Good Friday 2015

Good Friday—2015 There is a temptation that we face this day. It is understandable; our liturgy even seems to encourage it. Our temptation today is to think that this day, Good Friday, is about us. It is not. Good Friday is about God. As one Episcopal priest puts it, “The Bible is the love story between God and humanity.” It’s important to remember always, but especially today. Another saying, from a French parable, says that “the crucifixion is that moment when God’s heart falls out on the floor, and we trip on it.” In the Passion story from John’s gospel, we see a much more stoic Jesus than in any of the other gospels. This is a Jesus who knows exactly what is happening. This is a Jesus who “strides through the Good Friday passion account in divine and human majesty.” ( FOTW Theological perspective p 306). Jesus in John’s gospel utters three mysterious statements from the cross. “Woman here is your son. Here is your mother.” “I am thristy.” “It is finished.” Theologian Stanley Hauerwas, in his book Cross-Shattered Christ writes about this reticence saying, “…I believe the reticence of the Gospels as well as these spare words from the cross is not accidental. Instead, that reticence is a discipline given us by God to draw us into, to make us participants in, the silence of a redemption wrought by the cross. In the world as we find it—a world that seems to make belief in God some desperate irrationality, Christians are tempted to say more about what we believe than we can or should say…In his book Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles our Judgment, Rowan Williams observes that ‘God is in the connections we cannot make,” a wonderful remark that reminds us that our desire to say and know more than the silence scripture forces on us manifests our uneasiness with the mystery of a God who would be known through crucifixion.” (Hauerwas pp 39-40). Today we are invited to dwell for a while in silence, ‘in the mystery of God who would be known through crucifixion’. We contemplate the mystery that is the heart of God, fallen out on the floor for us to trip over today. We remember today that “mystery does not name a puzzle that cannot be solved. Rather mystery names that which we know, but the more we know, the more we are forced to rethink everything we think we know.” (Hauerwas p 15) In closing I leave you with an excerpt from the poem Mercy by John F. Deane (from which the title of Hauerwas’s book comes) to reflect upon: Mercy Unholy we sang this morning, and prayed as if we were not broken, crooked the Christ-figure hung, splayed on bloodied beams above us; devious God, dweller in shadows, mercy on us; immortal, cross-shattered Christ— your gentling grace down upon us. (Taken from Stanley Hauerwas, Cross-Shattered Christ (p. 10). The poem appears in Deane's book Manhandling the Deity.)

