3rd Sun after Epiphany Year A

3rd Sunday after the Epiphany- Year A January 26, 2020 Our gospel reading for today begins: “When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea…” At this point in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has been baptized by John in the Jordan River; he has been driven into the wilderness to face temptations, and he has just come out of the wilderness to begin his ministry when our reading for today picks up and he hears the news about John’s arrest. So what does Jesus do? He moves. He had been raised in Nazareth, a different region in Galilee, and Matthew tells us that he makes his home in Capernaum by the sea. Last year when we made our trip to the Holy Land, our tour group visited Capernaum. It was the end of the day, and we had spent the whole first day on a bus driving around Galilee, following the edge of the Sea of Galilee. We had seen the ruins of a huge Roman complex right in the heart of Galilee; we had visited the purported sights of some of Jesus’s miracles and teachings, and with less than an hour left of daylight, we pulled up in Capernaum. As we followed the crowds, I stopped at the entrance to take a picture of the sign: “Caphernaum the town of Jesus.” I wandered around an excavated synagogue and peered underneath a modern church which had been built over the ruins that were thought to be the home of Simon Peter’s mother in law. I walked past the large bronze statue of Peter to look out over the Sea of Galilee, all close together within the space of one of our squares in downtown Savannah. As I wandered around this place where Jesus had chosen to make his home, I thought about what it means to make a place home. Matthew suggests that Jesus chooses to make his home in Capernaum in fulfillment of the prophecy. But we all know that there is much more that goes into making a place home. Home is our comfortable place, where we are known and safe. It’s a place whose landscape and surroundings are familiar. Home is a place where we have friends and family and pets others who care about us, and home is a place that is layered with memories and experiences. It is the place where we can be most fully ourselves. (I know certain people who say that the first thing they do when they get home is take off certain articles of clothing!) This is why when we face disruptions in the places that we consider to be home, then these disruptions can be the most unsettling. However, in life as in this gospel reading, we see God calling, God working in and through the disruptions. Jesus heeds God’s call to make his home elsewhere as a result of the disruption of his cousin’s imprisonment. The disciples heed Jesus’s call to follow him, in the midst of their orderly, homely lives—doing the work of their families, called from what they have always known to lives of disruption in following Jesus. Those of us who have ever been in churches that are suffering from conflicts can relate to Paul’s appeal to the conflicted church in Corinth. When church feels like home and disruptions happen there, it is hard to hear God’s call in the midst of the clamoring factions. So Paul reminds them of their common call to preach the good news of the cross of Jesus Christ. He reminds them how God works through the ultimate disruption to bring about salvation for all and how we are invited to be a part of that. Our collect for today reminds us that each and every one of us is called by God, and we ask God for the grace to “answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works.” For this week, I invite you to think about your call and to think about the call of this church in terms of home and disruption. Where do you feel most at home right now physically, mentally, and spiritually? Then look at the ways that God is disrupting you in your life? It can be in those places or it can be elsewhere? Another way of asking this question is “what’s keeping you up at night?” Then pray about the ways that God might be calling you to a new way of being in and through the disruptions. In January of 2001, I met with the Bishop and he told me he saw in me a call to the priesthood that had also been seen by my community. He told me he was sending me to seminary that fall, and we talked about some practicalities. Before we finished our time together, his canon to the ordinary, who had been sitting there with a hymnal open on his lap the whole time, told me he wanted to share with me the words to his favorite hymn. It’s hymn 661—“they cast their nets in Galilee” and it was written by William Alexander Percy, a fellow Mississippian who had known his own share of disruptions and call in his life. In my 19 years of trying to faithfully follow God’s call in my life, these words have affirmed and upheld and haunted me: They cast their nets in Galilee Just off the hills of brown Such happy simple fisherfolk Before the Lord came down Contented peaceful fishermen Before they ever knew The peace of God That fill’d their hearts Brimful and broke them too. Young John who trimmed the flapping sail, Homeless, in Patmos died. Peter, who hauled the teeming net, Head-down was crucified. The peace of God, it is no peace, But strife closed in the sod, Yet, let us pray for but one thing– The marvelous peace of God.

