4th Sunday after Epiphany-Year A

4th Sunday after Epiphany-Year A January 29, 2023 “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters,” Paul writes to the divided church in Corinth. And it’s not unintentional that in the first chapter of that letter, Paul talks about “call” 6 different times. For Paul, the church is those who are “called out” to represent Jesus in the world, and his letter to this young, church in Corinth shows all the ways that they are struggling together to understand what it means to be the church, the body of Christ in the world. I am thankful that we at St. Thomas do not find ourselves in a time of conflict. And yet, as followers of Jesus, we are always called to wrestle with what it means to be the church, those who are called out into the world to share the news of God’s love through the person of Jesus. Our Book of Common Prayer reminds us that the mission of the church is “to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” It teaches us that “the Church pursues its mission as it prays and worships, proclaims the Gospel, and promotes justice, peace, and love.” And it reminds us that “the Church carries out its mission through the ministry of all its members.” i. Church isn’t just a place, a building, that we go to on Sunday mornings. Church is us, and we are called to ministry beyond the walls of this place in ways that are inspired by God’s Holy Spirit working in, among, and through us. This year, we are celebrating 100 years as the worshipping community of St. Thomas. We have lots of celebrations planned, and we also want to look back and remember all who have come before us and the ministry that they carried out in this place. It is also a time to ponder who we are being called to be in the next 100 years. How is God inspiring us to be a reconciling force out in the community beyond the walls of these buildings? To that end, I invite us to begin conversations today around listening for where God is calling us this year and beyond. I have three questions that I’m going to invite you to reflect upon at our Annual Parish meeting today or in an electronic format. It is my hope that these questions help us get to the heart of where God has been working in and among and through us this past year, and may give us an inkling on where/how God is calling us into the future. The questions are: 1. Where have you encountered God in life at St. Thomas in the last year (2022)? 2. When was St. Thomas at our best in representing Christ in this past year? What made that possible? 3. What aspects of our church are we being called to let go of to create space for new life and growth? I invite you to take some time pondering these, which I’ll reflect on more in the Rector’s report at the annual parish meeting, and to share your thoughts in small groups with vestry members at the meeting or via an online survey that was shared on social media today and will be in the email tomorrow. In conclusion, I’ll pray one of my favorite prayers about church and calling. It comes from the ordination of a priest and is also found in our Good Friday liturgy. Let us pray. O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquillity the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were being cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. i. Book of Common Prayer 1979. P 855 (from The Catechism—under The Church)

