The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany-Year C

The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C January 30, 2022 I’m going to say something that may upset some of you. This passage from 1 Corinthians that we read today isn’t really about the love between a couple. While it is the favored passage for many weddings, this passage is so much more than just the blissful state of love that almost newly-weds find themselves in. Paul is writing to the church in Corinth which he founded, and he is really angry and disappointed with them. He’s received word that they are fighting about all kinds of stuff, and so this letter is to remind them of who they are supposed to be. “Love is patient; love is kind,” he urges people who have been impatient and unkind to one another. “Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude,” he chides people who have been lording it over one another based on social status and who they were baptized by. “It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth,” he exhorts people who have been spreading lies and rumors about each other. “[Love] bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” Paul reminds this group of Christians who have made bitter enemies out of one another. To get the full effect of Paul’s challenging words on love, think about someone in your life who you have gotten cross-wise with, someone you absolutely cannot stand to be in the same room with because of how they act, what they think, how they have treated you. And now imagine Paul is saying these words about love to you about that person. But Paul doesn’t stop there. He goes on to talk about all the things that will come to an end before love ends. Some scholars think that this list of spiritual gifts is something that the community in Corinth prides itself for having: the gifts of prophies, speaking in tongues, and of knowledge. And Paul is telling them that these gifts that they value so highly in themselves as a community of faith are nothing if they are done without love. Imagine Paul naming out the things that we most value about our community—our gift for hospitality, for creativity, the relationships that have been cultivated over decades—and Paul is saying, if you have all those without love, then they aren’t worth anything. In his book Love is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubled Times, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry writes about this passage from First Corinthians. He talks about how the opposite of love isn’t hate; it’s selfishness. The opposite of love is a life that is completely centered on the self. He talks about how this love that Paul writes about isn’t a noun or a sentiment. He writes, “This love is a verb: it’s an action with force and follow-through. When we pull love out of the abstract, really put it to work, it starts to reveal its extraordinary power. Love as an action is the only thing that has ever changed the world for the better…Love is a commitment to seek the good and to work for the good and welfare of others.”i I’ve been working on a project for a new formation offering at the diocesan level. It’s a leadership development training that has its roots in the old Church Development Institute. For our first session, one of the topics is how we nurture relationships inside and outside of our churches. The model we are using has an exercise that participants are invited to do—where all but one participant create a body sculpture that depicts a tight-loving community in which the one outsider has difficulty breaking in. The second body sculpture the participants are invited to make is one that focuses solely on reaching out to outsiders. And the third body sculpture is one that depicts a community that values both internal and external relationships.ii The point of the exercise is to teach that a focus on tending to both internal and external relationships in the church is important in order for a church to be healthy and to live into its mission of “restoring all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” iii We at St. Thomas are really good at practicing love as an action with each other here. The many, deep, long-standing relationships here are a testament to that. This year, I’d like to invite us to look for ways that we can build and tend relationships with people, both inside and outside the church, who we don’t know as well. We had 25 people join the church last year! That is an amazing gift to our community, and it is a testament to the spiritual gift of hospitality that is one of the cornerstones of this church! How well do you know them? What can you do to get to know them better? How might we be called to restructure things around here to be more inviting to people who haven’t worshipped here for many years? How might we be called to practice love in action beyond the existing bonds of common affection that exist in our faith community? How might we be challenged to put love into action out in the greater community? i. Curry, Michael. Love is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times. Avery: New York, 2020, pp 18, 19, 22. ii. This model comes from the book Holy Currencies by Eric Law p 23. iii. Book of Common Prayer. The Catechism. p 855

