5th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 7B

The 5th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 7B June 24, 2018 Today, I want you to think for a moment about what you are afraid of. When is the last time that you felt afraid? Now, think about this for a minute and be honest with yourself. I’m not just talking about a kind of “fearing for your life” afraid, although that is certainly legitimate. I’m talking about that low-level buzz of anxiety that may or may not cause us to act certain ways that we wouldn’t otherwise. Maybe you’ve been afraid because something new or different is going on with your health? Maybe you’ve been afraid because something is going on with someone you care about? Maybe you’ve been afraid because something is happening that you cannot control? Maybe you are afraid because your child is growing toward more independence, because you are afraid that you will lose your job or that you won’t have enough money to do all that you want to do? Maybe you are afraid that you will become infirm and not able to do all that you have been accustomed to doing? Maybe you are afraid when you watch the news? Have you got it yet, the last time you felt afraid? (Maybe it was just now when I listed all those scary things?) Ok. Now, think about how you reacted in that fear. Be truthful. Was your reaction how you would have acted if you had not been afraid? Jesus and the disciples are in a boat crossing over to the other side of the water. Jesus falls asleep in the stern on a cushion when a huge, scary storm whips up suddenly, and the disciples become afraid. They wake him up and greet him with the words, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He rebukes the wind and the waves, immediately calming the storm, and then he says to the disciples, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” At first glance, this story seems to be Jesus’s rebuke of the disciples of their fear and their lack of faith. But I think there is more going on there than that. I don’t think it is that simple. I can’t help but wonder if Jesus isn’t saying to them, “After all that you have seen me do in healing the sick and bringing folks into the kingdom of God, then why is your default reaction still one of fear and thinking that I don’t care about you?” Have you still no faith? Because that’s the thing about fear, isn’t it? Many times we don’t even realize that we are acting out of a place of fear or anxiety, but the way that fear provokes us to act is not out of our better nature. It is not out of a place of faith, hope, or love. A priest-friend told me a story about another priest this week. The priest had been asked to go to a hospice facility and to marry two people, one of whom was at the end of life. The priest wouldn’t do it, and when my friend asked him why not, he said, “All I could think about was all the rules.” My friend asked me if I would have done it, and I said yes. But as I think more about it and delve deeper into the depths of my own heart, I recognize that I, too, am a rule follower. I look to rules to keep me safe, and I can easily see how I would also look to the rules to support my acting from a place of fear. You see, it’s not always clear when we are acting out of a place of fear or anxiety, out of a place where we are not living into the fullness of faith, of who God created us to be. Sometimes we look to try to control situations. Sometimes we focus too much on the rules. Sometimes we label whole groups of people as bad or other. Sometimes we accuse those we love and who love us of not caring or we lash out against them. Sometimes we try to use certainty to squash both fear and any ambiguity. And sometimes we avoid dealing with things altogether, pretending that we are not afraid through denial or bravado. So what are we to do? Where is the good news in this? The Old Testament lesson, the story of David and Goliath, actually has something to offer us in this quest for considering what to do in the face of our fear. I'm thinking about the part of the story when Saul dresses the young David up in all his armor to equip him to meet the mighty Philistine giant in battle, but after realizing that he cannot walk in all the armor, David takes it all off, and goes with what he knows, what he has used to keep wild animals away from his father’s flock. He meets the Philistine warrior in battle armed with his staff, five smooth stones his shepherd’s back and his sling. That, my friends, is the fearless authenticity that faith calls us to as well. We don’t act a certain way just because someone tells us that is how we are supposed to act. We don’t let fear drive out what we know and hold to be true of ourselves and others. For us people of faith that is anchored in our baptism, in the fact that each of us is God’s beloved, cherished by God, and it is anchored in the resurrection—which showed us that God’s love is stronger than absolutely everything, even death. So we have absolutely nothing to fear. So in times of fear or anxiety, we hold on to the truths of our faith. The other thing that we can do is to kindly hold a mirror up to each other. When someone we know and love seems to be acting out fear as opposed to acting out of faith, then we are called to gently reflect that back to them. And in that process, we are given the opportunity to speak peace to each other. There is another side to all of this that I need to mention. It has to do with the state of our nation. I saw the cover page of the Christian Century magazine this past week, and I was struck by the words written there: “The Politics of Fear.” The politics of fear. This is what our partisan politics has devolved into—politicians playing and preying on our worst fears as individuals and as a people. No one is without bias. That’s part of human nature. That is why it is so important for us to do this inner work examining our own fears and how they motivate us, so that we can identify when the politics of fear are being employed upon us, to identify and hold fast to what we know to be true and to the key tenants of our faith, and to not fall into the trap of believing everything they are pedaling as antidote to the fear they are provoking. You invitation for this week is to pay attention to the times when you are afraid. Stop in the moment and offer that fear to Jesus and before you act, make space to hear his words echo in your soul: “Beloved: peace, be still.”

