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.

23rd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 28C

23rd Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 28C November 13, 2022 “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” I couldn’t help but think of this line from our epistle reading today—the 2nd letter to the Thessalonians--as I sat at a stoplight about to turn onto the Truman from Montgomery Crossroads. I was looking out the window at a man holding a small sign—saying he was a veteran and asking for any sort of assistance. I was thankful that I had one of our blessing bags in the back seat, so I rolled down my window and handed it to him. Then I watched as my husband, who was in the car in front of me, rolled down his window and handed him some money. It’s one of the things that I admire about my husband and his priestly ministry. He takes to heart another scriptural admonishment, that we heard Jesus say in last week’s gospel: “give to everyone who begs of you.” And I wondered what we’re supposed to do with these two seemingly contradictory scriptures from one week to the next? There’s a whole history around this quote from 2 Thessalonians. It has been quoted by leaders across the centuries—John Smith to the colonists at Jamestown; Vladimir Lenin as a foundation of socialism, the first phase of communism. The original hearers of this line, the Christian community of Thessolonika, received this admonition from the letter writer (who may or may not have been Paul) in a specific context. They were worried about the eschaton, the end times. They thought it was going to happen any day now, that Jesus was going to return and pass judgement on this world, and they would be released from their trials and tribulations to go live as the faithful in Jesus’s eternal kingdom. If you think the end of this world is going to happen any day now, then what does it matter how you earn your living or contribute to the community? But the writer of 2nd Thessalonians is telling that community that it does matter. What they do every day between now and the end of this world, how they function together in community continues to matter. No matter what is happening, our contributions to our community matter; how we care for each other matters. So, I started wondering about different ways to think about contributions to community and how we take care of each other from this particular scripture. How do we get at the heart of it—that our contributions matter, that how we take care of each other matters—while maybe leaving behind the very individualistic and punitive nature of it? My little family is getting ready to go visit my extended family in Northeast Mississippi next weekend. Most of you know that my parents decided to buy a farm in the last few years, and together with my youngest brother and his wife and their twins, they all farm, growing their own organic food—fruit and produce—and sharing that with their community by selling it at a local farmer’s market and through C.S.A. shares (which stands for community supported agriculture). It’s a huge undertaking for four adults and there’s always something to do. They joke now about how they often save big projects for when they know my other (California) brother and I are coming with our families. They call us their migrant workers. And if the weather cooperates, we help do these projects; and my mom cooks and cooks and cooks and feeds us all. We don’t help out to earn our food. My mom would still feed us even if we didn’t help with the work. We help out because we’re family, and the farm is important to them, so it’s also important to us, and we want to support it. (It’s why we go to sporting events for our children and grandchildren, right? Why we sign up to bring food to church events or volunteer. We are a part of these families, these communities, and we value what they value and so we support it and them.) But what if the gospel calls us to think bigger? Bigger than helping out in our own families? Bigger than helping out in our own church? I’ve been reading the book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer is a mother and a scientist and also a Native American. In her chapter titled The Council of Pecans, she recounts one of the stories of her family of origin—how her grandfather and his brother go out fishing for their supper but catch nothing. They are hesitant to go home empty handed and face a supper of only biscuits and red-eye gravy yet again. When one of the boys stubs his toe on something, they are delighted to discover nuts, so many he can hardly walk through them all. They decide to take them home and stuff as many as they can in their pockets, but they long to bring more home to mamma to see them through the coming days, and they can only carry so many in their small hands. Kimmerer concludes the story writing, “The heat eases a little as the sun sinks low and evening air settles in the bottomland, cool enough for them to run home for supper. Mamma hollers for them and the boys come running, their skinny legs pumping and their underpants flashing white in the fading light. It looks like they’re each carrying a big, forked log, hung like a yoke over their shoulders. They throw them down at her feet with grins of triumph: two pairs of worn-out pants, tied shut with twine at the ankles and bulging with nuts.” i Over the course of the chapter, Kimmerer writes beautifully about what pecan (and other nut trees) can teach us. She writes about how pecan trees don’t produce every year but rather at unpredictable intervals that scientists speculate are brought about because of environmental stimuli or factors. And in the years that the nut trees mast or produce, the environment around them flourishes. The squirrels eat more and become more abundant, and then the hawks eat more and become more abundant. And the next year, when the nut trees don’t mast, the squirrel and hawk populations drop as well. Because the thing about pecan trees is that they don’t just decide as individuals if they’re going to produce nuts in a given year. They all work together and all the trees produce or don’t. She writes, “If one tree fruits, they all fruit—there are no soloists. Not one tree in a grove, but the whole grove; not one grove in the forest, but every grove; all across the county and all across the state. The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.” ii All flourishing is mutual. What you do matters to the greater community. What if each of us moved from a more individualistic mentality (the one of he who does not work shall not eat) toward a more communal mentality—that all flourishing is mutual? What might we as a church, as a society learn from the pecan trees about how to live and how to take care of each other and the world around us? What might we consider changing in our lives or in the life of this place to support the flourishing of all? i. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed editions, 2013. p 11 ii. Ibid. p 15

