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RCL Year B, 6 Easter
We’re working our way through this theme of stewardship during Easter season. If you’ve heard me more than once, you should be getting the idea now. Everything we have is of God; we are stewards and caretakers of it, for the good of others. This idea shapes all we do as Christians. We care for creation; we care for each other’s physical well-being; we care for others through our daily work and conversations. Today I want to talk about how we care for ourselves – not in the usual sense of ‘taking time for me’ or eating healthy, but how we steward the specific gifts God has given each of us. Which means we have to think about what gifts we have, where they come from, and how we discern what to do with them.
There are a few different places in scripture, mostly in Paul’s letters, where spiritual gifts, or ‘charismata,’ are listed and named. They range from miraculous gifts like prophecy, healing, the gift of tongues – things we tend to see as obviously charismatic gifts, supernatural and not very common – to gifts like teaching, preaching, and generosity – things that have something to do with our character or our calling. People have tried to collate all the gifts into one list, numbering 25 or so spiritual gifts it is possible to have. But none of the lists in scripture are meant to be the sum total of all spiritual gifts – they just seem to be the ones Paul thinks of in the context of that particular letter. And the Holy Spirit being what it is, most accept that there are more gifts than are in that long list – talents, skills, aptitudes, all of them things that help build
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RCL Year B, 5 Easter
We’re still exploring the theme of stewardship in this season of Easter, looking at all the ways we care for and live out God’s gifts in our lives. On Earth Day we talked about care for creation; last week we talked about caring for brothers and sisters near and far away. Today it’s the stewardship of daily life: how we do our work, relate to our families, go about the tasks of every day as stewards of the gifts God gives us.
We have a great story to work with today, this one from the book of Acts about the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch. Acts is full of conversion stories, often of unexpected and unlikely people. This one we heard today is maybe the most surprising of them all. It’s about Philip, one of the seven men called as deacons, those who care for the needs of the widows and orphans in the community and who serve at the Lord’s table in the Eucharist. Stephen was one of those seven deacons as well, famous in Acts for preaching a long wonderful sermon and then being stoned to death. Philip fares better, preaching and proclaiming the gospel to people in Samaria, including Simon the magician. Then, called by the Spirit, he journeys to a road in the wilderness, where the eunuch comes riding along.
The eunuch is from Ethiopia, what would now be northern Sudan. He is a highly placed finance minister in the queen’s court, wealthy and influential. But in Jewish terms, he is an outcast, because as a eunuch he would not be able to participate in the Temple rituals – should he choose to convert to Judaism. He has not converted, but he clearly is interested, reading Isaiah as he rides along.
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RCL Year B, 4 Easter
It’s the season of Easter, a season of resurrection, a time of abundance of life and gratitude. We’re talking about stewardship, about how we live faithfully as stewards, caretakers, of all that God gives us to watch over. We have so many gifts: our own skills and resources, our work, our communities, the creation we live in. We’re tempted to think of them all as our own – but the theology of stewardship reminds us that we do not create or control any of these things. All things come from God, and we are given the task of caring for them. We come from and return to dust – while God’s gifts remain. So our job is in the time we are here to care for things well.
Each Sunday we’re looking at this idea from different angles. Last Sunday on Earth Day we talked about our stewardship of creation. Today our readings point us toward considering how we care for the needs of others in our world – stewardship of God’s love, stewardship of our brothers and sisters, to use the words of 1 John. How can we care for others in both spiritual and practical ways?
It is a basic Christian idea that we should do so, of course. But maybe it’s worth asking why. After all, we are born thinking of ourselves alone; in certain extreme situations of survival, most people go back to that state. We tend naturally to surround ourselves with people who are like us, related to us in the case of our family, or similar to us in their outlooks and opinions in the case of our friends and community. It could easily be argued that this is just a natural outgrowth of our early selfishness, a larger
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Earth Day
RCL Year B, 3 Easter
We’re in the great 50 days of Easter, a whole season where Sunday after Sunday we hear story after story of Jesus resurrected, Jesus alive and appearing to his amazed disciples. Every one of the stories is just about the same as every other one: there the disciples are, doing their own thing, preoccupied, and suddenly, boom, there’s Jesus, who’s just walked through a locked door or otherwise shown up where he shouldn’t be. And the disciples are scared, and Jesus tells them not to be, and then he does something to prove he is who they think he is, truly there in the flesh. And then he tells them to spread the word, and then he goes away.
Easter is one long season of Jesus coming and going, until the ascension 40 days later when Jesus at last leaves his bodily form behind for good. Over and over again he keeps checking in, making sure his followers have gotten the point and gotten the news, and every time telling them to go and tell it to others – and then, his time up, he leaves, and his followers are left behind. And this time, unlike they did when they were with Jesus before his death, the disciples really do seem to get the point. And they do what he tells them to – they spread the word, they themselves preach and teach and heal just like he did, the Holy Spirit comes upon them, and the community of faith begins to grow like wildfire.
Jesus offers them the gift: resurrection. Life instead of death. And then he says, here’s what I want you to do with it: make sure everybody knows about it. Give my life to everyone.
We’re going to be
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RCL Year B, Easter Day
So off went the women with this marvelous message: Jesus is risen from the dead, he’s going ahead of you, you will see him! And they told no one, for they were afraid. And that’s the end of Mark’s gospel, the shortest, possibly the oldest, of the four gospels. There’s the empty tomb, but there’s no Jesus. And nothing further is said to explain what happens next.
It’s such an odd ending that people later tried to add different endings to it, to clean it up and make it sound better. You’ll find them if you look in your Bible, two different endings tacked on to the end of the gospel of Mark. The endings try to finish the story a little better – to bring Jesus in for a resurrection appearance, for one thing. And also to get the disciples back on board to go out and preach the good news, giving them another shot at being friends and disciples after completely deserting Jesus at the cross. But that’s not how the original reads. The gospel of Mark begins 16 chapters earlier with the line: ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ And then it ends 16 chapters later with, ‘they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.’
Well, of course, someone must have said something. Someone heard it from someone and wrote it down and that’s why we have it to read aloud today. Something like resurrection doesn’t stay secret very well. But even so, Mark the gospel writer leaves the ending open in his story. He does it on purpose: his gospel, the 16 chapter-long book, is the beginning of the good news about Jesus. But everyone in that beginning part fails to share
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Here we are, gathered together into church in the middle of the day on a Friday. Here today because each of us somehow believe that this day matters, that it is important enough to spend time in church in the very middle of this day. And yet it always strikes me: there is a whole world outside of this church that is not spending the day this way. Schools aren’t necessarily out, offices don’t close, people still go about their normal routines. Many people do not see it as important or important enough, at least, to go to church on such a day; many people don’t particularly think this day matters in the least. Every now and then because of a movie or a book or an archeological find people get interested in the story of Jesus and the crucifixion and all of that; but for the most part, Good Friday doesn’t make a great deal of difference to most people.
