26th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 28B

26th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 28B November 18, 2018 Those of you who are “friends” with my husband on Facebook will recognize this story that he shared two years ago and then again this past week. “In Crown Heights, there was a Jew, Yankel, who owned a bakery. He survived the camps. He once said, ‘You know why it is that I’m alive today? I was a kid, just a teenager at the time. We were on the train, in a boxcar, being taken to Auschwitz. Night came and it was freezing, deathly cold, in that boxcar. The Germans would leave the cars on the side of the tracks overnight, sometimes for days on end without any food, and of course, no blankets to keep us warm,’ he said. ‘Sitting next to me was an older Jew – this beloved elderly Jew - from my hometown I recognized, but I had never seen him like this. He was shivering from head to toe, and looked terrible. So I wrapped my arms around him and began rubbing him, to warm him up. I rubbed his arms, his legs, his face, his neck. I begged him to hang on. All night long; I kept the man warm this way. I was tired, I was freezing cold myself, my fingers were numb, but I didn’t stop rubbing the heat on to this man’s body. Hours and hours went by this way. Finally, night passed, morning came, and the sun began to shine. There was some warmth in the cabin, and then I looked around the car to see some of the other Jews in the car. To my horror, all I could see were frozen bodies, and all I could hear was a deathly silence. Nobody else in that cabin made it through the night – they died from the frost. Only two people survived: the old man and me… The old man survived because somebody kept him warm; I survived because I was warming somebody else…’ Let me tell you the secret of Judaism. When you warm other people’s hearts, you remain warm yourself. When you seek to support, encourage and inspire others; then you discover support, encouragement and inspiration in your own life as well. That, my friends, is ‘Judaism 101.’” In the letter to the Hebrews, we see a sermon to a discouraged congregation. The preacher is addressing a congregation that is suffering from decline; he is addressing a flock who is “tired and discouraged about the way evil seems to persist in the world. As a result the congregation has begun to question the value of being followers of Christ. Attendance at worship has begun to falter, zeal for mission has waned, and the kind of congregational life that is rich with love and compassion has begun to dissipate.”i He is addressing a people who are weary and longing for the not yet to be realized and fulfilled. The preacher continues to re-iterate the sacrifice that has already been made by Christ, and in the reading for today, we finally get to the part where we get the answer to the question: “so what?” So what if Christ is the once and future priest in God’s church, offering once and for all a sacrifice for the sins of all? What does that have to do with us? He writes, “Therefore, my friends… let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” Two things strike me about this today. First, as followers of Jesus, we are called to “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering” because we can trust in the never-failing goodness of God, even when it does not always seem so. Our annual giving campaign this year is titled Celebrate St. Thomas: Hope grows here. What does it look like for us as a community and for us as individuals to “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering”? This seems to me to be an essential component to hope growing here today, tomorrow, and many years into the future. Second, as followers of Jesus, we are called to “provoke one another to love and good deeds…encouraging one another.” The word for “provoke” here is literally translated as to agitate. Now, this may seem foreign to some of us. We don’t want to come to church to be agitated. But in true Christian community, we hold each other accountable; we are called to agitate each other toward being more loving and working more good deeds. We are called to encourage one another. But in no place does it say that we have to be so nice to each other that we don’t engage one another, especially when we are going astray. This doesn’t mean that we go spoiling for fights. But it does mean that we speak the truth in love when we see individuals disrupting the body of Christ that is the church and actively working against the hope of God’s faithfulness in which we have been called to live and to which we have been called to testify. In Yankel’s story about how he survived on the train car to Auschwitz, it was through Yankel’s work to agitate the old man, keeping him warm, that kept both men alive in the freezing box car. This work kindled the fire of Yankel’s faith, helping him hold on to hope, and it warmed both him and the old man, physically and spiritually. Who might you be called to warm, to agitate a bit this week, and in doing so warm and re-ignite your own hope? i. I had cited this passage in my sermon in 2012 on these propers. At that time, I was not able to identify the source, but it is not original to this sermon, nor was it original to me in 2012.