The Fifth Sunday in Lent Year B

5th Sunday in Lent—Year B March 22, 2015 One of my favorite movies growing up was The Princess Bride, a cult classic for my generation. Many of us could quote whole portions of dialogue from the movie, and I find, even now, after not having watched it in many years, that certain lines stick with me. This week, I couldn’t help remembering an exchange between Princess Buttercup and the man in black, a mysterious stranger who has stolen her from her captors but whose motives are yet unclear. They are talking about Buttercup’s one true love, Wesley, whom she lost, and the man in black mocks her. Buttercup replies, “You mock my pain!” and the man in black responds sharply “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” Another well known writer, M. Scott Peck captures this in the opening lines of his book The Road Less Traveled. He writes, “Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.” Both of these quotes get at the question that I hear in our readings for today. It is the question of suffering. Are these two understandings of life Christian in their understanding of the nature of suffering? Are we just supposed to grin and bear it when it comes to suffering? How do we deal with suffering as people of faith? What do we do with all of this? Our scriptures for today provide as many questions about suffering as they do answers, unfortunately. In the Jeremiah reading, we see the prophet offering words of hope and good news to a people who are experiencing great suffering. “This text is situated in a season of failure in ancient Israel. The city of Jerusalem has been conquered and burned, the temple has been destroyed, the monarchy has been terminated, and the leading citizens deported into exile. This all came about, says the poet, because Israel broke the old covenant of Mt. Sinai. Over a long period of time Israel refused the commandments of Sinai. Israel did not take justice seriously, and did not ground its life in the God of the Exodus. And so, in covenantal perspective, came the judgment of God.”i Now they are suffering greatly. The Hebrews reading talks about Jesus’s suffering, how he had to learn obedience “through what he suffered and having been made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him…” I’ll just go ahead and tell you that this is theologically problematic for me. Thankfully, I read an essay on this reading that helped me engage it in a more helpful way. The writer gives a different perspective noting that “these are attempts to make sense of what otherwise could be a senseless death, not attempts to ascribe divine necessity to the crucifixion. To say that Jesus learned obedience through suffering is not to say that God willed Jesus’ suffering, nor that suffering was part of the divine plan. It is only to say that the suffering of Jesus is not utterly meaningless. God worked through it for a greater purpose.”ii It reminds me of one of my favorite parts of scripture, when in the Joseph story in the Old Testament, after Joseph is reunited with his brothers who sold him into slavery and they are afraid that he will seek retribution, he tells them basically, “What you meant for evil; God meant for good.” Finally, there is the gospel reading for today. It’s a curious story that takes place in the middle of the Passover in Jerusalem and is preceded by events such as Jesus’s raising of Lazarus, Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet, and the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The crowds of people form to hear and see Jesus even as others plot to destroy him. These two Greeks show up in the midst of all this and tell Philip who then tells Andrew that they want to see Jesus. We don’t know if they ever get to actually see Jesus because Jesus answers his disciples by saying that now is the time for him to be glorified, and he goes on to speak about his own suffering. Do we worship a God that would demand suffering in order to save all of humanity? I find that incommensurate with the God whom Jesus reveals time and time again. What I think Jesus is wrestling with here, as all of humanity wrestles, is how to find meaning in suffering. And that is really the crux of the issue. There’s another way of putting these questions, a more positive, perhaps life-giving way that captures a little more of the hope to which we are called. It is the opening line of John O’Donohue’s book Anam Cara. He writes, “It’s strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you.” It hints at the truth that this life which will most definitely offer us a fair portion of pain and suffering also offers us a fair portion of beauty and meaning. Our work as humans is to not get so lost in the pain and suffering that we cannot seek and find the beauty and meaning, and that is where grace comes in. This week, I read a poem that somehow mangages to capture all of this. It is titled So? By Leonard Nathan So you aren’t Tolstoy or St. Francis or even a well-known singer of popular songs and will never read Greek or speak French fluently, will never see something no one else has seen before through a lens or with the naked eye. You’ve been given just the one life in this world that matters and upon which every other life somehow depends as long as you live, and also given the costly gifts of hunger, choice and pain with which to raise a modest shrine to meaning. Along with this poem, the Quaker writer Parker Palmer poses the following question about his own life to reflect upon “Using everything I have—including my own ‘costly gifts of hunger, choice, and pain’-what can I do today to keep raising the ‘modest shrine to meaning’ I’d like to create with my life?” Think about it this week and ask it of yourselves from time to time: “Using everything I have—including my own ‘costly gifts of hunger, choice, and pain’-what can I do today to keep raising the ‘modest shrine to meaning’ I’d like to create with my life?” In closing, here are some wise words from Brian Andreas in his story Out to Play. “No hurt survives for long without our help, she said and then she kissed me and sent me out to play again for the rest of my life.” i. Walter Bruegemann. http://www.odysseynetworks.org/on-scripture-the-bible/ferguson-forgiveness-jeremiah-3131-34/ ii. Feasting on the Word Commentary Year B Volume 2. Ed. Bartlett and BrownTaylor. Theological perspective by Martha L. Moore-Keish. P 138.