The Sunday after All Saints' Day-The Rev Melanie Lemburg

Sunday after All Saints Year C November 6, 2022 Most of us don’t want to think about death. Not our own death. Not the deaths of those we love. Rather than even mentioning the word “death,” we have created these phrases that we all know mean death but don’t make us say it. There’s the most popular “passed away” (as in “he/she passed away”) or the expression of someone being lost-- (we lost him/her or I’m so sorry for your loss). There’s the wonderfully Shakespearean “shuffled off this mortal coil” or the more prosaic: “kicked the bucket,” “bought the farm,” or even “bit the dust.” The references may be even more oblique; one of our Wednesday service congregation reported indignantly that her doctor had said to her this week, “you know as we age, these things are going to happen”. Most of us just don’t like to talk about it or even think about it. And when we do think about death, it may make us afraid or uncomfortable. That’s why I’m so thankful for our liturgical tradition—which encourages us to spend some time with death this time every year. Every year, we walk through three days of death—All Hallow’s Eve, All Saint’s Day, and the day after when we remember All the Faithful Departed. In fact, it’s so important to us that we face this reality at least once a year that we can move the observance of All Saints’ Day to the Sunday after, which we are doing today, so just in case people tried to duck spending three days with death earlier in the week, we’re going to get you with it on Sunday! I’m also thankful for this place, where we bury our loved ones right outside the doors of the church, so that they are not far away from us in their “eternal rest.” There’s no fake grass here to try to cover up the gaping hole of the grave, and we even take turns passing around the shovel during the burial service to help fill in their grave. So what are the gifts that we receive from marking this day—this Sunday after All Saints’ year after year, from being willing to look at death head on from time to time rather than trying to ignore it or pretend it doesn’t exist? First, it gives us an opportunity to acknowledge our discomfort around death, and it invites us to sit with death for a bit, maybe even start to make friends with it. Second, All Saints’ helps us remember that even though each of us must ultimately face death on our own, there is a whole great communion of those who we love and who love us, who have gone before us into death and who wait to welcome us when we get there. Third, this day serves as a reminder for us that no one who is ever loved is truly lost. During this season, as we write names on bags and place them on the graves, as we read off names from a list during our Eucharistic prayer, we creep a little bit closer to the reality that there is no real division between death and life, between this life and the next. It’s what Jesus is talking about in the gospel reading for today: we make our own eternity even now in the choices we make and how we engage others and the world around us. Or as our burial liturgy puts it: “death is not the end, but a change.” One of my favorite musicians—the Quaker poet and musician Carrie Newcomer—has a song titled All Saints’ Day that I’ve been listening to these last couple of weeks. She captures in poetry and in song the grace and mystery that this day offers us, the comfort and consolation that can be found in remembering all those who have loved us and have gone before us into death and the ways that they continue to support and surround us, in our life and in our death. In the chorus, Newcomer talks about how the next life hovers close to us all throughout this one, as if on the other side of a veil, and it is only at times that we notice. Can't you feel it ever closer We breathe it in and then we exhale We touch both sides and now eternal Standing closer to the veil Now is just a moving image Not a ribbon a start and end There is a bird a hidden singer That calls and listens and calls again Can't you feel it ever closer We breathe it in and then we exhale We touch both sides and now eternal Standing closer to the veil Centered down and moving outward Sometimes almost too sweet to bare There are endless ways to reach home Just keep walking and I'll meet you there Can't you feel it ever closer We breathe it in and then we exhale We touch both sides and now eternal Standing closer to the veil There's a blurring of the borders And I swear that I heard voices But every act of simple kindness Calls the kingdom down and all around us Can't you feel it ever closer We breathe it in and then we exhale We touch both sides and now eternal Standing closer to the veil Standing closer to the veil Songwriters: Carrie Newcomer, Carrie Ann Newcomer. For non-commercial use only.