4th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 6B

4th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 6B June 17, 2018 I’ve been thinking a lot about families this week, as I’ve been interacting with our kids through Vacation Bible School, and as my own kids have been out of town all week. And so I was struck by our collect for today: “Keep, O Lord, we beseech thee, thy household the Church in thy steadfast faith and love, that by the help of thy grace we may proclaim thy truth with boldness, and minister thy justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ…” There’s a lot in there that is striking to me. First, we are acknowledging that the church is God’s household and then we are asking God to keep it in God’s steadfast faith and love so that we may proclaim God’s truth with boldness and minister God’s justice with compassion—not for our own sake or for the sake of the church but for the sake of our savior Jesus Christ. I don’t know about y’all, but that’s not usually how I think about church at all. I think about church as how it helps me be in relationship to God and to God’s people, how it feeds me to go out into the world to proclaim God’s love. But this collect is suggesting there is a much larger purpose at work here in God’s household the church. That we are a family who is to be about doing the work of proclaiming God’s truth with boldness and ministering God’s justice with compassion. In our gospel reading for today, we see Jesus offering a couple of parables, and Mark tells us that Jesus only spoke to the crowds in parables but he would explain everything in private to his disciples. The word parable literally means to throw alongside. So rather than being analogy or morality tales, parables serve the purpose of putting two different realities alongside one another. They are narrative contrasts that throw a vision of God’s kingdom up alongside the world as it is and they often challenge us and even goad us into considering new possibilities in light of God’s promises.i In the parable for today, Jesus says that the kingdom of God “is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” So the kingdom of God is like something so tiny that grows into something so great that “all the birds of the air can make their homes in it.” Another homey, image for us this week. I don’t know about y’all, but it’s disconcerting for me because, while I like birds, I would have never thought that a place for all birds to make their nests would be such a priority in the kingdom of God. And here’s the other piece of all this for me this week. I can’t stop thinking about the thousands of migrant children in US custody, many of whom have been intentionally separated from their parents. Now, I know this is an extremely political issue, so take a deep breath and hear me out. I’ve been reading a great deal about this (from both “sides”), and both sides have valid arguments. One side says that children shouldn’t be separated from their parents who are coming here to seek a better way of life and even fleeing life-threatening circumstances. The other side says the parents have broken the law by trying to enter our country illegally, and it is our right to imprison them, but since we don’t imprison children, we will house them separately because we don’t have anything else to do with them. So what are we, God’s household the church-God’s family, supposed to do with all this? How do we, with the help of God’s grace, “proclaim God’s truth with boldness, and minister God’s justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ…” in this situation where there are no clear answers, no clear solutions? One thing I think that we can all agree on is that not a single one of us wants those children to be separated from their parents or immediate care-givers. We can use our own sense of empathy and imagine what it would be like for us as a parent or a grandparent or even as one of the children, to be kept apart from one another and all alone in a strange country. And I would go so far as to say that our God who is so concerned with whether all the birds of the air have a place to nest in God’s kingdom would also be concerned about these thousands of migrant children, regardless of what their parents had done to get them here. For they, too, are a part of God’s household, God’s family. One of my favorite artists is a man named Brian Andreas. He operates the website storypeople and his art incorporates short stories along with his drawings. One that I saw for this week titled Imaging World reads: “In my dream, the angel shrugged and said if we fail this time it will be a failure of imagination and then she place the world gently in the palm of my hand.”ii I believe that we are seeing a failure of imagination on the part of all of our elected leaders, on both sides, on this particular issue. And one way I suggest that we may “proclaim God’s truth with boldness, and minister God’s justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ…” is to demand, as people of faith, that our elected leaders re-engage their imaginations and work together to come up with a better solution than the one we have now. The other thing that we can do is to pray for them—for our elected officials, for the thousands of children, their parents and caregivers and all those who are caring for them right now. Daily. Remember them all before God, whose justice and compassion far outweighs our own understanding. May God give us the grace and the courage to proclaim God’s truth with boldness, and minister God’s justice with compassion; for the sake of our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. iThese ideas were sparked by David Lose’s essay for this week: In the Meantime at http://www.davidlose.net/2018/06/pentecost-4-b-quiet-dynamic-confidence/ iihttp://www.storypeople.com/2013/12/16/imagining-world/