Perhaps, on the one hand, it is entirely fitting that this is so. Every year on Good Friday in church we read John’s story of the Passion, a story with a lot of crowd activity and involvement. To stage this story, you need a lot of extras: you need Roman officials and Jewish high priests conferring and deciding Jesus’ fate; the crowd yelling for another prisoner to be released instead of Jesus; all kinds of people going out to watch the spectacle of the crucifixion outside of the city, and soldiers gambling for Jesus’ clothing; Jesus’ mother and various disciples and followers standing by the cross as Jesus dies; and soldiers and some of the more secret of his followers coming to deal with Jesus’ body after he is dead. A lot of characters troop through the scene, in
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RCL Year B, Palm Sunday
It is always pretty redundant to preach a sermon after the Passion story is read like that. What more is there to say that has not already been said? And yet even with this story we can forget to hear it, really hear it – it can roll right over us yet again without us taking it in. Sometimes we still need something, a way out of the harsh suffering of the story, and a way to make sense of it for ourselves. So, a little bit of a homily.
The Gospel of Mark pulls no punches in the Passion narrative. It is maybe the harshest of all the versions of the Passion. Jesus’ suffering is utterly without relief in this story. Every time anyone speaks, it is to accuse Jesus, to betray him, to mock him, to turn away from him. Every single character in the story does this, from all the mobs of priests and bystanders to Jesus’ dear friends Judas and Peter to the indifferent bureaucrat Pilate. Every one of them uses words to him and about him that inflict and further Jesus’ suffering: He’s horrible and deserves to die. I’ll betray him to you in return for money. He’s worse than a criminal. I don’t know him.
And so when he finally comes to those six hours on the cross, Jesus’ abandonment is total. No one of his friends and followers has stayed by his side, no one in power has come to his aid, and he is forsaken. Flogging hurt intensely, crucifixion is a horrible way to die, but the gospel writer doesn’t dwell on that. Instead, what he tells us and shows us relentlessly is how horrible it is to suffer and die alone. And Jesus is utterly alone.
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RCL Year B, 5 Lent
All season long, we’ve been talking about covenant. Our scriptures tell us of our relationship with God, seen through the long history of covenants between God and us. God created us good in the beginning, but we went the other way instead. God despaired of our improving ourselves, so God promised through Noah to love us anyway. Then God started a people with Abraham, a people to be a blessing to all humanity and a reminder of how to live. God made the terms clearer through Moses, giving a law that showed this people how to live. But the people rebelled against this way, and hurt each other. And things got much, much worse.
So today, God gives up. This covenant is broken, says the prophet Jeremiah in today’s first reading. The people have never been able to keep their side of the agreement. In a human relationship, this would be the part where one person walks away from the other, saying, you’re never going to change. I can’t do this any more.
But that’s not what God says. God says, you’re never going to change. So I’ll do it for you. Never mind about all that that happened. We’ll start over again now.
In the Lenten adult ed series we spent a session talking about forgiveness and reconciliation. I brought in some ideas from a secular book on forgiveness, one by Fred Luskin of Stanford called Forgive for Good. The book makes the point that forgiveness is something we can choose to do or not, but that when we do forgive, we’re able to let go of the hurt and victim status and be happier again. To explain further, Luskin clarifies what forgiveness is not: It is not condoning hurtful actions and saying that
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RCL Year B, 4 Lent
Things in the world of covenant relationship have gotten a little darker with today’s reading. You could say Genesis is a long love story between God and God’s people – not all of it rosy, of course, but overall it’s about God’s desire and love for us: our creation, the rainbow promise of Noah, the long friendship with Abraham and his descendants, the blessing-out-of-suffering that is the theme of the Joseph stories. Exodus continues this story of love, with God freeing his people from the slavery in Egypt. But if all of that’s the love story and the happy honeymoon, then the book of Numbers is the account of the marital troubles. It’s one long wandering in the desert from start to finish, and everyone behaves pretty badly with each other all along the way. All is not well in the relationship between God and God’s people. So now we get more of a picture of what happens when things go wrong with the covenant relationship.
Today’s story begins with the Israelites grumbling. The king of Edom has prohibited them from going through his land on their way into Canaan, so they must go the long way around. They’re so close to the Promised Land, and yet still so far. They’ve survived for 40 years on manna and a few quail, but now the prospect of better, more succulent food in Canaan makes them sick of what they’ve got. They’ve had numerous rebellions against God already, including one over water (but Moses struck the rock and it gushed out), one about clericalism (the ones arguing against having priests were destroyed – keep that in mind, all of you), one about who the real God is (remember the golden calf story?) and one over whether they
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RCL Year B, 3 Lent
I started off my Lenten preaching two weeks ago talking about covenant, and the relationship we have with God and with each other. Our Old Testament texts through Lent all deal with covenant, from Noah to Abraham, Moses and on from there. It’s a great opportunity for talking about relationship, a chance for us in this season to explore together what it means to be in relationship with God.
So far we’ve heard God’s side of the relationship. With the promise made to Noah after the flood, God pledged to love us no matter what, to be faithful to us even despite our unfaithfulness back. It’s an awesome gift of truly unconditional love, love that sees us clearly and truthfully and yet embraces us all the same. It’s hard for many of us to take that kind of love in. Last week the reading was about God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah, that they would be the ancestors of a great nation and that God would be the God of all those people, the people Israel. It is again an unconditional covenant, not requiring anything in return from the people.
Today, however, we hear a further refining of the covenant, if you will. Now the covenant is being made with Israel through Moses, and our response is required. The Exodus reading today is about what is expected of us in this covenant relationship, in the Ten Commandments. We have all of us heard these commandments before, in church and out of it – there are those who want to post them in state capitols, and consider them to be so universal that all people should understand the laws they give. They do give the essence of the Law, the Torah, but the commandments are
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RCL Year B, 1 Lent
Well, Lent has begun. It is a season of renewal and penitence, a season when we are encouraged to look more closely at our lives, to readdress our balance of time and energy, to focus more intently on our relationship to God and to each other. Often we use Lent as a time for each of us individually to work on our connection with God, but historically it is meant as a season for the whole community of the church. In the ‘invitation to Lent’ in the Ash Wednesday service we hear that in this season those preparing for baptism, for initiation into the community, intensified their readiness for baptism at Easter. And in this season those who had been ‘separated from the community because of notorious sins’ – whose actions had hurt the community, and thus they had been excommunicated for a time – were welcomed back into the body of Christ. In other words, Lent is a time for welcoming and welcoming back, growing and deepening our bonds with one another and with God.