Third Sunday in Lent

Lent 3B March 8, 2015 We have a bit of a change this week, in our gospel readings. Today, our lectionary gives us a reading from the gospel of John (where we have been mostly traveling through Mark this year). Our reading for today from John is striking in its difference from Mark and the other synoptic gospels. Today’s story is what is known as the cleansing of the temple by Jesus. In all the synoptic gospels, (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), this story comes at the very end of Jesus’ public ministry, and it is the last straw for the authorities, the impetus for Jesus’s crucifixion. But John’s gospel is different. In John, this story is at the very beginning of Jesus’s public ministry. It sets the stage for it, even. This is interesting because John’s gospel is the last of the four gospels to be written. It is written to a community who is living in a world after the temple in Jerusalem has been completely destroyed. Think about it. The heart and center of Jewish worship is no more. Where do they go to worship God? How do they worship without the temple? By placing this story at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, John is offering a commentary on that. “God is no longer available primarily, let alone exclusively, via the Temple. Instead, as John confesses in the opening verses of his account, Jesus invites us to experience God’s grace upon grace (1:17) through our faith in him. Given that John’s account was written well after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans, his insistence – and perhaps reassurance – to his community that they would find God’s mercy in Christ outside rather than inside the Temple makes practical as well as theological sense. And, to tell you the truth, I think it has the same potential today.”i One of my all-time favorite series of books is C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. In these books, Lewis tells of a mythical land called Narnia, a group of children who get to visit there from our world and have marvelous adventures and their encounters with the Christ-like lion figure in Narnia named Aslan. The protagonists for the first few books are a set of four siblings, who travel to Narnia together and have these adventures. But as the children grow older, Aslan tells them that they will no longer be able to return to Narnia. At the end of the third book, Aslan has this conversation with the two youngest of the four children—Lucy and Edmond. Lucy is distraught at the prospect of not seeing the beloved lion again, but he reassures her that she will see him in her own world. When she is surprised that Aslan is present in her world, he tells her that the whole reason for bringing her to Narnia for a time was so that, coming to know him well here, she would recognize him more easily there. This is part of why we come to church. It is to recognize God more easily when we encounter God out in the world and in our lives. But there is a flip-side to this as well. This past Wednesday, I did a teaching about spirituality and worship. In this teaching, I listed several practices to help make common worship more prayerful/spiritual. Listen to this first one: To worship God with greater ease, we must practice loving God every day of our lives. To see God in worship we need to see God in the everyday, and if we see God in the everyday then we can see God better on Sunday. Imagine, if you will, that you are in Grand Central Station at rush hour and you are scheduled to meet a friend that you haven’t seen in many years, but you don’t have a specific place to meet. This is what it is like when trying to love God only in and through worship on Sundays. What if, dear ones, the true work of the church is equipping her people to uncover God out in the world in our everyday lives? What in our parish, our worship, would we need to change to live more fully into this mission? Today, we’re going to do something a little different. We’re going to pass out index cards to everyone, and when I finish speaking, we are going to sit for a few minutes in silence. Then I want you to take your index card, and I want you to write upon it one place-out in your life in the world-where you will be mindful that you will be actively looking for God this week. It can be as general as your work or your home or more specific to your individual circumstances. (We Lemburgs are going to be doing the stressful work of moving this coming week. So, on my card, I’m going to write, “Looking for God in the chaos and confusion of moving with my family.”) After you complete your card, I want you to hold onto it. And when the ushers come around with the offering plates in a few moments, I want you to put your card in the plate—as an offering of your time and attention to God in the coming week. And then remember and do it. God’s grace is as present for you in your everyday lives as it is here, in this holy place. My prayer for you this week is that you may seek it out and find it. i. http://www.davidlose.net/2015/03/lent-3-b-igniting-centrifugal-force/