3rd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 5B

Third Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 5B June 10, 2018 Our gospel reading for today starts off in a strange way. “The crowd came together again, so that Jesus and his disciples could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.” What on earth is going on here? Why are people saying that Jesus is “out of his mind”? What has already been happening in only 3 short chapters of Mark’s gospel to make Jesus’s family and those of the religious establishment freak out? One of the blog writers I follow, a Lutheran pastor named David Lose, writes about this passage: “Why is Jesus getting so much flack?...All he’s done so far is announce the coming kingdom of God, call some disciples, cast out a demon or two, and heal a bunch of sick people.” [Lose continues,] “Of course, one of those disciples was a tax collector, he cast out the demon and did much of his healing work on the Sabbath, and he wasn’t put off in the least when approached by a leper. Which means that his vision of the coming kingdom of God was rooted in a profound inclusivity that would let neither religious law nor social custom prevent him from reaching those in need with the abundant life he came to offer.”i So what David Lose is saying is that in our gospel passage for today, we see Jesus’s family and the religious establishment of his time thinking that Jesus is either crazy or demon-possessed because of his radical hospitality and his practice of meeting people exactly where they are and not adding or even paying attention to existing rules for them to follow to be healed or to be with him. And it makes them all really mad, and we get that, don’t we? Because we humans love to have ways to determine if someone is “in” or if someone is “out;” or as David Lose puts it: “we create rules not so much for how they help our neighbor but for how they help us to define ourselves and how handy they are as a standard against which [we can] judge our neighbor. When we see someone who doesn’t conform, we call them rebels, or radicals, or unnatural, or immoral. Which is pretty much what’s happening to Jesus.”ii Thinking about Jesus’s radical hospitality has gotten me thinking about our own hospitality as a church. Now one of the gifts of our church is, in fact, gracious hospitality. I have seen it over and over again. We throw some amazing parties, including our Vacation Bible School that is coming up this week. And I also know that we can continue to grow in this, just like all churches can continue to grow in the ways that they follow Jesus and in how they welcome visitors and in the way that they meet people where they truly are as opposed to expecting them to conform to a pre-determined code of behaviors. The vestry and I began talking about some of this a few months ago at our annual vestry retreat, when I introduced them to the ministry of Invite Welcome Connect. Invite Welcome Connect is a ministry that came out of the diocese of Texas and was developed by a lay person named Mary Parmer. Mary and Invite Welcome Connect have since moved to a new home at Sewanee, and our own Canon Frank Logue is very active in this work with Mary. (In fact, Frank is one of the keynote speakers in the upcoming Invite Welcome Connect Summit happening this week.) If you are interested in all of this, I encourage you to check out their website at invitewelcomeconnect.com. You have already seen some of the fruits of Invite Welcome Connect at work in this congregation: in the Moo Cards for seasonal worship services, in our new website, and in our new full text bulletin. And today, I’d like to invite you into the conversation here. And of course, with that invitation comes….homework! I have copies of the Welcome Checklist created by Mary through Invite Welcome Connect that we are going to pass out now.iii Your homework for this week and over the next couple of weeks is to observe this church through the eyes of a newcomer and to fill out this check-list and then turn it back in to us. I’d like to have the completed check-lists back by the end of June if possible. Doing this may take a bit of research on your part, but I believe that this is one way our church can begin to intentionally expand our ministry of hospitality beyond what we are already doing. You can drop these off at the office, mail them, or scan and email them to me, or leave them in the basket in the narthex. You can put your name on it or you can leave it off. (If you find that this work really excites and energizes you, then please, let me know. There is an advanced component I can share with you to help us go even further in our assessment and exploration of the ways that we welcome.) In closing, I want to leave us with a challenge by David Lose, something for us to think about as a church. “So maybe the question isn’t, “Why is Jesus getting so much flack?” But instead should be, “Why aren’t we getting more?” Why, that is, aren’t we pushing the boundaries of what’s socially and religiously acceptable in order to reach more folks with the always surprising, often upsetting, unimaginably gracious, and ridiculously inclusive love of Jesus? And if that is the kind of love we want to offer, we might go on to ask whether we [are] communicating that message in word and deed loudly and clearly, both inside our doors and outside to the community as well.”iv i. Lose, David. Blog post: Pentecost 2B: Offering a Wide Welcome published June 1, 2015 at http://www.davidlose.net/2015/06/pentecost-2-b-offering-a-wide-welcome/ ii.Ibid iii.This can be found at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55e0acc3e4b0fc91a8f511f7/t/59fcbfa08e7b0ffcd27877b3/1509736352816/WELCOME+Check+List.pdf iv.Lose, David. Blog post: Pentecost 2B: Offering a Wide Welcome published June 1, 2015 at http://www.davidlose.net/2015/06/pentecost-2-b-offering-a-wide-welcome/