On Ash Wednesday I encouraged you to look at this season as a time to work on relationship. Whatever disciplines you’re taking on or things you’re giving up, my suggestion is that you let the focus be on clearing the space and time to be in real loving relationship with other people – those in your own home and those you don’t know – and with God. Too often we can focus on weight loss or Bible reading or limiting our time on Facebook as if those are ends in themselves, Lent just another chance for self-improvement and self-focus. Instead, I encourage you to clear away what truly gets in the way of relationship and love, to focus your
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RCL Year B, 6 Epiphany
I’ve been talking about call and vocation, how God calls us and our ways of answering and not answering that call. God has desires for us and our lives, ultimately desiring us to be followers and friends of Jesus and the life he shows us. But sometimes we have a hard time answering – we don’t hear well, or we want to run away, or we feel like we’re doing too much. In other words, we don’t answer because of our own stuff – before we can, we need healing. We need healing before we’re able to be all that God created us to be.
I think if we were going to give a title to the theme of today’s scriptures, it would be this: ”People behaving badly, but they still get healed.” We heard two stories of healing, stories of people who bring their illnesses to be healed by the power of God. But there’s a twist – Naaman in the Old Testament reading, and the leper in the gospel reading, are, frankly, not very likeable people, and both of them resist or even ignore what they are told to do for healing. They don’t even necessarily behave any better after the healing happens. But they get healed anyway – which makes me think that there’s something about God’s part in healing that goes beyond what we can do or say about it. There’s a lot to it I just don’t understand.
The first story is that of Naaman, what I think is one of the most curious stories in the Old Testament histories. Naaman is a great man in the army of Aram (another name for Syria, and an enemy of Israel), a high-ranking general in high favor with his king. He’s a
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RCL Year B, 5 Epiphany
A few weeks ago I preached on vocation and call, about listening for what God wants us to do and keeping tabs on our own attempts to run away from it. Last week I talked about pilgrimage, our pilgrimage together at ECA as we seek out God’s call to us in this time and place. Today’s readings I think again point us in the direction of call and doing what God is asking of us – and they also illustrate the flexibility of how such a call might be answered.
In the season of Epiphany we get to hear stories of the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry, as he starts his preaching and teaching and calls disciples and gathers crowds around him. In the gospel of Mark especially we hear how quickly Jesus becomes known as a healer and exorcist, curing people from their diseases and freeing them from the oppression of demons and evil spirits. This ministry is a crowd-pleaser, you could say: everybody loves a miracle worker, and especially one who comes to make things better for you personally. People are thrilled about Jesus and they will do anything to get closer to him, because they hope to gain so much in his presence. There’s a kind of feeding frenzy in the story today: Jesus comes to Capernaum and visits the home of his new disciple Simon Peter. While there he cures Peter’s mother-in-law, and before sundown, the word has spread so far that the whole city is gathered at the door. Jesus does a lot of healing, and he casts out a lot of demons, and at some point he slips away and takes off to be by himself for a while and pray. But before long his new disciples find him. Everyone
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ECA Annual Meeting: 29 January 2012
Today is our Annual Meeting, a chance for us to look at the last year of our life together. Now that was a compelling gospel reading we just heard. But as much as I’d like to talk to you all about exorcism, I just can’t make it fit well into what I want to say about our last year together at ECA. Instead, I’ve been increasingly tugged by what our Bishop has set as the theme for the diocese for this year, Walking the Way. It’s such an apt metaphor for our life together that I want to adopt it as our theme as well. We’re on a pilgrimage together, and we’ve walked the first several miles together. Now we pause to see where we’ve been – and we get to look at where we go next.
Pilgrimage is an ancient metaphor for the Christian faith. The early Christians didn’t call themselves Christians – they called themselves People of the Way. Jesus talks in the gospel of John about how he is the Way, and his whole ministry can be seen as walking along on it – first through Galilee, gathering disciples, preaching and teaching, feeding people and healing them – and then on into Jerusalem and his journey toward the cross. Early on in the life of the church, pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to walk the stones Jesus walked, became a significant part of people’s piety. We have the travelogue from a woman named Egeria who did just that in the late 4th century, and on through the Middle Ages it was not unusual for people with the resources to do so to travel to the Holy Land. For those who could not travel there, and for everyone once it became too
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RCL Year B, 3 Epiphany
Last week I talked about call, how God speaks to us in ways great and small and invites us to follow, sometimes into unknown and scary places. We learn to hear and recognize God’s voice over time, and we shape our lives into how God would have them be. God calls each of us – and as I’ve said before, the greatest quote about that is the one from Frederick Buechner, that our vocation, where God is calling us, is where our own deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.
Well, all of that is true. But today I want to talk about the opposite entirely – when what we really want to say to God is NO. Because more often than not, our response to God is to run the other way – at least for a while.
When I was going through the ordination discernment process as a young adult, I was simultaneously debating whether to return to Europe to live (I’d spent my junior year abroad in France and part of me wished I’d stayed there). When my parish discernment committee would press me too hard on questions I didn’t want to answer, our group code for ‘leave me alone’ was ‘Kate wants to go to Europe now.’ One of my mentors along the way, a successful rector of a large church, told me that his secret escape fantasy, what he would do if he left the priesthood, was to become a greenskeeper for a golf course. Another priest friend on the verge of retirement confided that he wanted to work in a baseball stadium – and indeed, once he retired, he did just that. My escapism shifted away from Europe some time ago, but now I sometimes longingly imagine life as
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RCL Year B, 2 Epiphany
Today in our scriptures we got to hear two different stories of people at the very beginning of their relationships with God, two tales of people being called to and drawn by a God they don’t yet know. First, the prophet Samuel, just coming into his own as a young boy; the other, the skeptic Nathanael, who becomes a disciple of Jesus. I want to start with these stories, for both of them tell us something of how God calls us, and how we respond.
In the first, Samuel is a boy serving in the ancient place of worship at Shiloh, living out the commitment his mother Hannah has made on his behalf. Samuel comes from a heritage of faith: his mother Hannah had a long relationship with God, praying year after year for a child. When she finally receives word through the priest Eli that her petition will be heard, she promises the child to God. She follows through after Samuel is weaned and brings him to the priests. So Samuel has been living near the altar of God since the very beginning of his life, but he does not yet know all that this might entail for him; the story tells us that ‘he did not know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.’ When God speaks to him and calls him in the wee hours of the morning, Samuel does not recognize his voice – he doesn’t yet know it to recognize it. And yet God is calling him all the same, to be a prophet to all of Israel, and to begin with delivering some hard news to his mentor and father figure Eli.