Spirituality and Worship teaching

Spirituality and Worship I. Spiritual but not religious. How many of you have heard someone ever say, “I am spiritual but not religious.” What do you think is meant by that? (I usually assume that means that they do not participate in organized religion, nor do they regularly attend worship or church). II. What is worship? How do you define the word “worship”? a. Worship—means to pay someone their due; the response of the creation to the creator b. Dennis Maynard’s chapter on worship—p. 37-38 “Additional definition of worship as it might apply to the Anglican Communion: ‘worship is the attempt to create an atmosphere in which we can know God’s love and make God’s love known.’ In the Episcopal church, ‘worship is the attempt to create an atmosphere in which we can know God’s love, and we can make God’s love known.’” c. How many of you have stories of how your parent’s became engaged or how you became engaged? What are key parts of these stories? That’s what we are doing when we are gathering together to worship God. III. Three characteristics of Episcopal worship A. Worship is a universal instinct. To worship is to be human and to be human is to worship. Worship is the consequence of not taking life and living for granted. It includes a sense of awe, amazement, and thanksgiving. B. In the Episcopal church, worship is not a spectator sport. It is an aerobic activity. The liturgy is what we all do together. (Anybody know what the word liturgy means—from its Greek roots? “the work of the people). The Holy Eucharist, the Liturgy, is a great drama. It’s a pageant. It’s a play in which we are all participants. There’s direction, movement, and purpose. These are all designed to inspire and uplift us. But we are not the audience. God is the audience. C. Through worship we are to lose ourselves in adoration and praise of God. We come to worship to empty ourselves so that God might make us full. If we have to concentrate on the very elements of worship, then we aren’t worshipping. I heard it once described this way: “if you have to count the steps, then you aren’t dancing.” IV. Book of Common Prayer: what binds us together in both prayer and belief. A. If you go to an Episcopal church, anywhere around the world, chances are that our worship will be very recognizable. B. Lex orandi lex credendi—we pray what we believe and we believe what we pray. We are not a dogmatic church where you have to believe a certain number of things to be Episcopalian. Our belief is all tied up in how and what we pray (and our prayer is all tied up in how and what we believe). V. Practices to make common worship more prayerful/spiritual. A. To worship God with greater ease, we must practice loving God every day of our lives. To see God in worship we need to see God in the everyday, and if we see God in the everyday then we can see God better on Sunday. B. We have certain responsibilities in worship. One of my pet peeves is when someone comes to me and says, “I’m just not being fed.” It makes me want to say to them, “Well, open your mouth because here comes the choo choo!” C. First responsibility is for those who are leading the worship. We have a responsibility to be well-prepared, and to understand that our purpose is not to entertain but to point away from ourselves and toward God. To lead others in worship, we leaders need to worship ourselves. (Presiding Bishop Frank Giswold used to tell clergy that we needed to be more than “technicians of the sacred.”) D. The people have a responsibility to one another. Worshipers must be tolerant of one another’s preferences. There is a tendency for all of us to value things according to our own subjective experience. If it was meaningful to me then it was a good thing. If it wasn’t meaningful to me, then it’s not a good thing. What is called for is worship tolerance. What is meaningful to one may not be so to another. We also have a responsibility to one another to participate in the worship. Say the responses, sing the hymns. (Talk about change in location of 8:00 service…) E. Finally, we have a responsibility to ourselves. We need to come to worship with a thirst for God. We need to come before God with anticipation and expectancy. When you come to worship, expect God to touch you, change you, be present with you at some point in that worship. And God will.