1st Sunday after Epiphany-Baptism of our Lord 2020

Epiphany 1A_2020 bapt letter January 12, 2020 A letter to Holst Herring upon the occasion of his baptism. Dear Holst, Today, in our church we remember and celebrate Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River by his cousin John the Baptist. We hear the story of how Jesus comes to John and asks to be baptized, but John protests. Finally, Jesus convinces him, and as Jesus comes up dripping out of the water, the Holy Spirit lands on him like a dove and the voice of God thunders from the heavens, “This is my son the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Our Psalm for today reminds us of the might and the power of God, whose voice overpowers the four elements: earth, fire, wind, and water. Our epistle reading for today is a sermon by the apostle Peter in the Acts of the Apostles, and in this sermon, Peter tells the story of all that he has seen and experienced as a disciple of Jesus: “You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ--he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” Holst, today you are being baptized into that story, into the body of Christ through his death and resurrection. Today, your parents and godparents (and all of us gathered here) are recognizing that you have been named and claimed as God’s beloved since your very creation. In your baptism, your parents and godparents are accepting that belovedness on your behalf, and they are promising that they will raise you in a way that teaches you how to live into that belovedness. Because you see, Holst, today isn’t just a special occasion, a chance to pull out the fancy clothes and have a party (although we do celebrate with you this new life in Jesus Christ which you are taking on today). Just as Jesus’s baptism is the beginning of his ministry, so today is the beginning for you as well. It is the beginning of your discipleship which means living your life in accordance with the teachings of Jesus, living your life in a way that befits God’s beloved. This means seeking and serving Christ in all persons; it means loving your neighbors as yourself. It means respecting the dignity of every human being, no matter how different they are from you, and striving for justice and peace among all people. It is wonderful and difficult and life-giving and life-changing work upon which you and your parents embark this day, and it is much too difficult to do alone. But the good news is that you don’t have to. Just as your parents and godparents have made promises to God on your behalf, so has this church, this gathered community made a promise, too. Our promise is that you will never have to do this work of discipleship alone. We promise to support and uphold you in it, to help your parents teach you the story of our faith, to help you remember when you forget, to speak God’s peace to you when you are afraid, to celebrate with you when you rejoice, to remind you that God forgives you when you falter and fail, and to sit with you when you mourn. It is the work of all disciples together to help spread the good news of God’s love—that is divinely all powerful and humanly vulnerable, a love that is stronger than death-- to everyone we come into contact with through our words sometimes, but mostly through our actions-in the way that we love, in the way we ask for forgiveness when we hurt someone or are wrong, in the ways we see that other people are as beloved by God as you are. May you never forget the truth of your belovedness, and from this day forward, may you live that truth out in the way that you love others in this world. Your sister in Christ, Melanie+