In the gospel, it is Nathanael who hears the
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RCL Year B, Baptism of Our Lord
Jesus came to John and was baptized by him in the river Jordan. And Jesus came up out of the water and the Spirit descended on him and he heard a voice saying, You are my Son, the beloved – with you I am well pleased. And so he began his ministry in Galilee.
So what did you hear when you were baptized?
Many of us, I’d guess, were baptized as infants. We probably don’t remember hearing anything at all, unless our family had some story to tell about it. Were any of you baptized when you were older, so that you do remember it? Of course, maybe some of you haven’t been baptized yet – if so, let’s talk. But have you, at your baptism, or at some other time, have you heard that voice, telling you that you are loved?
Every night that I put my kids to bed, I trace the sign of the cross on their foreheads and say, you are sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever – words from our baptismal service. Sometimes Frances asks me why I’m doing that. So you’ll remember that God loves you, I say. What does being marked as Christ’s own forever mean? she persists. It means that God always loves you and will never forget you, I tell her.
Do you know that? Have you heard that? So many of us stumble along without that sense of God’s love, doing the right thing just because. Or doing more or less the right thing, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience us too much. Maybe sometimes doing the wrong thing. But we may have forgotten why we should even try. Or we may have never really heard it.
Our
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In T.S. Eliot’s book of poems about cats, there’s one called ‘The Naming of Cats.’ Eliot says every cat has three names: the everyday name the family uses, like James or George; the particular, dignified name like Quaxo or Coricopat that the cat can be proud of; and one other:
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over, And that is the name that you never will guess; The name that no human research can discover– But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess. When you notice a cat in profound meditation, The reason, I tell you, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: His ineffable effable Effanineffable Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
Today is the Feast of the Holy Name, of Jesus that is, the feast day that falls on New Year’s Day in the church calendar. It’s 8 days after Christmas, which means it’s 8 days after the day of Jesus’ birth, the traditional day for circumcising a Jewish boy and giving him his name. In some ways we don’t really get the importance of this in our culture. We think a lot about what to name our kids, whether it’s a family name or something from a book or something we make up, and we sometimes comment on how a person’s name suits them, or doesn’t suit them. Some of my Jewish friends made a point of picking a name for their children that began with the same letter as an ancestor’s name – the more traditional way is to name with the same name as the ancestor – but they also were careful not to say the child’s name before she or he was born, just
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And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
There’s a tradition in the Mexican community called Las Posadas. In the week before Christmas, people go knocking door to door, looking for room for Mary & Joseph to stay. House after house refuses them, until they come to the home that is hosting the Nativity that evening. When they can finally come in, they pray and sing together and have a party. The next night, it is someone else’s turn to host, and again the group of pilgrims seeks door to door until they find the place that will take them in. This repeats for nine evenings in a row, the nine months that Mary carried Jesus in her womb. The tradition has been going on for some 400 years. It strikes me that somehow that detail of the story, Mary & Joseph looking and looking for a room in Bethlehem and being turned away over and over, has caught the attention of generations of people.
It’s part of our worship tonight as well: Tonight we’ll end our service with the hymn that ends pretty much every Christmas Eve service, ‘Joy to the World.’ ‘Let earth receive her king. Let every heart prepare him room,’ we’ll sing. That hymn was written by Isaac Watts in 1719, nearly 300 years ago. Again that detail, the need to make room for God to come. We think we’re busier and more preoccupied in the 21st century than ever before, but it turns out people 3-400 years ago had problems with the same thing – perhaps it’s always been hard for us to make room for God. And maybe too, people long
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For my birthday last Sunday, my family took me to the best Christmas pageant ever – well, the best one until ours next week, of course. It’s a Mexican pageant play that is put on every year at the mission church in San Juan Bautista by a theater company called El Teatro Campesino. At Christmastime they do one of two plays, alternating year by year – one about the Virgin of Guadalupe and one, what we saw this year, called La Pastorela. It’s the story of the shepherds trying to go see the Christ child and their struggles in getting there. For the devil and all his minions don’t want them to make it, and try to prevent them every which way; while the angels of heaven try to guide them to Bethlehem and protect them from the devils. It’s full of music and dancing and it’s funny and profound all at the same time, and I absolutely love it.
So I have to tell you the story of the play. The shepherds are sleeping when the Christ child is born, but one of them, a shepherd girl named Gila, awakens to hear the angels’ song. She rouses the rest of her friends, and off they start to see the child. Soon they’re met by an old hermit, a monk who has been living alone for 20 years awaiting the coming of the Messiah. He has seen a vision that the holy child has been born, and that Lucifer knows of the birth and is mustering his forces against the child. Terrified and excited, the hermit races out to find someone who can tell him whether the child really is born. The shepherds confirm his vision and so they travel together, following the angels’ light to Bethlehem.
But the devil
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RCL Year B, 2 Advent
We get to have a couple of weeks of gospel stories about John the Baptist, and I am thrilled. I have an ever-increasing love and respect for John. When I was younger I found him off-putting – I think I just thought he was weird, out there eating locusts and all of that. So I never set out to learn more about him exactly. But over time I picked up a little bit here and there. And I got older and crankier, and grew more disenchanted with the culture around us, and I started going into the wilderness more myself. And more and more, I find John fascinating.
We don’t really know that much about John. But we can make guesses about him based on what we read in the gospels and what we know of his times. Luke tells us that John was the long-desired son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, an older righteous couple. Zechariah was a priest of the temple, of the order of Abijah, and Elizabeth was a descendant of Aaron herself, so John came from pretty good stock. As priest, Zechariah’s duty was to take his turn in the house of the Lord fulfilling the rituals proscribed by Aaron – so he was there when he received word from God that John would be born, a prophet to go before the Lord to prepare his way. So John began his life in Jerusalem, a son of the elite priestly class. But Luke tells us that ‘he became strong in spirit and was in the wilderness’ – perhaps in his adolescence he was orphaned, given that his parents were older, and somehow wound up in the wilderness. One theory is that he went to live with the Essenes, the community who
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Here’s my warning to you: the season of Advent puts me in an existential frame of mind. The scripture readings, the short days, the insane pace of the world around us, all of it gives me pause. This time of year can be the best of times and the worst of times all at once – and sometimes the worst gets the best of me.
And one of the more dispiriting images I saw in the last few days was a photo on the front page of the NY Times of tents, people camping out on Thanksgiving Day in front of BestBuy. They were waiting to be first in line for the Black Friday sales beginning at midnight. Meanwhile at Walmart in Los Angeles, beginning their Black Friday at 10pm on Thanksgiving Day, a woman used pepper spray on her fellow shoppers in order to be first to get the deals.