3rd Sunday after the Epiphany-Year A

3rd Sunday after Epiphany—Year A January 22, 2023 I’ve been reading a book titled The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline, and New Hope for Beloved Community. The author is The Rev. Canon Stephanie Spellers, who is a canon on the staff of our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry. In this book Spellers is writing about the seismic changes that are happening in the Church since 2020, and she is unpacking some of what she thinks is happening there. I’m about half-way through the book, and she is painting a bleak picture, indeed. So, I’ll confess, I looked ahead to the conclusion (mainly to decide if I could keep soldiering through this challenging read), and I was heartened by this paragraph: “No one asks to be cracked open or disrupted. No church seeks to decline in membership or stature. Most people don’t go looking for experiences that will humble them and break their hold on a treasured identity and culture. We did not choose to land here in this wilderness; we were shoved by pandemic, racial reckoning, decline and economic and social disruption. But now that we’re here, humbled and open, we have a choice and a chance.” i It’s an interesting idea to think about how a crisis can crack us open, and in and through that process give us a choice and a chance at something new. It’s true for us as a church, and it’s true for us as individuals. In our gospel reading for today, Jesus is beginning his public ministry in Matthew’s gospel, and he begins it under the shadow of a crisis. His cousin, John the Baptist, has just been arrested by Herod after John has offered public criticism about Herod’s marriage to his brother’s wife. In the midst of this crisis, Matthew tells us that Jesus decides to move from Nazareth to Capernaum, citing the fulfillment of scripture from the prophet Isaiah for the reason for this move: “Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,/ on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles—/ the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light,/ and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death/ light has dawned.” But what’s interesting about this is that at the time of Jesus and even at the time of Matthew’s writing, Zebulun and Napthali weren’t on any maps. They had been wiped out by foreign occupation 700 years before. So Jesus is starting his ministry under the shadow of a crisis, in a place that is marked by darkness and failure and loss, and in an area that is especially connected with the shadow of the occupation of the foreign power of Rome, under which the people of Jesus’s day lived. And what is Jesus’ message in this crisis-shadowed time and place? “Change your hearts and lives! Here comes the kingdom of heaven!” (This is from the Common English Bible translation.) In the midst of crisis and failure, Jesus offers an invitation to change, to new life, and new hope, and new opportunity. When talking about how crisis can be a time to experience new life, our Wednesday healing service reflected on crises that they had weathered in their past—how we as a church changed and adapted to the crisis that has been the pandemic, how they recognized new life and growth in their spiritual lives after having coming through personal crises. Some of us shared how, even as we are in the midst of crises now, we look toward tried and tested sources of wisdom or learnings from how we navigated other challenging experiences to help us look for the sprigs of new life that are sprouting even now and that we hope will bear fruit on the other side of this crisis. The gift of that conversation was also a reminder that community is another gift in the midst of crisis to help weather and navigate change together. There have been no shortages of crises of late. Many here have known the death of a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a child, a friend. Some have known the loss of a job or income. Many are tasting the lessening of mobility or independence. We have heard a new diagnosis. We have been held by the uncertainty of waiting for what may be to come. And that’s all in addition to the changing landscape of the world around us, the changing landscape of the post-covid church. But there is good news. Jesus who is God with Us, the very heart of Matthew’s gospel, doesn’t leave us alone in our crises. And let me be clear and say again, I do not believe that God is giving any one of us these crisis, so please, stop saying that to yourself or about yourself. (God isn’t giving you crisis to handle!) In the times when we are being cracked open by the circumstances of our lives and of our choices and other peoples’ choices, God moves there—into the moment of crisis, into the no-man’s land—to make God’s home there with us. And God calls forth new life, even in the midst of the worst experiences, even when we are not able to yet see it. And Jesus acts to spread the good news of God’s love and to heal us. The gift of community, of church, is that we can help share some of the burden with each other, and we can help each other see the sprigs of new life which God promises will come. i. Spellers, Stephanie. The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline, and New Hope for Beloved Community. Church Publishing, Inc: New York, 2021, p 95.

2nd Sunday after the Epiphany-Year A

2nd Sunday after the Epiphany Year A January 15, 2023 A letter to Mason Lanier Johnston upon the occasion of your baptism Dear Mason, Today is an exciting day in your young life! It is the day that you are being baptized into Christ’s body the church in this special place where your mom grew up and where your parents were married. It is the day when your parents and godparents will make promises before God and this congregation about how they will raise you and how they will teach you to live. It is the day when they will acknowledge on your behalf that God has already called you and claimed you as God’s beloved and that you will live your life accordingly. And it is the day that this congregation will promise you and your family that we will support you as you grow in your faith in Christ, no matter where you go or what you do. Because you see, sweet Mason, being baptized changes us. In and through our baptism, we become who we already are; we become more fully who God has created us to be. The baptismal covenant that your parents and godparents will say on your behalf this day, that we will all say alongside them and you, and which we will all continue to renew together again and again throughout the years means that we live life with a different sort of intentionality. And through baptism, we are bound together in community through the body of Christ, not just with all those who surround us now, but also with all those who have come before us and all those who come after us by these promises to this way of life, this commitment to following this path. In and through our baptism, we are called by God to continue to be transformed, to be open to God’s work in our lives, in the lives of those we love, and in the world around us. And we need each other to see, sometimes, how we are called; to understand things about ourselves that we cannot always see or understand. In his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul is writing to that community there. He’s gearing up to let them have it because they have been fighting and acting up, and he’s not at all happy with what they’ve been up to since he’s been away. But first, before he does this, we have our portion for today, where he reminds them about what he loves about them. He holds up the mirror before them to show them and remind them of the best of themselves. This is one of the gifts of Christian community—that we can see and recognize and name things for each other, speaking the truth in love, that we can’t always recognize in ourselves. Paul also reminds the Corinthians that God has already given them all the spiritual gifts or the tools that they need to be in community and to share the good news of God’s love for all through Jesus. So, today, sweet Mason, we give thanks for you and your baptism. We promise that we will help you recognize things about yourself that you might only be able to find in and through Christian community. We will help you remember that you are called and claimed as God’s beloved, to live your life accordingly, and to trust that God will give you the tools that you need in order to do this. And we will support you as you grow, nurturing you in the faith and helping you to see the ways that God is at work in your life, in the lives of those you love, and in the world around you. Your sister in Christ, Melanie+