The 2nd Sunday after Christmas Year B_2019

Christmas 2B January 5, 2020 A letter to Sutton Lucius upon the occasion of his baptism. Dear Sutton, On this day of your baptism, our gospel reading is about a time when Jesus was a child, and his father Joseph listened to the warning of an angel in a dream and took Jesus and Mary away from their home country into a foreign land where they would be safe. But there’s more to this story that has been left out, and even though it seems like a strange thing to talk about today, upon the occasion of your baptism, it is an important part of the story. The story in Matthew begins with the visit to Jesus and his family from wise men from the East who follow a star the long way from their homes to Jerusalem, where Kind Herod lives. When the wise men approach King Herod to ask about this new king who has been born, Herod and the people around him become enraged. But Herod is sneaky, and so he acts like a friend to the wise men, and he tells them that the prophets say the king will be born in Bethlehem. They should go look for him there, and when they find him, they should come back and tell Herod where he can be found so he can also go and worship him. The wise men leave, and the star they have been following leads them all the way to Bethlehem to Jesus’s home, where they meet him and his parents and give him gifts and great respect. But an angel comes to the wise men in a dream and warns them not to return to Jerusalem to Herod, because he wants to harm the child, so they go home by a different road. After the wise men leave, an angel appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him that he needs to gather his family and flee Bethlehem to the foreign land of Egypt where they will be safe from King Herod, who wants to do away with his newly perceived kingly rival. Brave Joseph, who has learned to listen to his dreams does just this, and they remain safely in Egypt out of harm’s way. But the part that is left out of our reading today, the sad, hard part that seems strange to talk about on this happy day, is what happens back in Bethlehem after the Holy Family escape. When Herod realizes that the wise men have not returned to tell him where to find Jesus and his family, he becomes enraged. And he gives orders to send his soldiers to Bethlehem to kill all the boys who are 2 years old and younger. And they do. In the meantime, the Holy Family remain safe in Egypt until Joseph receives another message from an angel in a dream, telling them that Herod is dead and that is safe to return to their homeland, and they return and settle in the district of Galilee in a town called Nazareth. What does this story of light and dark, of safety and horror, have to say to us on this day, the day of your baptism, sweet baby Sutton? In baptism, we remember that the same Jesus who has known the fullness of our humanity including sorrow, danger, uncertainty and also joy, safety, and familial love gave himself up to death on the cross because of love for you and me and every person you will ever know. And this same Jesus, because of God’s love which is stronger and bigger, and gentler and tenderer, and fiercer and kinder than anything we can ever know, came out on the other side of the worst possible thing—that is death. And he shows us that no matter what bad decisions we make, no matter what corrupt rulers or people around us may do, no matter what griefs we may suffer, God is always with us. There is absolutely nothing that we nor anyone else can do that can separate us from God’s love in the person of Jesus Christ as it has been bestowed upon you at your creation and received by your parents and godparents on your behalf on this day and sealed by the Holy Spirit in your baptism. From this day forward, you are marked as Christ’s own forever, and there is absolutely nothing that can change that. So today, sweet Sutton, and for all the days forward, it is the job of this church, this gathered community and all who come after us, to help you remember this “hope to which [God] has called you;” to help you look for unexpected messengers of God’s love in your life; to help you grow into the person God has created you and calls you to be. And it is our job to help you remember that no matter what happens, nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate you from the love of God. God is with you, this day and every day. Always. Your sister in Christ, Melanie+

Christmas Eve 2019

Christmas Eve 2019 Yesterday, when I was driving back and forth to the grocery store, I noticed a new political sign on Ferguson Ave. Have you seen it? It says, “Jesus 2020: Because only Jesus can save this nation.” (Let me interrupt this sermon for a Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about this phenomenon of the Jesus 2020 signs; I even googled it to see what it’s all about but couldn’t find much of anything beyond a Twitter hashtag. So, please, don’t hear me endorsing any particular candidate for any future elections. But also, know, that I’m not one to waste a good sermon illustration, so there you go. ) As I was driving home, I wondered about the person who placed the sign there. I wondered what he or she hoped to accomplish. I wondered what that sign even means: “Jesus 2020: Because only Jesus can save this nation.” And I wondered what if that were to come to pass, what that would even look like. (Something tells me that we probably wouldn’t actually like the look of things if Jesus became president. I know most of the time Jesus’s priorities are not always my own priorities, and I suspect I would be as uncomfortable as the good religious people in Jesus’s day were if he were to return and rule here and now.) But even with all my wild wonderings about that random road sign, I get it; don’t you? Because there’s at least a little part of me that wants Jesus to come and save us from ourselves. And this is not a new longing. “The people who walked in darkness/ have seen a great light;/those who lived in a land of deep darkness--/ on them light has shined.” During a time of great political unrest, Isaiah names this longing for the people of Israel. They are a land deeply divided, at great risk from their political opponents which will eventually result in their homeland being overthrown and many of them being taken into captivity in a foreign land. Isaiah has let them know that it is Israel’s unfaithfulness to God that has gotten them to this point, and yet, they still long for God to step in and save them from themselves in the form of a righteous ruler from David’s line. In the time of Jesus’s birth, Israel finds itself once again in trouble. This time they are occupied by a foreign power, the Roman Empire. They are in the process of being counted in the great bureaucratic machine that is the Roman Census. They long for God to break into the world and to save them, to restore them to independence. And God does break in-in the form of a helpless child born to two ordinary parents. This birth is announced by angelic messengers to an unsavory lot of shepherds—an untrustworthy bunch if you can ever find one and certainly not a group you would trust with an important, world-changing message. The angels tell the shepherds: “Do not be afraid; for see-- I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” And this child who is born in this most ordinary and unlikely place is the full reconciliation of God’s divinity and our humanity—both fully human and fully divine. He shows the world that God’s realm is not made up of the powerful but of the lowly; that God’s passion is not for the mighty but for the down-trodden. He shows us that God doesn’t swoop in to save us from the messes that we have created, like a brave knight rescuing the princess from the tower. Rather, God joins us in the mess and stays there with us shining the light of God’s countenance in the dark for us to help us find the way. Whether we are immersed in the muck of our own bad decisions or misfortunes or whether we are throwing up our hands at the unprecedented division and deep distress of our nation, it is tempting to long for “Jesus 2020”. Jesus, take the wheel, we need you to come in and save us. But this night shows us that is not how God works. That is not who Jesus is. Jesus is God with us, always and forever. This Savior has already been born to us, on this day thousands of years ago. And through the grace of God, Jesus shows us the way and invites us to join him in being agents of God’s mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation in our own lives, in the lives of our families, in the life of our nation, and in this needy and heart-broken world. God is with us. And God has given us everything we need through the gift of Jesus Christ, the Savior of all creation. That is the truth and the glory of this night. In closing, I’ll leave you with a poem by the theologian, poet, and mystic Howard Thurman that talks about the work of Christmas to which our Savior calls us this day and every day. The Work of Christmas by Howard Thurman When the song of the angels is stilled, When the star in the sky is gone, When the kings and princes are home, When the shepherds are back with their flock, The work of Christmas begins: To find the lost, To heal the broken, To feed the hungry, To release the prisoner, To rebuild the nations, To bring peace among others, To make music in the heart.