It is amazing, when you think about it, that we have a Thanksgiving Day on our American calendar at all. A day of gratitude for our blessings, a day meant for nothing more than time with family and friends and giving thanks? Why waste time on that when instead we can just kick-start our overdrive into intense consumerism – the consumerism that we pretend is festive and loving, our welcome of the Christ child. These are the days that make me think of Don Quixote tilting at his windmills – what could be is so tarnished and marred by what is, but no one else really seems to care. Welcome to the season of anticipation – and welcome to another attempt to reclaim what that anticipation is really for.
For today we begin the season of waiting and preparation – not Christmas yet, but Advent, the time when we
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RCL Year A, Proper 29
And with that gospel reading, we wind up our church year. This is the last Sunday in the year on the church calendar, and the last Sunday of readings from Matthew’s gospel – next week we begin with the gospel of Mark and stay with that more or less for the whole year. In case you didn’t notice, there’s a lot in Matthew’s gospel that ends with something like, ‘do this or else’… a lot about ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ So we finish today with the big ‘or else’: a depiction of the final judgment, with the Son of Man like a king upon his throne – and yet also like a shepherd, separating the sheep from the goats. All who are accursed will be thrown into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, while the righteous will go into eternal life.
Just to bring the point home, the Old Testament reading from Ezekiel includes a sorting by the shepherd also – between the fat sheep and the thin sheep. The fat sheep are in trouble, because the only way they’ve gotten fat is by pushing the thin sheep away from the food, and butting at them with their horns. The fat and strong are that way through ill-gotten means, and God the good shepherd is going to serve them with justice – and nourish and care for the lost and weak.
So if you’re a fat sheep or a goat, you’ve got problems. If you’re a sheep, especially a thin sheep, you’re ok. Hey, we might say. This isn’t the Good Shepherd I learned about in Sunday School! The good shepherd is supposed to be taking care of all of us, and watching over us. All this sorting and
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RCL Year A, Proper 28
So, the parable of the talents. A few weeks ago my folks were visiting and my father buttonholed me on this very parable and what in the world it means. Their church had been using Luke’s version of the parable in a stewardship study and Dad found the interpretation they gave problematic. It didn’t help that Luke’s version includes a side story about a king whose people don’t want him to rule over them, and the king responding by slaughtering the people. That kind of thing really complicates the picture of the gospel of love. I didn’t have a very good answer for my dad.
The problem is, of course, is that there are two different ways of understanding the parable for today. Well, three. Probably more. I’m only going to explore two, however, because the other one is problematic. What might be the usual interpretation has it that the parable of the talents is about making more of ourselves and our gifts and skills. The landowner is God and we’re the slaves, and God wants us to invest well and turn a profit while he’s away. If we don’t, we’ll lose what we’ve been given and it will be granted to others instead. Be all that you can be, or else.
The problem is, that interpretation fits suspiciously into our modern American values, the part of our culture that has a capitalist be-all-you-can-be philosophy. Invest and make more; live up to your full potential and be rewarded. That might be the culture we live in now, but it is pretty different from the one Jesus lived in. And I’m not convinced that earning interest on the investment is God’s intention for us exactly. For one thing, earning interest at all is contrary to
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RCL Year A, Proper 27
Happy Birthday, ECA! On All Saints Day, 1967, ECA founding members formally applied for mission status in the Diocese of California, the diocese we were part of at the time. Today we remember the saints of 44 years ago who founded this congregation – and we celebrate ourselves, the community of saints gathered here, and those yet to come. The Sunday After All Saints is a chance to remember all the saints, all those who have gone before, all the great heroes of the faith, all the people who make the church what it is and what it will be.
We could be using the readings for All Saints Day today, but the gospel reading for that is the Beatitudes, something that we’ve had already this year (though it’s tempting to do what our Sunday School is focusing on as well!). So I went with this Sunday’s readings instead, keeping us in the continuity of the story of Jesus and his confrontations with the elders of the people. Now in that story it’s moving closer to Jesus’ arrest and trial, Jesus’ end times, and he is speaking more about the end times for all of us. The end times in question, however, have a great deal to do with how we live now.
So today we get another parable. And with parables, we can sometimes wonder which character is meant to be us. So please answer: are you a wise virgin or a foolish virgin? Or are you c) none of the above?
Well, you don’t really have to answer here. But this is decidedly one of those parables where you are supposed to locate yourself in one camp or another: are you ready for the bridegroom’s coming, or not; are you wise, or foolish;
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RCL Year A, Proper 26
Well, this is an awkward text for a priest in vestments to preach on. It’s always a little embarrassing to realize that Jesus is talking about you, and not in a flattering kind of way. I was reading this text with other clergy this week and one man noted that he’d had the ‘call no one Father’ text quoted at him several times in his ministry – then he looked at me, and said, ‘but I suppose you haven’t had a problem with that.’ No, it’s true, so perhaps I can take myself out of this picture – after all, the image Jesus’ words conjure up in my head is certainly one of particular self-important male clergy I know of, and thank goodness I’m not like that.
And then I read again, ‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled – and all who humble themselves will be exalted.’ Whoops. Perhaps I’d better pay attention after all.
Jesus is talking to religious leaders, so we could hear this as a gospel against clericalism – against clergy taking all the power in the church. As those of you taking my Episcopal Basics classes know, the American Episcopal church has never truly been very clericalist – and it is even less so (officially) since the 1979 BCP. The structure of the church is democratic, like the American government, and from the earliest colonial days lay people have had a great deal of authority and leadership in the church. The whole tide of liturgical renewal – what happened in the Catholic Church with Vatican II and in our church with our 1979 Prayer Book – was toward increasing lay participation and leadership in worship as well. This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of bishops and
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RCL Year A, Proper 25
We’re hearing in these few weeks about a series of confrontations between Jesus and the leaders of the Jewish people – Jesus has told scathing parables on the Pharisees and Sadducees and others, pointing out their faults and failings, and they have responded with tests designed to trip him up and undermine his credibility with the people. One commentator called this section of Matthew’s gospel ‘Reality Show Jesus’ – the persistent attempt to humiliate Jesus coupled with his perfect answers back. You can hear the crowd going huh! huh! huh! go Jesus! Today he silences his adversaries so well that no one dares ask him any more questions. Which isn’t necessarily good news for Jesus – now they will start to seek his death instead.
But what Jesus says today isn’t just a chance for us to be spectators at the tennis match. He offers a challenge to us as well. Love God and love your neighbor. It sounds so simple. And yet we fail at both so regularly.