Lent 2B

Lent 2B March 1, 2015 Several years ago, when I was a brand new priest and a new mother, I became convinced that I was going to die. I’m not talking about the “remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” kind of knowing I was going to die. I felt like I had a premonition that I was going to die. It was horrible. I was so sad; I wrestled and argued with God, upset that there was so much left of my young life that I would not get to live. I thought about all the things I would never get to see my daughter do; all the moments I would not get to spend with my husband. Then one night, I was driving in a horrible storm, and I thought, “This is it. This is when I’m going to die.” But obviously it didn’t happen. What I realized, after I reached my destination and was then driving home later after the storm had passed is this. I had been walking with an older woman, a parishioner named Madeline as she was actively dying. It was one of the first people who I truly cared about in a parish who I was accompanying through hospice and death. And Madeline was not at all happy about dying. She railed against it, insisting that her 70+ years on this earth were not enough, praying to God for more time. And I just couldn’t understand it. In my youth (and probably shallow spirituality), I couldn’t understand or empathize with her. But after I came through the period when I was convince that I was going to die, I understood Madeline, and I could empathize with her in a way that I couldn’t before. Mark tells us in today’s gospel about how Jesus began to teach his disciples that “the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” Mark tells us that Peter takes Jesus aside and rebukes him, and (an interesting detail Mark gives us that I’ve never noticed) Jesus turns back to look at his disciples while he rebukes Peter, telling him that he is setting his mind on human things instead of divine things. It’s understandable. Peter doesn’t want to hear about his friend’s suffering and death. He doesn’t want to contemplate that change in all of their lives that Jesus seems to be predicting. Peter hopes that if they don’t talk about it, maybe it won’t happen. And interestingly enough, by including that detail of how Jesus turns to look at all the disciples while he rebukes Peter, Mark seems to tell us that all of the disciples (and maybe even the crowd that Jesus gathers with him to expound on his teachings) is indicted in Jesus’s rebuke. So what do we do with this? How does this affect our faith and how we live our lives? We, like Jesus’s disciples and the crowd, are indicted in Jesus’s rebuke. But what does that mean? This week, I picked up the book by the Francisan monk and Roman Catholic priest Richard Rohr titled Immortal Diamond: The Search for our True Self. In this book, Rohr writes about how in the shorter ending to Mark’s gospel, the disciples learn of Jesus’s resurrection and they run away and fear. The end. He writes about how this is really true for all people. Resurrection does not sit easily with us. We cling to old forms, old ways of being. Rohr writes, “Whether human beings admit it or not, we are all in love with—even addicted to—the status quo and the past, even when it is killing us. Resurrection offers us a future—dare I say a permanent future—but one that is unknown and thus scary. Humans find it easier to gather their energy around death, pain and problems than around joy. I know I do. For some sad reason, it is joy that we hold lightly and victimhood that we grab onto.” In the book, Rohr writes primarily about the ways that we can let go of our false self, who we think that we are that is all bound up in ego, to uncover (like an immortal diamond) the essence of our true self, who we are in God. He offers three components of the process for how we do that. The 1st has to do with recognizing something about the nature of God. He writes,“The goodness of God fills all the gaps of the universe, without any discrimination or preference… Grace is not something God gives; grace is who God is.” It is God’s grace, God’s very nature to keep all things God has made in life and love alive forever. And it is God’s grace that bridges the gap between light and dark, between death and life. The 2nd is about what our Christian tradition means by death itself. “Death is not just a physical dying, but going to full depth, hitting the bottom, going the distance beyond where I am in control, fully beyond where I am now.” Death is encountered in failure, in vulnerability, in shame, in heartbreak. In fact, any time we love fully, we are opening ourselves to death. “If we are honest, we acknowledge that we are dying throughout our life, and that is what we learn if we are attentive: grace is found at the depths and in the death of everything.” The 3rd has to do with death and resurrection. “When you go into the full depths and death, sometimes even the depths of your sin, you come out the other side—and the word for that is resurrection.” This is what Jesus is trying to teach Peter and the disciples and the crowds and all of us this week. Our encounters with God are not always easy and pretty. Sometimes God calls to us out of the depths of our failures and failings, and it is in those moments that we follow Jesus in the way of the cross through death and into resurrection. In closing I want to share with you a poem I read this week. It’s from a 14th century Middle Easter mystic named Hafiz although the translation is a contemporary one. It’s a little startling in its language and some of the images it uses for God, but it speaks to how this experience of the way of the cross that Jesus calls us to often feels when we are walking that way. Tired of Speaking Sweetly from "The Gift: Poems by Hafiz," translated by Daniel Ladinsky Love wants to reach out and manhandle us, Break all our teacup talk of God. If you had the courage and Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights, He would just drag you around the room By your hair, Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world That bring you no joy. Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly And wants to rip to shreds All your erroneous notions of truth That make you fight within yourself, dear one, And with others, Causing the world to weep On too many fine days. God wants to manhandle us, Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself And practice His dropkick. The Beloved sometimes wants To do us a great favor: Hold us upside down And shake all the nonsense out. But when we hear He is in such a "playful drunken mood" Most everyone I know Quickly packs their bags and hightails it Out of town. Rohr, Richard. Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self. Joessy-Bass: San Francisco, 2013, p xi Rohr, Richard. Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self. Joessy-Bass: San Francisco, 2013, p xix Rohr, Richard. Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self. Joessy-Bass: San Francisco, 2013, pp xx-xxi Rohr, Richard. Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self. Joessy-Bass: San Francisco, 2013, p xxi http://www.onbeing.org/blog/the-vivid-colors-of-real-life/7332