Advent 4A 2019

Advent 4A_2019 December 22, 2019 Our gospel reading for today is Matthew’s version of the nativity story. Unlike Luke, Matthew tells the story from Joseph’s perspective, and Matthew uses a series of 4 dreams to reveal information about Jesus’s birth and to assist in his safety. Our reading for today starts with heartbreak, with what seems like broken promises between and man and woman, with a man who is struggling to “do the right thing” without causing unnecessary harm. Joseph’s expectations of his upcoming marriage to Mary are completely upended, and he is left trying to figure out the most faithful way forward in the midst of the scandal of the incarnation. Then, an angel comes to Joseph in a dream and tells him to not be afraid to take Mary as his wife. (What fear in Joseph is the angel countering, do you think? Fear of what people will think? Fear of further heartbreak or betrayal?) The angels tells Joseph that the child that Mary carries is in fact the child of God, and the angel gives Joseph instructions on how to name the child, which through this naming, Joseph is adopting the child as his own. When Joseph awakes, he does exactly what the angel has told him to do. I am struck this week by the fact that this portion of Matthew’s gospel uses the word for genesis two different times (although our NRSV translation doesn’t reflect this). Matthew is connecting the birth of Jesus with God’s creation of all that there is- as is reflected in Genesis; and Matthew is showing that Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s long-standing promise to God’s people. I am mindful of how often creation comes out of chaos; how new life comes out of heartbreak. I think about the times in my life when I have stood at a crossroads between where I wanted to go and where God was calling me to go. So much of this life and the heartaches we bear come because we are unwilling to relinquish our own dreams in order to embrace the dream of God which we are being invited to participate in. I think about the times in my life when I have been truly heartbroken; in those times, I am often more receptive to God’s invitation to join in God’s dream than I am at other times when I feel like everything is going smoothly. I wonder if this is how Joseph felt, too? I think about the alertness of Joseph-his willingness to be open to signs and messengers from God in both the ordinary and in the extra-ordinary. I think about the courage of Joseph—the courage to say yes, to participate in the dream of God; the courage to love after heartbreak and disappointment. Every one of us is invited to participate in the dream of God. In the days leading up to the celebration of the birth of God with us, I invite you to reflect on the times in your life when you accepted God’s invitation to participate in the dream of God (and, if you are really courageous, to reflect on the times that you didn’t). I invite you to keep your eyes wide open to look for signs and the ways that God continues to invite you to participate in the dream of God. And I invite you to be courageous in your love, even after heartbreak and disappointment.