Jesus is asked to name the one greatest commandment, and he seemingly answers with two. Both are quotes from the Old Testament, one from Deuteronomy and one from Leviticus. Love God with all your heart and mind and strength – and the second is like it – love your neighbor as yourself. Sometimes we like to tack on a third, about loving yourself. But, well, I don’t think that’s part of Jesus’ point – this is not a commandment about our self-esteem. What Jesus is getting at is the idea that these two commandments are really one commandment – you can’t love God without loving your neighbor, and you can’t love your neighbor without loving God. (Parenthesis: Stop worrying about yourself.) The first letter of
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RCL Year A, Proper 24
Things have started to get nasty between Jesus and his adversaries. Today is the first of their attempts to confront Jesus and try to trip him up, but there will be more. He’s in Jerusalem now, teaching in the temple. He is in the last week of his life. And the other sects within Judaism, others who have had power and influence over the people, are getting annoyed with him. He’s been telling parables and giving teachings that make it clear his opinion, that those who have been entrusted with the care of God’s people have misused their responsibility, and that God is bringing the ragtag misfits and outcasts into the kingdom ahead of them. Not a message that’s likely to win him friends in high places.
So today the attempt is around money. And it’s a good attempt. The Pharisees come together with the Herodians – a strange combination of groups, first of all, as the Herodians are supporters of the puppet Jewish government put in place by the Roman occupiers, and the Pharisees are purists who despise the Romans. But together they have a good question for Jesus: is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? On the Pharisees’ side, you could say this is a real question – some Pharisees felt it was impure even to touch a Roman coin, emblazoned with the image of Caesar on it. Others certainly had qualms about paying tribute to a foreign pagan power. The Herodians, however, are in power because of those pagans. So if Jesus answers, no, it’s not lawful, he delights the Pharisees and other zealots in the crowd who want to throw off the Roman occupation – but the Herodians will go report him for treason. If he says
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RCL Year A, Proper 23
Just imagine what it would feel like, giving a big party and having no one show up. Maybe it’s even happened to you once or twice – I hope not. Sometimes church events are just about like that, of course! But we can imagine what it would feel like: humiliating; embarrassing; lonely; all those 7th grade fears made real. We hear of a situation like this in today’s gospel reading. But instead of identifying with the host of the party, it’s a little embarrassing to realize that we’re meant to identify with the callous folks who refuse to come. And to realize that the parable we heard is the story of how we are guilty of humiliating God in this way just about every day.
The story is almost the same parable that is told in the gospel of Luke. There is a village feast – a lot of people are invited, and everyone in the village knows the preparation is happening. It’s like a save-the-date card is sent out. Then when all is ready, the invitation comes again: come to the feast. But those invited refuse to come, and give excuses for what they’re doing instead. So the host of the party goes out and invites everyone else in the village, determined to have a party. And all of those people come. All are invited, the good and the bad alike; some refuse to come, but the party happens anyway. It’s a wonderful vision of God’s inclusive kingdom.
That’s the way Luke tells it. Matthew doesn’t leave it there, however. He adds two details: when the first guests refuse to come, the host of the party, a king in this version, sends his army and sacks their city. And then Matthew tacks on that
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This is the third in a series of three sermons on our vision for ECA
RCL Year A, Proper 22
This is the third of our three weeks of vineyard parables. Each time the message has gotten sharper. From the expansive mercy of the first parable – the story of the laborers in the vineyard – we moved to the idea that we need to make the choice whether to go work or not – the parable of the two sons. Today, however, we’ve shifted to the imperative tense. Do the work that is there to be done, or else. Like I said last week, if we haven’t been feeling motivated up to now, today ought to do it. If we don’t take care of the vineyard the way we’re supposed to, it will be taken away from us and given to someone else. End of story.
I feel a little bit like my son Benjamin does on Friday morning. Friday is garbage pickup day, and when you’re a 2-year old boy, that makes it a very exciting day indeed. The usual scramble of getting all of us out of the house takes on overwhelming levels of stress, because every 20 minutes or so, another large truck comes lumbering down the street. We have to drop everything we’re doing and race outside to look. Quick! Benji yells, lifting up his arms to be carried. Quick! And woe betide us if we don’t get him out there in time. His urgency is excruciating for all of us.
Quick! I’m feeling. There’s work to be done! Let’s get out of here and do it! But first, let’s look at this parable. There are a number of characters in it. There’s the landowner, who does all the work at the beginning: plants the
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Last week I talked in my sermon about my vision for ECA, that we can become a parish church. By that I mean that we would see ourselves as responsible for and connected to the welfare of the community around us, those who do not come to our church and those who do. I talked about our neighborhood and who the 2010 census figures tell us live around us, and raised a question for us all to consider. What can we do to serve those near us? How can we spread God’s mercy in our community? I hope you’ve been thinking about this this week.
Today is the second part of my three sermons on what I think our vision could be here. I originally planned to start this series a week earlier, but the 10th anniversary of September 11 felt too important not to mention. Besides, the gospel for that day was about forgiveness, which paired so well with that anniversary. What I didn’t fully realize was that by shifting this series a week later, I would be preaching on the three weeks our gospel focuses on parables about working in the vineyard. It’s thrilling! I can’t think of a better metaphor for God to hand us than this one. (Although maybe an orchard would have been even cooler.)
This is the second of three sermons on my vision for our community.
RCL Year A, Proper 21
Last week we heard the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, the call God has to all to go and work and the greatness of God’s mercy for all who participate in it. Today we have another vineyard parable, this time about two sons and their choices around going to work. Next week we’ll hear a third
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This is the first of three sermons on my vision for our community.
RCL Year A, Proper 20
Here’s the history of this parish as I understand it. In the late ‘60s new housing developments were being built in this area, what used to be orchards. Companies were beginning to locate here and people needed housing. So young families moved into the area, with dads who worked for GE or Lockheed or IBM and kids who went to the new good schools in the area. The Episcopal Diocese of California said, we need a church out there. So the Rev. John Buenz and others planted this church, as a new ecumenical venture with a UCC congregation, and so it began. And for many years, ECA was a church of families, of people who worked in the tech industry and who wanted good schools and the comforts of suburban living.
In other words, ECA reflected its neighborhood. It was built for the people who were here at the time, and it served the needs of those people well. Which is part of what a neighborhood parish church is all about.
In our country, especially in the West, not that many people go to church. But for those who do, it’s the norm to shop around before picking which church to go to. Sometimes folks were raised in a particular denomination and they go looking for a church of that denomination when they move to a new area. Others may feel less denominational affiliation, and they look at a wide range of churches. But either way, people look for a church that suits them in some way, even if they drive past several other churches on their way there on Sunday morning. So churches are in the marketplace in a way,
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RCL Year A, Proper 19
It’s a challenging day for preaching. It’s our fall kickoff day, the day we’re back to our usual service schedule, when Sunday School and youth group get started, when we commission teachers and think ahead for the new year. A happy see-your-friends-and-family kind of day. A day for a barbecue and party.