The Second Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C

Epiphany 2C January 16, 2022 “I hope my babies can be in the wedding service.” A colleague who had been a priest for over 30 years was telling me a story of the latest wedding he had done in his church, and this is what the bride kept telling him over and over. “I hope my babies can be in the wedding service.” “Well, of course your babies can be in the wedding service,” he kept reassuring her. It did occur to him to wonder why this bride was so insistent on her babies being in the wedding while at the same time so insecure about it, but he quickly stowed those thoughts away. On the day of the wedding, the bride showed up with her babies proudly in tow—male and female chihuahuas dressed in a tux and a bridal gown. She proceeded to have them wheeled down the aisle in a baby carriage as a part of the wedding procession, much to the dismay of my friend who had assured her repeatedly that her babies could be in her wedding. He concluded that conversation by saying, “and that’s why, every time we have a wedding, here at St. Mark’s, I have to update the wedding customary. This week I added the line: “no chihuahuas.” Weddings are fraught with expectations. In these very public celebrations of new life and new family, the expectations of all the major players—bride and groom, their parents, sometimes their siblings and extended relatives and others-collide. It’s not uncommon that right around the time that we do our pre-marital counseling session on conflict for there to have been some significant conflict around the wedding—either between the bride and the groom or a member of the wedding party and a parent--which we spend time unpacking and discussing to learn more about how the couple handles both conflict and expectations of others. It’s interesting to me to see in our gospel passage for today a snapshot of similar dynamics at work in a wedding during Jesus’s own day. Jesus’s mother (who is never called by name in John’s gospel) learns that the wedding feast is about to run out of wine. This is a huge scandal and would reflect very poorly on the new couple and their families. Mary goes to Jesus and tells him the situation, and Jesus responds: “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” Mary doesn’t answer him, but instead tells the servants: “Do whatever he tells you.” And then he just does it. Jesus turns the water into wine and no one except the servants and his disciples even know that he has done it. I can’t help but wonder what shifts in Jesus in that moment after he answers Mary? Why does he decide that it is his concern and that ok, maybe the time is right for his first miracle? (One of my colleagues has suggested that maybe Jesus decided that it was easier to just go ahead and change the water into wine that to deal with his mamma after they got home.) It’s interesting, too, that this change in Jesus’s understanding of the timing of his mission happens in the gospel of John, where Jesus is so unemotional, unmovable, so focused on his mission, and more divine seeming than human. I’d like to understand what happens here when Mary’s expectations for Jesus collide with his own expectations and understanding of his mission. Last weekend, my family and I watched the Disney movie Encanto. Encanto is an animated film that tells the story of the Madrigal family, who received a lineage of unique, magical gifts for each of their offspring after their Columbian village was overrun by armed men in the dark of night. In addition to the magical gifts, the family is given a magical house, and they have decided to use all of these resources to protect the other members of their village and keep them safe from harm. The movie follows the story of Mirabel, the main character, who is the only member of the family to not receive a magical gift, and it explores the weight of expectations on key members of the family to use their gifts in a way that is of service to the family and the community. Mirabel isn’t able to live into the expectation of having a magical gift, so she overcompensates by trying to be super-helpful. Other characters feel burdened by the weight of expectations to use their gifts to the fullest, often to the sacrifice of their own wellness. And when facing the threat of losing their gifts, they begin to question their own self-worth. Mirabel’s oldest sister Luisa, whose gift is super-strength,has a whole song about this: “If I could shake the crushing weight of expectations Would that free some room up for joy? Or relaxation, or simple pleasure? Instead we measure this growing pressure Keeps growing, keep going 'Cause all we know is Pressure like a drip, drip, drip that'll never stop, woah Pressure that'll tip, tip, tip till you just go pop, woah Give it to your sister, it doesn't hurt and See if she can handle every family burden Watch as she buckles and bends but never breaks No mistakes” In Encanto, the characters realize that expectations of others do not have to define their identities or self-worth. They learn to evaluate expectations of their own and that they have received from others, (especially their Abuela, who is the head of the family) and to determine which ones should be kept and which ones could be discarded for them to be healthier and more whole. All this makes me wonder if Jesus’s change is less about succumbing to his mother’s expectations of him and more about reevaluating and shifting his own expectations of his ministry? In this season where all of our expectations for life continue to be disrupted and upended, this is a helpful reminder for all of us. What expectations of yourself do you have that are deeply engrained that you may need to reevaluate during this season? Where in your life are expectations crushing the possibility of more joy, more relaxation, more pleasure? What might be a way that God is calling you to change or grow in a way that is different from your expectations of how things should go?