Blue Christmas 2019

Blue Christmas 2019 The Feast of St. Thomas December 21, 2019 One of my friends shared a lovely story on social media this past week about the German writer Franz Kafka. “When he was 40, the renowned Bohemian novelist and short story writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, was strolling through Steglitz Park in Berlin, when he chanced upon a young girl crying her eyes out because she had lost her favorite doll. She and Kafka looked for the doll without success. Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would look again. The next day, when they still had not found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter "written" by the doll that said, ‘Please do not cry. I have gone on a trip to see the world. I'm going to write to you about my adventures.’ Thus began a story that continued to the end of Kafka’s life. When they would meet, Kafka read aloud his carefully composed letters of adventures and conversations about the beloved doll, which the girl found enchanting. Finally, Kafka read her a letter of the story that brought the doll back to Berlin, and he then gave her a doll he had purchased. ‘This does not look like my doll at all,’ she said. Kafka handed her another letter that explained, ‘My trips, they have changed me.’ The girl hugged the new doll and took it home with her. A year later, Kafka died. Many years later, the now grown-up girl found a letter tucked into an unnoticed crevice in the doll. The tiny letter, signed by Kafka, said, ‘Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.’ It may seem strange to combine this Blue Christmas service with the Feast Day of St. Thomas, which is today and from which our readings come, but that story about Kafka, I think, gets to the heart of both. In the gospel reading, we see Thomas, who was away when the rest of the disciples had a visit from the resurrected Jesus. They all were huddled together in a locked room, afraid and grief-striken. We don’t know what Thomas was doing to not be there, but the very fact that he wasn’t there suggests that he wasn’t so afraid to be out and about. Perhaps he was doing what many of us have done in times of grief—he was trying to keep calm and carry on. Like Kafka’s doll, both Jesus and Thomas have been changed by Jesus’s death, by the love and the loss that came with that. But fearless Thomas is not afraid to ask Jesus for what he needs to be on the same page with the other disciples as a full participant in the astonishing event that is Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. On this night, may we be like Thomas, not afraid to ask God for what we need—to live our lives faithfully, to fully participate in the astonishing event that is Jesus’ resurrection from the dead—the ultimate result of what it means for us in the birth of Emmanuel: God with us. May we who have tasted heartbreak remember the truth of Jesus’s nativity which can never escape the shadow of the cross: ‘Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.’

Advent 3A_2019

Advent 3A_2019 December 15, 2019 “Advent is a season of waiting,” she said to me. “What are you waiting for?” What are you waiting for? Anyone else, I would have just made something up, maybe even made a joke about it, but since she was my spiritual director, I told her the truth. Sadly I responded, “I’ve been too busy to wait. But I’m hopeful there is still time yet to wait, and I’ll be thinking about what I am waiting for.” What are you waiting for? We see John the Baptist in greatly reduced circumstances just in the course of a week. Last week, he was loose in the wilderness, preaching about repentance and calling the religious authorities who came out to see him a “brood of vipers.” Now, we see him imprisoned after having angered the wrong person, and he sends a single question back to Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Many other commentators have read John’s question as one of uncertainty and doubt, but this year, it struck me that maybe there is another interpretation. What if John’s question comes, not from a place of anxiety but a place of curiosity? What if John’s question reflects that he is comfortable waiting for as long as it takes because he trusts that the Kingdom of God will be brought to fulfillment; he knows that his job, his only job at this point, is to wait and see? What would it look like for us if we trusted whole-heartedly that the Kingdom of God would be fulfilled, not through any work of our own but through the grace of the Holy Spirit and through the person of Jesus Christ? How would our waiting be different? Would it change what we are waiting for? I had a conversation with a friend of mine the other night. She was telling me about a season of discernment that she finds herself in pertaining to her work and her family needs. “What are you waiting for?” I asked her. And she responded that she did not know. I then told her about one of my touchstones of discernment, a print my mom had gotten me years ago on a trip out west. It’s a drawing and poem by an artist named Brian Andreas, and the title is “Waiting for signs.” “I used to wait for a sign, she said, before I did anything. Then one night I had a dream & an angel in black tights came to me & said, you can start any time now, & then I asked is this a sign? & the angel started laughing & I woke up. Now, I think the whole world is filled with signs, but if there’s no laughter, I know they’re not for me....” I’m going to invite us to sit in silence for a bit today. During that time, if you feel anxious or agitated, I invite you to pay attention to your breath, and to ponder: What are you waiting for? Where is the laughter in your life in this season of expectation and waiting?