And it’s also the 10th anniversary of September 11. The attacks already seem so long ago – and yet for some of us the feelings of horror and sadness and anger are still fresh. It’s a day when we remember again those terrible events. A stop-and-reflect day.
I don’t know whether any of you were personally affected by the attacks on September 11. I have close friends who were, but I wasn’t there at the time. By the time we moved to New York in 2005 it was distant enough memory that the parish I was at decided to stop holding yearly commemorations of it. Ground Zero was more of a construction squabble than a place of tragedy. Even events as traumatic as 9/11 fade eventually, and it’s ok to let them go. But 10 years is a marker, enough so that many churches and civic organizations even here in the South Bay, far away from where the attacks happened, are offering services and commemorations. And there have been a lot of references in the media as this day has approached. So it’s up in our minds today no matter what.
It is by pure happenstance, I suppose, that the gospel reading for this day is all about forgiveness – uncanny, said one commentator. Peter asks Jesus about forgiveness, and in answer, Jesus tells a parable. It’s one of the few parables that is crystal-clear in its meaning. A slave who owes his
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RCL Year A, Proper 18
I spent most of last week backpacking with Jim in the Sierras, up near Sonora Pass. We got up at 4am Monday and drove up the road, stopping only to pick up our permit at the ranger station. We were on the trail by 10:30, and spent that day walking, finally stopping, exhausted, around 4:30 or 5:00 at a campsite some 10 miles up. The next day we were walking again by 8:30, and after 6 miles of trail, we headed cross country 5 miles up over a 10,000 foot saddle and then back down the loose scree on the other side to a lake, arriving exhausted at a campsite. The next morning we started off again at 9:00 and headed down a scrappy little trail going steeply downhill, planning to head out to our car some 14 miles away to escape the swarming mosquitoes that were driving us crazy. Sometime shortly after lunch, I lost it. Did I mention I had huge blisters on my feet from boot problems? Jim suggested we stop and camp and finish the next day like we’d originally planned. I resisted. We’re tough. I’m tough. I can do long days. This is nothing. Go, go, go. IF we stop now, at only 2pm, what will we do with the afternoon?
But then I wondered: what would it be like to take it easy in the outdoors? Other people do it. They call it ‘layover days.’ I’ve never taken a layover day. What do you do out there? Do you pack in a book? Just sit and stare at the view? Slap mosquitoes?
There was a time a few years ago when I was reading something about running, and how people who run are often Type A. I said to
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RCL Year A, Proper 21 Matthew 16:21-28
Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?
“For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”
So you might recall that in last week’s gospel reading, Peter got it right. Jesus asked his disciples what people were saying about him, and then he asked them, who do you say that I am? Peter answered right off the bat, You’re the Messiah, the Son of the living God! And Jesus said, Yes! You get it! Blessed are you, Peter – the whole community of God’s people will be built on the faith you profess.
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Many months ago in Lent, I challenged everyone in our congregation to each think of one way we could welcome new people to ECA. I said that in Easter season, we would bring our ideas together. And then Easter season came and went, and I never followed up on it. I couldn’t figure out the right form for gathering the ideas in, and other things took up my time instead. It’s a measure of how little it captured your attention that no one asked me about it, either! But welcoming new people is a large part of our task as a community – and a large focus for many of you as you have talked to me about your hopes and dreams for this church.
As the fall begins, I’ll be talking more about ideas for how we can put our welcome into practice. But today we have this golden opportunity of a gospel reading before us, a story that has a lot to say about welcome. So I want to take some time today to delve a little bit into what welcoming is really about.
Jesus and the disciples are on a trip to Tyre and Sidon, regions along the coastline of Palestine that were largely Gentile, not Jewish. While they are there, a Canaanite woman accosts Jesus, asking for healing for her daughter. She’s a Gentile, not one of the people of Israel, a Palestinian Arab in today’s terms. But she comes to Jesus and asks him for help, calling out to him, Lord, have mercy – Son of David, have mercy. A non-Jew in a non-Jewish land, and yet she calls out to Jesus by his Jewish title, and seems to have faith that he can help her. The disciples, however, have other ideas. They want to
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Matthew 14:22-33
Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”
Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”
Well, this is certainly an exciting story: a storm at sea – Jesus walks on the water – Peter tries to and fails. In thinking about this text, I read a great commentary this week about this gospel story. It pointed out that many times when we hear this reading the message we take from it is that we should have more faith. Peter steps out on the water at Jesus’ invitation, but then he gets scared, loses his
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Note: This sermon is from the second of a two-week instructed Eucharist.
I said last week that we share communion together every Sunday, obeying Jesus’ commandments in the Last Supper: do this in remembrance of me. That was the practice of the early church and it is still the practice of most liturgical churches today. There was a time when in the Episcopal Church it was not the custom to do communion every week, when we were more like our UCC brethren in only having it once a month. It was seen as too special, too complicated, too time-consuming, etc. – for a wide range of reasons many Episcopal churches did a choral Morning Prayer on Sundays most weeks, and saved the Eucharist for special times. But the liturgical renewal of the 1960s and 1970s, the era that gave us our current BCP, brought back the Eucharist as the most important thing, the main thing, the main reason we gather. So I guess we’d better talk about why it’s so important.
It’s important because the early church did it, and it connects us with a long line of tradition. It’s a powerful experience of taking God into our very beings. It puts us in mind again and again of Jesus’ love and sacrifice for us. All of that – and more besides. What happens in the Eucharist is like what happens in the feeding of the 5000 that we heard about today. There are four main actions Jesus does in feeding the crowds (after he tells them what posture is appropriate: in this case, sit): Jesus takes the bread and the fish, he gives thanks and blesses it, he breaks it, and he shares it. It’s the same sequence in the Eucharist: the priest takes the bread and the wine
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The following is the first part of a two-week series on worship, part of two instructed Eucharist services at ECA.
Why do we worship?
Sunday: day of resurrection – 1st day of the week, after the Sabbath (Saturday) Come together to share the Lord’s Supper – because Jesus told us to Being Christian is a community thing – you can’t be a Christian all by yourself at home We show up to nourish ourselves for ministry; we show up for other people The idea is that we pray all the time; we have prayer practices of our own; this day is for public worship together, which is different than private prayer (This may or may not be true, but it is the ideal of public worship! The reality is many find little quiet time elsewhere, or take the time to pray, and so depend on the church service to do it all for them. It can’t.)
Elements of our service:
Gathering Hearing & reflecting on scripture Responding with affirming our faith, prayer Sharing the bread & wine Sending us out to do our ministry in the world
That’s the basics. Everything else is frosting and tradition.