2nd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 4B

2nd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 4B June 3, 2018 Then [Jesus] said to them, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.” When is the last time you thought about Sabbath and its relationship to your life and your faith? Now, I’m not talking about a day off, or the weekend, or leisure time, I’m talking about Sabbath which in Hebrew literally means “stop.” If you haven’t really thought about it lately, don’t feel bad. You are not alone. Our culture is one that, I believe, has come to value progress over rest, productivity over stopping. So it is no surprise if you have not thought about Sabbath in a while. In our gospel reading for today, we see Jesus and the Pharisees get into a squabble over Jesus’ treatment of the Sabbath. But what’s the big deal? Just a few weeks ago at our spring clergy conference, our Bishop invite a husband and wife team, Dr. Matthew and Nancy Sleeth to come and speak to the clergy of the diocese about the importance of Sabbath. In that time listening to them, I remembered some things and learned some more things that I’d like to share with you as we think about Sabbath together this morning. Sabbath keeping is one of the 10 commandments given by God to Moses to help order the lives of the children of Israel after God brought them out of bondage in Egypt. The first three commandments are all about God. (You can see this for yourself. They are printed in our BCP—Rite 1 p 317; Rite 2 p 350) So, commandments 1-3 are about God: I am the Lord your God. Don’t make idols for yourselves. Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain. Commandments 5-10 are all about our relationships with others: honor your parents; don’t commit murder or adultery; don’t steal; don’t bear false witness, and don’t covet anything that belongs to your neighbor. But the fourth commandment is wedged in-between the two sets of commandments, making it the fulcrum or the bridge between the two sections: “remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” And what you don’t see in the BCP is that in scripture, the 4th commandment is the longest; it takes up the most space. In fact, the 4th commandment is longer than commandments 5-10 put together. For the children of Israel, Sabbath keeping is a luxury that they could only indulge when they were no longer slaves. It is a holy time that was made to protect the vulnerable; it is a time of integration or re-integration and a time of healing our fractured parts. This is what Jesus is getting at when he says to his disciples and the Pharisees who are challenging his keeping of the Sabbath: “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.” Sabbath is the gift of rest for us; a reminder that God is God and we are not. My husband David’s Uncle Joe would always have a saying for us when we would join them for Sabbath time at their lake house. He would say, “it feels so good when you finally stop.” That is the gift of Sabbath. I think we find ourselves at odds with the gospel reading for today. Instead of being bound up too much by the law to keep the Sabbath like those who questioned Jesus, we have lost the Sabbath. We hardly ever stop. So, how do we reclaim Sabbath in our busy lives, in our busy times and seasons? What would it look like for us to keep Sabbath once a week, to receive this gift from God of healing, reintegration, and rest? What would it take for us to carve out a single 24 hour period when we remembered that God is God and we are not, so the world will go on around us even if we stop and rest for a bit? The definition of work and rest has changed so much since the 10 commandments were written down, and the definition of work and rest varies from person to person. (Some of y’all like to garden or do yard work, and for me, that is not restful at all. In fact, I usually manage to acquire poison ivy when I try to do yard work, so it is the very opposite of restful for me.) So in some sense, what is Sabbath is going to vary from person to person, from family to family. The pastor Eugene Peterson says there are two components to Sabbath keeping that can help us think about how we keep sabbath: pray and play. He says that true Sabbath must have some components of both prayer (reconnecting with God) and play (finding joy in each other and the gifts God has give us). When talking to us clergy, Dr. Matthew Sleeth gave us a simple prescription for figuring out how to keep Sabbath: “figure out what ‘work’ is for you, and then don’t do it.”i My invitation for you this week is to think about how you keep Sabbath. Can you begin working toward consecrating a whole day of your week every week to play and pray? If that seems overwhelming, then maybe start with half a day? What would that look like for you, for your family? What would be the “work” that you would need to set aside for that period of time? Talk to the people in your life who might be affected by this. If you have a family that lives all together, then get everyone’s input on what Sabbath time would look like and try to make space for all of it. And then try it. This week. In closing, I’ll share with you this short poem by the poet Wendell Berry: Whatever is foreseen in joy Must be lived out from day to day. Vision held open in the dark By our ten thousand days of work. Harvest will fill the barn; for that The hand must ache, the face must sweat. And yet no leaf or grain is filled By work of ours; the field is tilled And left to grace. That we may reap, Great work is done while we’re asleep. When we work well, a Sabbath mood Rests on our day, and finds it good.ii i. Notes from Diocese of Georgia’s Spring Clergy Conference 2018 at Honey Creek. Speakers Matthew and Nancy Sleeth ii.Berry, Wendall. “Whatever is foreseen in joy” from Sabbaths by Wendall Berry. 1987.