First Sunday in Lent Year B

First Sunday in Lent—Year B February 22, 2015 This First Sunday in Lent, we always have the story of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness. But because we are currently in Year B of the lectionary (reading) cycle, we have the gospel account today from Mark—short, stark, sparse, and to the point. Mark recounts how Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan; how he is claimed by God as God’s son, the Beloved, with whom God is well pleased. And Mark tells us that the same Spirit that anoints Jesus in his baptism then drives him out into the wilderness where he stays for 40 days, is tempted by Satan (which in Hebrew means “the adversary”), is hanging out with wild animals and is tended to be angels. That’s it. That’s all Mark gives us on Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness—not a lot when you think about all the detail that is found in Matthew and Luke’s accounts (including a variety of temptations and other specifics like dialogue between Jesus and Satan). But Mark’s scarcity of detail is interesting because with so little to work with, Mark leaves us lots of room for both questions and imagination in our conversation today. I have some questions I invite you to think about this morning in light of the gospel. I’ll leave some silence in between these so you can reflect on them, and even jot them down to think about over this coming week, if you want. 1. Where does temptation come from? Does it come from outside or inside of us? Can you identify a temptation that you have struggled with? (Perfectionism is one for me….) 2. What do you consider to be your biggest adversary right now? (For me, this is living with messiness and uncertainty when I really prefer for things to be well-planned and executed. It’s interesting how the first two answers for me are clearly related. Is that the case for you, too?). 3. What is the connection between baptism and wilderness and/or temptation? We dip our hand in the water of the font and make the sign of the cross on ourselves when we leave this place every week and go out into the world. What might that have to do with temptation or wilderness places? 4. What are the characteristics of wilderness places? In our world? In your life? When is a time when you’ve been in the wilderness (either literally or figuratively or both)? Today is also the day in the church when we celebrate Episcopal Relief and Development Sunday. We collect money for the helping arm of our church all through Lent in our little hope chests (or mite boxes as they used to be called). They we bring these back on Easter Sunday, and we send the money to ERD who mission is that of “healing a hurting world.” One of the pop-ups that came up on the ERD website when I was looking at it this week, reminded me of how they often will go and dwell with others in the wilderness of poverty or disaster when so many others cannot or will not go there. (Our own Mississippi Gulf Coast was a huge recipient of a great many funds from ERD after Hurricane Katrina. ERD helped provide a brand new facility for the soup kitchen in downtown Gulfport and purchased a house for the transitional shelter for families.) ERD’s pop-up that I read says, “Where others cannot reach, we go. Where others leave, we remain. Where others lose hope, we shine God’s light.” I wonder how much St. Columb’s can raise for ERD this Lenten season? If you are giving up something for Lent, would you consider putting the money for that in your ERD hope chest or writing a check to them? Could we raise $5000 do you think? That’s 250 people or families giving $20 at Easter. What do you think? If we at St. Columb’s could raise $5,000 this Lent for ERD, that is enough to pay for a well for a family who lives in the wilderness of lack of access to clean water. We could make a huge difference in the life of one family! As you ponder all these questions this week, I want to share with you an image and a meditation by Quaker writer Parker Palmer. It’s called Life on the Mobius Strip. “That curious object is a Mobius Strip. If you take your index finger and trace what seems to be the outside surface, you suddenly find yourself on what seems to be the inside surface. Continue along what seems to be the inside surface, and you suddenly find yourself on what seems to be the outside surface. I need to keep saying “what seems to be” because the Mobius strip has only one side! What looks like its inner and outer surfaces flow into each other seamlessly, co-creating the whole. The first time I saw a Mobius strip, I thought, ‘Amazing! That’s exactly how life works!’ Whatever is inside us continually flows outward, helping to form or deform the world-depending on what we send out. Whatever is outside us continually flows inward, helping to form or deform us—depending on how we take it in. Bit by bit, we and our world are endlessly re-made in this eternal exchange. Much depends on what we choose to put into the world from within ourselves—and much depends on how we handle what the world sends back to us. As Thomas Merton said, ‘We don’t have to adjust to the world. We can adjust the world.’ Here’s the question I’ve been asking myself ever since I understood that we live our lives on the Mobius strip: “How can I make more life-giving choices about what to put into the world AND how to deal with what the world sends back—choices that might bring new life to me, to others, and to the world we share.”