25th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 27B

25th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 27B November 11, 2018 At first glance, our gospel reading for today seems like a preacher’s dream come true. Here we find ourselves at week three of our annual giving campaign: Celebrate St. Thomas: Hope Grows Here; and what does the lectionary give me to preach on but the story of the poor widow who gives absolutely everything she had to support her church. But unfortunately for me, there are more layers to this story that complicate its application in our annual giving campaign season. Jesus is clearly condemning “the church” or the institution of the temple and those who benefit from the ways in which it is corrupt. The Hebrew Scriptures are pretty clear that God expects God’s people to take care of those who are vulnerable, to take care of the very widow who is dropping her last two coins into the treasury. So, it is hard to tell if Jesus is using the story to commend her faith or to condemn the very institution that she supports. This past week, I listened to the Jesuit podcast Pray As You Go for today’s gospel reading. And, as usual, the Jesuits had a more thoughtful twist on this gospel. Here is what they said. “In the unremarkable action of a nobody, a poor widow without even a name, Jesus sees a great mystery: the mystery of God. Take a moment now to look back over the last month or so, to call to mind some small, unspectacular act of self-giving which you may have seen without fully registering it… in your family life, at work, in the street, or something you heard about on the news.” “Now let that person be present to you in your memory. Look at their face. Hear their voice. Allow the reality they represent into your heart – to touch you deep down, to move you, perhaps to invite you…” “When we open our hearts to the best side of human nature, strong feelings are often stirred – maybe a desire to be generous ourselves, or maybe quite the opposite, feelings of fear or doubt about ourselves. Whatever has been stirred within you in the last few minutes, take it to God now, speaking as you would to a friend about what you feel, what you desire…”i There are two different ways to think about the action of the widow in the gospel reading. One way is to see her “small unspectacular act” as an act of sacrifice—of giving away something that she would surely miss. The other is to see her “small unspectacular act” as an offering of herself, a way of giving that helps her to live out her faith within the community. When we talk about stewardship, we are talking about the latter option. We are talking about examining our lives and asking in what ways can we give offerings of ourselves to God and each other in thanksgiving and in joy and in hope that God’s future will be brought to fulfillment in this place through our small unspectacular acts of self-giving. Do y’all remember the definition of stewardship that I have talked about off and on in my year and a half here? “Stewardship is all that I do with all that I have after I say ‘I believe.’” Stewardship is small, unremarkable acts of self-giving that well up from our faith and our hope, from our gratitude and our joy. So this week, I invite you to prayerfully consider what those small, unspectacular acts of self-giving will look like in your own faith life in connection with how you give money away. I invite you to consider moving deeper into faithfulness in your giving, which will look different for every different person or family. One concrete way to do this is to consider where your pledge or giving to your faith community fits into your budget. I once had a parishioner who told me his life and his faith were changed when we looked at his bank account during the annual giving campaign one year and he realized that he gave more to his two golf club memberships than he did to his faith community. And it doesn’t have to be golf—it could be eating out, going on vacations or weekends away. I invite you as an exercise in your faith to spend some time imagining what small, unspectacular act of self-giving might you make in your giving to God through the mission and ministry of St. Thomas in the coming year. For some it may mean being more intentional in how and when you give, either through a pledge or through some sort of regularity. For some it may mean examining how you spend money and asking yourself if that truly reflects your faith priorities. For some, it may mean encountering and offering to God strong feelings that this raises in us—both the desire to be more generous and the fear and doubt about how we will do that. As you engage prayerfully in what may be challenging work, may you rest in the awareness and the assurance that the mystery of God can be found in small, unspectacular acts of self-giving; and that God loves you; God has created you good; and God blesses you. Always. i. https://www.pray-as-you-go.org/home/ November 10/11, 2018