Holy Name 2023

Holy Name 2023 January 1, 2023 Today is the Feast of the Holy Name, when we mark Jesus’s naming and circumcision 8 days after his birth. Our Old Testament reading gives us a glimpse of how God gives God’s name as a blessing to the people of Israel in Exodus, so I’ve been thinking about the sort of naming that we do in blessing this past week. Jesus’s own name is, of course, a blessing. In his native tongue, Jesus’s name is Joshua, which means “the Lord is salvation.” Jesus’s person and his name serve as a reminder to any and all that God cares about what happens to God’s people and that God will continue to offer salvation. In our Episcopal tradition, a priest is able to offer blessing at certain times during certain services, and a blessing is essentially the pronouncement of God’s love and favor for God’s people. And that’s important. But there are other ways to offer blessing as well. The Irish priest, poet, and mystic, John O’Donohue, has written an entire book of blessings. Its title is To Bless the Space Between Us, and in the book O’Donohue explores what the gifts of blessing are. He writes that blessing is a way of manifesting kindness, of holding a circle of light around the one being blessed. “There is a kindness that dwells deep down in things;” he writes, “it presides everywhere, often in the places we least expect. The world can be harsh and negative, but if we remain generous and patient, kindness inevitable reveals itself. Something deep in the human soul deems to depend on the presence of kindness; something instinctive in us expects it, and once we sense it we are able to trust and open ourselves… The word kindness has a gentle sound that seems to echo the presence of compassionate goodness. When someone is kind to you, you feel understood and seen. There is not judgement or harsh perception directed toward you. Kindness has gracious eyes; it is not small-minded or competitive; it wants nothing back for itself. Kindness strikes a resonance with the depths of your own heart; it also suggests that your vulnerability, though somehow exposed, is not taken advantage of; rather it has become an occasion for dignity and empathy. Kindness casts a different light, an evening light that has the depth of color and patience to illuminate what is complex and rich in difference. Despite all the darkness, human hope is based on the instinct that at the deepest level of reality some intimate kindness holds sway. This is the heart of blessing.” i. As I was thinking about blessing this week, I was joking around with people in the office. At the end of each conversation, I offered a blessing to them of what we had talked about in our conversation or what I thought they might need. To Jane, I offered her the blessing that she could find the grocery item she needed without having to go to the Big Kroger. To Amy Jo, as I was parting, I said that I hoped that she would not need to talk to me or I to her over the long weekend (because that usually means there’s some sort of crisis). These blessings were said as jokes, but I noted how good it made my heart feel to offer these friends my hope for goodness and blessing in their lives. So this week, as we continue in this Christmas season (yep, it’s still Christmas through this Thursday), I invite you to look for ways to offer kindness to those you love and those you encounter. Look for ways to name the hopes that you have for them, to shine a sphere of light around them and be alert to the ways that God offers God’s love to you through others. In closing, I’ll offer you an excerpt of one of O’Donohue’s blessings: At The End of the Year As this year draws to its end, We give thanks for the gifts it brought And how they became inlaid within Where neither time nor tide can touch them... Days when beloved faces shone brighter With light from beyond themselves; And from the granite of some secret sorrow A stream of buried tears loosened. We bless this year for all we learned, For all we loved and lost And for the quiet way it brought us Nearer to our invisible destination.ii i. O’Donohue, John. To Bless the Space Between Us. Doubleday: New York, 2008, pp 185-186 ii. Ibid. pp 159-160