The First Sunday after the Epiphany-Year C

The First Sunday after the Epiphany-the Baptism of our Lord Year C January 9, 2022 “Everybody hurts, everybody hurts, everybody hurts…sometimes.” i REM lead singer Michael Stipe crooned these words over and over as 7 of us sat on the floor of my freshman year college dorm room listening to the song over and again and again. We were a biology lab small group working on our lab project to test the way that listening to sad music affected the biometric readings of the human body—the connections between the body and the emotions. I don’t remember the results of that experiment but here is what I do remember from that day. 1. The REM song Everybody Hurts is a really long, and really depressing song. 2. It is really, really awkward to be a 19 year old sitting on a dorm room floor during such a long, agonizing song which both lifts up the pathos of the human condition and also acknowledges the shared condition and burden of suffering with a bunch of random classmates, relative strangers, who you have been thrown together with in a lab assignment. ii I was reminded of the song and the experience this week, when I read a portion of the daily meditation written by author, theologian, and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. Rohr’s meditation could have easily been titled “Everybody hurts.” Here is what he writes: “I am no masochist, and I surely have no martyr complex, but I do believe that the only way out of deep sadness is to go with it and through it. Sometimes I wonder if this is what we priests mean when we lift up bread and wine at the Eucharist or communion and say, “Through him, and with him, and in him.” I wonder if the only way to spiritually hold suffering—and not let it destroy us—is to recognize that we cannot do it alone. When I try to heroically do it alone, I slip into distractions, denials, and pretending—and I do not learn suffering’s softening lessons. But when I can find a shared meaning for something, especially if it allows me to love God and others in the same action, God can get me through it. I begin to trust the ambiguous process of life.” He continues, “When we carry our small suffering in solidarity with the one universal longing of all humanity, it helps keep us from self-pity or self-preoccupation. We know that we are all in this together, and it is just as hard for everybody else. Almost all people are carrying a great and secret hurt, even when they don’t know it. When we can make the shift to realize this, it softens the space around our overly defended hearts. It makes it hard to be cruel to anyone. Shared struggle somehow makes us one—in a way that easy comfort and entertainment never can.”iii Our reading from Isaiah today is a love song from God to God’s hurting people. They have been scattered and exiled far away from their home, assimilated into the foreign empire of Babylon. They are deeply fearful that they will become extinct; they are doubtful of their future as God’s chosen and cherished people because God seems to have abandoned them. The prophet here speaks on behalf of God and reassures God’s people that are loved and cherished and not abandoned; that their suffering will not be endless but will give birth to hope and new life. This year in reading this familiar scripture once again, I am struck by the poetry that the prophet uses: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.” I don’t think it’s an accident that the phrase “pass through the waters” calls to mind another time that God’s people were suffering and afraid, as the Egyptian army is bearing down on them to either recapture them and drag them back into slavery or even to kill them all. During that moment of fear and suffering, God proves that God is with them, working through Moses to part the waters of the Red Sea so God’s people can pass through them unharmed. Exodus 14:22 describes the event as the waters parting to create a dry path with walls of water on either side where the people walked—truly a terrifying experience but one through which they come out on the other side, into the first day of their life as a free people. Today in our liturgical year, we lift up the theme of Jesus’s baptism by John in the Jordan River. Every year on this first Sunday after the Epiphany, we read a gospel story about Jesus’s baptism, and it is a Sunday that is especially appropriate for either a baptism or for renewing our own baptismal vows. This Old Testament passage for today, coupled with the gospel passage which shows us Luke’s version of Jesus’s baptism, is a timely reminder of life’s hard places or as REM puts it, that “everybody hurts.” Our lives are a series of passing through the waters of hardship, fear, and suffering, through death (or a change), and into new life or resurrection. And God is with us in and through all of that, comforting us and reminding us that we belong to God and that we are precious in God’s sight. This is what we are baptized into; this is what we recall and remember when we renew our baptismal vows; this is what lift up before God when we gather around God’s altar: that even though we suffer and things may feel scary and hard right now, God will not allow us to stay in that spot for forever. We will pass through the waters and come out on the other side. Just before Christmas, I receive an email from my mom with the subject line: found prayer. Her brief email said that she had read this prayer on a blog that she follows and the writer said it had been sent out by her church. I’ve been praying it since just before Christmas and even though it is a new year, it still seems applicable. I’ll share it with you in closing. "God of the long and aching wait. This year has swelled with the grief and longing and loss of many. We want so much more than the present condition of this world. Where are you? There are seasons where it becomes difficult to believe in your nearness. Would you make it known to us now? That as we carry each other through this season, we would find the miracle in the mundane, tiny sacred flashes of good as we wait for a healing that lasts. Help us to dream. That we would find even our prayers grow large in this season, asking for those things which have seemed too good or naive. Help us to dream, not that we would pine for some mirage of how things used to be, but that we would hold space for visions of life where justice can breathe, where power is mobile, and where liberation leaves no one behind. Come, God. And we will wait." iv Amen. i. Here’s how to listen to the song and see the full lyrics (in case you need some comfortable melancholy or you were living under a rock in the early 90’s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rOiW_xY-kc&t=5s ii. The song is described as having a comfortable melancholy and REM guitarist Peter Buck wrote in the album notes “that ‘the reason the lyrics are so atypically straightforward is because it was aimed at teenagers’, and ‘I've never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but the idea that high school is a portal to hell seems pretty realistic to me." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everybody_Hurts iii. https://cac.org/it-cant-be-carried-alone-2022-01-04/ iv.Here’s the original blog post with the prayer: https://fabricpaperthread.blogspot.com/2021/12/almost-christmas.html