Ash Wednesday 2015 sermon

Ash Wednesday 2015 February 18, 2015 “Ash Wednesday is the day Christians attend their own funerals.”i This is the opening line from an essay on the gospel reading today by Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor. “Ash Wednesday is the day Christians attend their own funerals.” Today is the day in the life of the church when we take up the penitential practice of marking ourselves in ash, in hearing the words while we feel the grit on our foreheads: “remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Why do we do this? Are we that morbid that we take some sort of pleasure in attending our own funeral? We do this to start fresh, to remember, to be forgiven, and to help us get reoriented in our relationship with God. So much of life we live in a mindless way, going through the motions, not really paying attention. Today is the day we are called up short out of that. Today is the day that we are reminded that we will not live forever; that life is precious and of value, and how we live this one, unique life matters to God and to the world. One of my favorite contemporary poets, a woman named Mary Oliver, was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago, and so she wrote a poem about it. In the first two stanzas, she contemplates the frailty of her body and she reflects on what her death will be like. Listen now to her last two stanzas: 3. I know, you never intended to be in this world. But you're in it all the same. so why not get started immediately. I mean, belonging to it. There is so much to admire, to weep over. And to write music or poems about. Bless the feet that take you to and fro. Bless the eyes and the listening ears. Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste. Bless touching. You could live a hundred years, it's happened. Or not. I am speaking from the fortunate platform of many years, none of which, I think, I ever wasted. Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going? Let me be urgent as a knife, then, and remind you of Keats, so single of purpose and thinking, for a while, he had a lifetime. 4. Late yesterday afternoon, in the heat, all the fragile blue flowers in bloom in the shrubs in the yard next door had tumbled from the shrubs and lay wrinkled and fading in the grass. But this morning the shrubs were full of the blue flowers again. There wasn't a single one on the grass. How, I wondered, did they roll back up to the branches, that fiercely wanting, as we all do, just a little more of life?ii Today we live in this tension of remembering that we are dust and to dust we return and the fact that, at least for a while, we belong to this world. There is so much good that God invites us to give ourselves to in our short time here. One of my Facebook friends, who was also my liturgy professor in seminary, had posted this reflection yesterday and it gets to the heart of the matter today, I think. It is attributed to Rabbi Simcha. “Keep a piece of paper in each pocket. One should read: ‘For my sake the world was created.’ The other should read: ‘I am but dust and ashes.’ i. Barbara Brown Taylor Feasting on the Word Year B Vol. 2 p21 ii. http://www.onbeing.org/blog/mary-olivers-cancer-poem/7277