Christmas Eve 2022

Christmas Eve_2022 December 24, 2022 It’s not uncommon for me to be haunted by snippets of song in my ordinary days. Those of you who hear me preach with any regularity probably get sick of hearing about the ways that the Holy Spirit communicates with me through the annoying habit of lodging songs in my head. This tendency is even more pronounced in the days leading up to Christmas. Maybe it’s the Christmas carols swirling around us everywhere, the so-familiar soundtrack of this season? A few years ago, I had a phrase of lyrics lodged in my head that I kept repeating, trying to figure out where it was from, until I finally took to google to help discern the message the Holy Spirit was prompting in me, typing in “the weary world rejoices…” Well, of course the whole line goes: “a thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices…” and it’s from the beloved Christmas song “O, Holy Night.” This was a reminder to me that even the most familiar songs and words, when taken out of context, can take on new life, new meaning. “Sing to the Lord a new song!” our psalm demands of us-year after year-on this holy night. Sing, sing, sing! It commands us three times in its first two verses. A new song? Really? I don’t know…we all like our familiar carols with their hazy nostalgia and their safety this time of year. New songs are hard to learn. If you’re a singer, you have to learn new words, new music, new timing and breath. Dusting off an old familiar song is so much easier—we mostly know the words and timing; we know where to breathe; we know the notes that we struggle to hit. Some of these songs are so familiar we don’t even really have to think about singing them. Our bodies just do it. But sometimes, old, familiar songs can become new in unexpected ways. Maybe a different musician plays it differently than we are accustomed or in a different medium. Or an old, yet newly compelling phrase gets lodged in our heads as an invitation to look at our lives through this lens. Old songs can be refreshed, made new when the unexpected happens. This year, my soul was snared by another line from “O Holy Night” when I read a blog post by the Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber. (Bolz-Weber is a writer who writes books and a regular blog, but if you look for her, know that she used profanity regularly and abundantly in her writing.) In this blog post, Nadia Bolz-Weber writes about how “O Holy Night” is speaking to her this year.i She starts by lifting up the phrase: “long lay the world in sin and error pining” and she talks about the word pining, how the lyrics mean that we, in our lives and in the world are “failing gradually from grief, regret, or longing due to sin or error.” This phrase helps us acknowledge that we have messed things up. We see this in our individual lives: when we go astray from our promises; when we treat people badly; when we live out the old unhealthy stories and patterns of our lives or our families over and over again in our relationships; when we make choices that take us off the path of love that God would have us follow to live our best, fullest, most whole-hearted lives. Sometimes these paths away from love become so much easier to trod, like those old familiar songs are easier to sing, and it feels beyond us, even impossible, to get back onto the path of love. We know that we need help. And that’s part of what we celebrate this night. God doesn’t leave us alone to languish in the darkness. As the song says, we were pining “ ‘til he appeared and the soul felt its worth.” In and through the birth of Jesus, God once again claims and names creation as good—taking that old song and making it new again for us. Sometimes it’s so hard to believe that God values us or cares what happens, so God reveals the value God holds for each one us by becoming one of us, and then showing us how to walk the path of love. But it’s an unexpected path often through unsought places, much like the story of the first Christmas shows. A young peasant woman gives birth to God in a town far away from her home, in a place where there are so many people there is no room for her to be in the house with family. The shepherds who are working in the field that night are visited by an angelic host of messengers who terrify them at their appearance. And unexpectedly, even tonight as we celebrate birth, we also talk about death. How God was born as one of us, how that path of love led God to offer God’s-self up to death on a cross, and how even death couldn’t contain God’s love for us—as it bursts forth from the grave in the light of the resurrection. And then, in the new/old song, the music swells and the other voices join in singing: “fall on your knees, and hear the angel voices…” What does it mean to fall on our knees? It’s a posture of supplication asking for help, a posture of relief in finally admitting that we don’t have it all together and we can’t fix this for ourselves or our loved one or for anyone, no matter how hard we might try. It’s a posture of reverence before something so inspiring and overpowering that our legs can no longer support us. It’s a posture of trepidation and maybe a little fear, as we are faced with the challenge and the invitation to sing a new song or to sing anew old, familiar songs in new and different ways. i. You can access Nadia Bolz-Weber’s blog post here: Fall on your knees - The Corners by Nadia Bolz-Weber (substack.com)