2nd Sunday after Christmas Year C

2nd Sunday after Christmas-Year C January 2, 2022 Today we find ourselves in a strange time. It’s the second day of a brand new year, and it’s the 9th day out of the 12 day season of Christmas, the short season in our church year that falls between Christmas day and the feast day of Epiphany-January 6th. As our new year begins, I’ve been thinking about the people in our Old Testament reading for this week. These are the people that Jeremiah has been preaching to that God is going to give them what is coming to them, that because they have turned away from God and worshipped other gods, then they will be taken out of the promised land by foreign invaders and scattered. But today’s lesson has God speaking words of hope through the prophet, proclaiming that God will regather God’s scattered people and that they will be returned to their promised land where they will sing a new song. I’ve been thinking about new songs and about how people become inspired to sing new songs even when the new, promised thing has not yet arrived. As we enter 2022, I find myself weary; it’s hard to feel optimistic in the face of continued challenges and difficulties. I would like to be able to sing a new song, but I don’t even really know where or how to begin. The theologian and poet Howard Thurman has a poem about all this. It’s titled I will sing a new song and here is what it says: I Will Sing a New Song The old song of my spirit has wearied itself out. It has long ago been learned by heart; It repeats itself over and over, Bringing no added joy to my days or lift to my spirit. I will sing a new song. I must learn the new song for the new needs. I must fashion new words born of all the new growth of my life – of my mind – of my spirit. I must prepare for new melodies that have never been mine before, That all that is within me may lift my voice unto God. Therefore, I shall rejoice with each new day And delight my spirit in each fresh unfolding.i “I will sing, this day, a new song unto the Lord./ I must learn the new song for the new needs./ I must fashion new words born of all the new growth/ of my life – of my mind – of my spirit./I must prepare for new melodies that have/ never been mine before,/That all that is within me may lift my voice unto God.” Where in my life has there been new growth lately? Perhaps that is the place to begin looking, where God is preparing this new song for new needs that I am called to sing with my life? Where have I encountered the holy in my life during these wearisome days? What are the ordinary and the extraordinary ways in which the light of Christ has appeared in my life? In closing, I’ll share with you a meditation on the wise men who we see in our gospel reading for today and how they might inspire us to seek the Christ child in our lives and in our world, and how this might inspire the new song that God is inviting us to sing in our lives during this season. Seeking Magi from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?” —Matthew 2.1-2 They weren’t searching for treasure. They weren’t hoping to meet emperors or movie stars. They must have declined 100 invitations to digress and temptations to turn around. They likely encountered the cutest kids in the world— but not the one they sought. In your dealings, your duties digressions, it’s easy to look for trouble, look for the advantage, look for fault, look for comfort. It’s easy to settle for sentiment, for fitting in, for happiness. Don’t. Resist the distractions. Seek the holy. Seek the divine, even in those who do not know it in themselves. Seek the hopeful even in the dull and despairing. Notice those moments of courageous love, of suffering wisdom and gentle resolve. The Christ child—the vulnerable presence of God— is among us. Look. Look deeper.ii i. Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas & Other Celebrations ii. By Steve Garnaas-Holmes. https://unfoldinglight.net/2021/12/28/seeking/