love and to shape the lives and the faith of others. (You are already doing this, sweet Marlee, as you come to this church every Wednesday with your grandmother, and you bring a sense of joy and hope and innocence to all of us with your presence among us.) So today, Marlee, before your baptism, I will invite those who want to come forward to light a candle, and to light it for those whose lights have shone brightly in their lives. And I will also tell them to make sure that they light the candle for themselves as well, for their Christ light is still shining and has the power to light another’s path for a season. And then we will baptize you, and I will give you your own candle to be added to the others. In it, may you remember all those who have come before you and who will come after you to shine the light of their faith in this world; and may you remember the power that your one light has now and always. Your sister in Christ, Melanie+ i.http://paintedprayerbook.com/

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.