2nd Sunday of Advent Year A

2nd Sunday of Advent Year A December 4, 2022 It’s the 2nd Sunday of Advent. Do you know what that means for this day? It means it’s “Grumpy John the Baptist Sunday!” Every year on this Second Sunday of Advent, we get a picture of John the Baptist, who is a key figure in all four gospels, quite unusual. And boy, is he in rare form today. There is something strangely compelling about John the Baptist; all these different people are going out into the wilderness to hear what he has to say. And today, he targets the Scribes and the Pharisees, two competing segments of Judaism of the day—not unlike how Christians in the Republicans and Democrats of our day are at odds. So, it’s interesting that in Matthew’s gospel, which we know was written to a primarily Jewish audience, John goes after the most religious people who have come out to hear him. “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance….Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” It’s an interesting challenge: open yourselves and your religion up to God’s transforming work or God is going to make of you…a stump! When we lived in the rectory at our first church in McComb, Mississippi, we were haunted, for a season, by a stump in our front yard. The stump was the remnant of a tree that had fallen on the rectory during Hurricane Katrina, and every time I looked at it, even after the damage to the home and our possessions had been repaired, it felt like a reminder of a wound. Eventually, I was silently grateful when the church had someone come out to grind up the stump and make it disappear, so I didn’t have to look at it every day. So, I can certainly relate to stumps having some negative connotations. Our Old Testament reading for today, the passage from Isaiah, also talks about a stump in Isaiah’s vision of a peaceable kingdom. “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” For Isaiah, the stump is a hopeful symbol; as long as the roots of the stump are intact, it is still a living, growing thing. This image of the stump in Isaiah shows that all is not lost, that there is still a rooted foundation for new life to grow, even when it seems that disaster has struck, and the tree has been chopped down. When we moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, I was intrigued by an artistic phenomenon there. A chainsaw artist named Marlin Miller had carved a number of beautiful wooden statues of native creatures—dolphins, birds, fish—out of stumps; trees that had been cut down because they were so damaged by the hurricane. These statues dotted the coastline of the Mississippi sound. I saw them as beacons of how hard change and transformation can be and also a reminder that beauty and new life can come out of the hardest and worst things. These old, seemingly-dead stumps were transformed by the artist’s skill and loving attention into signs of hope and even joy. I have certainly known this reality in my own life, over and over again, and I wonder if you have, too? Have you experienced times in your life when change was inflicted upon you or even when you gave yourself willingly over to transformation and what felt like an ending became a source of new life, beauty, and hope, what seemed like a stump became a source of new life? I can’t help but wonder if the people who were flocking out to hear that grumpy John the Baptist preach in the wilderness weren’t longing for some of this, sensing that God was already at work in the world around them, in the foundations of their faith, as John prepared the way for Jesus the coming Messiah. Did they sense the shifting foundations? Were they hopeful for the dramatic transformation that was coming? At our diocesan convention a few weeks ago, our Bishop Frank Logue and two of his canons all spoke at length about the seismic changes that have happened in our greater Episcopal church since Covid. They spoke about the shock and dismay that they felt when they compared attendance and budget numbers for the diocese from 2019 with those of 2021. Those numbers would suggest a rapid decline across the diocese. They also shared stories of new life, new hope, of God’s continued faithfulness in congregations across the diocese, and they shared stories of how God was bringing new life out of stumps. I will confess that I felt a little disconnected from all of this at diocesan convention, and I have wrestled with it since then. While the decline in numbers was certainly true for us in 2021, it is not where we find ourselves here and now, as we close out 2022. In fact, these days, I’m pleasantly surprised to find that our attendance numbers are close to where they were in 2019, and our finances are in pretty good shape. And yet, we find ourselves dramatically changed from the pandemic. While it might seem like things are “back to normal” here, we’re different. We now have three Sunday morning services instead of two. We find ourselves living into slightly different rhythms; we have the addition of a virtual congregation, which we never had before; and weekly attendance rhythms have changed, especially for our families with children still at home. There is still a sort of stumpishness (through this change that has been inflicted upon us) clinging to us after Covid, that may never dissipate. I invite you to join me in contemplating this and praying about it. In this season of hope and expectation, may we, too, be curious about the invitation from grumpy John the Baptist, a challenge to be open to God’s transforming work. May we be visionaries like Marlin Miller, looking to see the beautiful new creation that God can reveal to us in the living scars of the stumps of Covid. May we trust in God, who gives us strong roots of faith and tradition to anchor us even as God calls new life forth in, through, and among us.