The Sunday after All Saints' Day--2018

The Sunday after All Saints’ Day November 4, 2018 Last month, when I came back from traveling to Mississippi for my grandmother’s funeral, I returned to Savannah with a treasure. While I was home, I found a number of old savings bonds that I had received as a teenager from my great-aunt, who we called Retsie. Retsie, whose given name was Margaret (where I got the Margaret in Melanie Margaret Dickson Lemburg and also Mary Margaret Lemburg) was my father’s mother’s sister. She was a retired school teacher who never married, and she was a close to me as a third grandmother. (When my middle brother Jonathan was born, I stayed with Retsie, who lived right across the street from us.) I spent many hours of my childhood with Retsie. She never did drive, so we would walk to the Krystal down from her house and visit the Woolworth’s. Retsie lived frugally, and she had a very structured routine into which she would fold me when I came to visit. But she would also take trips around the world with her girl friends, and she would bring me back souvenirs from distant lands. With her I learned about order and also about a different kind of feminine independence. In my teenage years, Retsie began giving me savings bonds for special occasions. I learned to set them aside, and then I forgot about them for 20 years. Just recently I heard that the Government is going to discontinue savings bonds, and I remember I had these. So I retrieved them, and I took them down to the bank to see if they were still valid. Well, it was quite an ordeal to get these bonds cashed, and as I stood there while the teller worked, I thought about Retsie, about how much I missed her, even though she’s been dead 16 years. I thought about all I had learned from her, and I realized I knew exactly how I was going to use the money from those bonds she gave me so long ago. I was going to use it to help fund my trip to the Holy Land early next year. Today we celebrate the Sunday after All Saints’ Day, one of the 7 major feasts in the church year when it is especially appropriate to have baptisms. Our readings for today name the ever-present reality of death, and the acknowledgement that when those who we love die then we are left to mourn. (I once planned a funeral with a son who was burying a parent who chose today’s gospel reading for the funeral because it was important for him that Jesus, too, mourned when those he loved had died). Grief is not unchristian, our prayer book reminds us. Rather it is a part of the way that we love in this life, and it is an acknowledgement that when we lose those we love we are forever changed. This past week, I read a meditation by the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr that was talking about divine love. And in that meditation Rohr writes, “all human loves are an increasingly demanding school preparing us for an infinite divine love.” He continues, “Today we recognize this school as the only real training ground for “All the Saints,” and it can never be limited to those who have fully graduated. As the entire New Testament does, we must apply the word “saints” to all of us who are in kindergarten, primary school, middle school, high school, college, and doing graduate studies. Love is one shared reality, and our common name for that one shared reality is “God.”i The New Testament talks about “saints” 20 times, and it’s not talking about stained-glass people living perfect lives of faithfulness that we could only dream about. Saints, in the New Testament, refer to “God-lovers.” One of our old, beloved hymns puts it, “they loved their Lord so dear, so dear, and his love made them strong.” Saints are those God-lovers, both in our own lives and in the life of the body of Christ who walk with us a ways in the school for divine love, who teach us about God through the way that they love God and the way that they love us. So, in the light of our human loves being a school for the divine love for each and every one of us, our baptismal vows give us the frame-work within which to learn, over and over again through the course of our entire lives. As we renew our baptismal vows today and maybe even spend some time with them in reflection over the coming week, we can ask ourselves the following questions. “How are we loving God and others in our lives?” “How can we love God and others even more?” “When do we fail to love God and others?”ii Now, after the sermon ends, I invite you to come forward and light a candle for the saint or the saints that you remember in your life today. Remember them for how they helped you learn to love God and to love others through their love for you; and as you light your candle from the Paschal candle, may you hold fast to the hope that death is not the end but a change, that we are all knit together in the communion of the saints, even now, and that we will all feast together again at God’s table, where we will dwell forever in the light of the undying, unending, unyielding love of God. i.Richard Rohr’s meditation for November 1, 2018: https://cac.org/self-giving-2018-11-01/ ii. These questions came from the article Learning to Love God and Love Others Well on All Saints Day by Emily Watkins on November 1, 2018 at http://www.growchristians.org/2018/11/01/learning-to-love-god-and-love-others-well-on-all-saints-day/