The First Sunday of Advent Year A

Advent 1A November 27, 2022 Today we celebrate the beginning of a new year in the church calendar. It is the first Sunday of Advent, a season of the church year that is characterized by anticipation and waiting, by expectant hope and longing, by preparation for Jesus’s coming again through his birth at Christmas and by preparation for Jesus’s coming again into this world as he promised. Advent is, perhaps, the most counter-cultural of our seasons because all around us, the stores, the yards, the houses are all decorated for Christmas in a riot of carols and colors. And yet in Advent, we light our single candles week by week and huddle expectantly around the light of those individual flames. In our gospel lesson for today, we see Jesus, who has just entered Jerusalem and is peering into the shadows of his impending death, entreating his disciples (and us) to “keep awake!” And that’s really the theme of this season, isn’t it: Keep awake! But how do we do that, we who are not so good at or comfortable with waiting? In Advent, we are invited to dwell for a season with our longing. We sing every week “O, come O come Emanual,” and we identify as a people in exile, longing to return home. We remember for a season that we are a people who are called to wait, to watch expectantly, to hope. Most of the time, we just refuse to wait. We rush or we ignore it or we distract ourselves with our smartphones, but in Advent we are called to embrace the waiting and the longing that comes with it; we are called to lean into the uncertainty of our daily lives. We are invited to keep watch for the presence of God, who does show up and who will continue to show up. A while back, one of my favorite songs was titled “Awake My Soul” by the British band Mumford and Sons. The refrain of the song goes: “Awake my soul! For you were made to meet your maker.” St. Augustine wrote a long time ago that at the center of each of us is a God-shaped hole. We try to fill it so often with things that aren’t God or of God. But in the end, only God can fill that void. So one way of keeping awake during this season of Advent is to embark upon an examination of our longing. What is it for which we wait? What does our deepest longing reveal about each of us? And what would it be like to kneel before God (perhaps during some extra silence before the confession?) and to name our specific longing before God and ask God for God’s fulfillment? So this Advent, may your soul be awakened: that you may watch with the expectancy and joy of children waiting for their playmates to arrive. May your soul be awakened that you may watch with the purpose of one who waits for water to boil. May your soul be awakened that you may watch with the patience and faithfulness of one who keeps watch with a loved one who is near death. May you keep awake and keep watch for the presence of God in your life and in this world. For you were made to meet your maker.