Our worship tradition mirrors what we know of the early church, with customs and practices layered on from the church in Europe and particularly in England. It looks kind of like the liturgical materials we have from the early church – we have a Eucharistic prayer from the 3rd century, and it’s like ours – and it looks kind of like what other liturgical churches do (Roman Catholics, Lutherans, etc.). And it has taken on elements and customs of this particular community of ECA and its history as well.
But one good principle of worship is that if we don’t know why we’re doing
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So it’s summertime, the gardens are growing, and we’ve got a string of parables in our Sunday gospels that are all about soil and seed and crops. The metaphor works well for the spiritual life, doesn’t it – things take time to ripen and grow in our lives and in our hearts, seeds sown in what someone once said or some book we read bear fruit later in unexpected ways, things are often happening and shifting in us without our even realizing it, just like seeds grow in the ground without our seeing it. It was an apt set of symbols for the farming folk Jesus was preaching to, but it suits us pretty well too, even as far away as most of us are from growing our own food. It helps some that our culture has started shifting back towards knowing where our food comes from – we’re a little more aware of the world of planting and growing than we used to be.
The parable we just heard, the parable of the wheat and the tares, is a little like the one we heard last week, the Parable of the Sower. It’s intended to answer one nagging question faced by the community of Jesus’ followers then and now: If Jesus is the Messiah, and his message is good news for all, then why isn’t everyone on board with it? Why are there some who refuse to join this movement? Last week’s parable gave the answer that it all depends on our human nature, that just as not all soil is good for growing, not everyone is ready to take in the gospel and let it bear fruit in them. That we can understand. But this week’s parable has a slightly different tack: the implication of the parable of
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I just came back from a week at Family Camp, an intergenerational camp up at the Bishop’s Ranch in Healdsburg. It was our family’s first time there, and it turned out to be a remarkable experience of Christian community, with people of all ages together in a beautiful place, worshiping and eating and laughing and singing for a week. We spanned the ages from 10 weeks to 70-something. It’s everything I want church to be, joyful and deeply connected to each other and God. And it was right there in the middle of the vineyards of the Russian River Valley, the land around us rich with growing. Good place to be thinking about the agricultural metaphors of scripture.
Jesus did a lot of his teaching in parables, stories that had a point. Most of them are a little tricky to interpret, not straightforward – you have to kind of push on them to figure out what he is saying about the ways of God in the world. Not so with the one we just heard, the Parable of the Sower – in fact, Matthew even gives us the interpretation right off the bat. It’s not hard to see what Jesus is getting at with the story: the question he means to leave us is a challenge. What kind of soil are you? It’s not hard to understand – but the challenge is there all the same.
The theme we were working with at camp this week was the metaphor of the tree, talking about what makes our trees grow. We talked about deep roots, strong trunks, branches reaching up to the sun, and good soil. The deep roots are what we get from our families and friends, from places that are sacred to us, and deepest of all, from God’s
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‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.’
Doesn’t some part of you just go ‘ahhhh’ when you hear those words? I know I do. I’m always longing for rest, I’m always wishing I could sleep in or take a nap or just lie around. It’s never possible with small children, of course, something I didn’t fully understand before I became a parent. There’s lots of ways they trick you into it. But I suspect it’s not just me that longs for rest of one kind or another, even on this long holiday weekend in summer. Which one of us couldn’t use more rest, wouldn’t rather lay down some burden or another that we have been carrying? Burdens of all kinds, in our relationships, in our to-do lists, in our hearts. Not to mention in our daily schedules.
We all know how it is. All of the great labor-saving devices of the last century, heralded as the technology that would bring us all leisure time, somehow only made us busier. The dishwasher was supposed to change our lives – remember the advertisements with the smiling happy housewife? Why do we still fall for this with the latest gadget from Apple? Instead of ending up with more open time, our life has only gotten more fast-paced – we’ve filled in the gaps. We may spend less time shuffling paper and writing longhand, but we spend even more time in emails and online. Even our children have too much scheduling in their lives now, busy going from lessons to practice to lessons again, rarely getting the chance to just play outdoors. ‘Family time’ or ‘date night’ becomes something we have to schedule on the calendar in advance, or it doesn’t happen
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With the summer solstice this last week, I think we can officially say that summer has begun. Happy summer! Among other things, summer is a time of both traveling and welcoming travelers to our homes, time when the guest room gets used more often. As many of you know, I’ve just been traveling, staying in three different homes (and one tent) over the last two weeks. There is nothing quite like the gift of arriving late after long travel to a home where you are offered a glass of cool water or a cup of tea, a meal, a comfortable bed, a front door key and the freedom to come and go. Hospitality done well is good for the body, giving us the rest and the nourishment we need, but it is even more so good for the soul – allaying our anxieties about being in a strange place, about imposing on others, about doing the right thing. It is a wonderful thing when practiced well.
Genuine hospitality builds relationships and friendships and smoothes social connections. But it can also be a spiritual discipline. During Lent I offered a series of adult forums on spiritual disciplines, and we talked about hospitality as one of them. I asked those in the group to share examples of giving or receiving hospitality. People had wonderful stories of traveling in foreign countries or cities and being welcomed by strangers, of large Thanksgiving dinners with everyone invited, of visiting churches and being greeted with genuine welcome. Opening our home or our dinner table to another is a way of allowing others into our lives. Come in, we say – make yourself at home here. And the idea of hospitality can extend beyond our homes: opening our hearts and souls to God is hospitality too, allowing
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Icon of the Martyrs painted by Awer Bul
Today we celebrate the feast of the Martyrs of Sudan whose icon is before us. You are closely connected with these martyrs because most of the children which you sponsor through the Sudanese Youth Opportunity fund are the children and grandchildren of the martyrs. In the first letter of Peter we hear, The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner…once your were not a people, but now you are God’s people; (I Peter 2) In many ways this phrase describes the reality of the Church of Sudan. When European missionaries came to Sudan in the mid-1800s they came as appendages to imperial economic interests, primarily of Italy and England. In 1899 Egypt formed a condominium with Great Brittan in order to jointly rule this vast territory. The Arab-Egyptian interest of course was driven by Muslims imperialism whose mission since the 7th century had been Islamization of all of Africa.
The Kingdom of Nubia, located in what is now Sudan, had become Christian in the 4th century, had eighteen dioceses, and survived waves of attacks by Arab Muslims begun in 642. Their Christian kingdom finally collapsed in the 15th century.
The Christian missionaries, including our own Anglican missionaries from Scotland, carried all of the European prejudices against people of color. In their eyes the native population of south Sudan was inferior, culturally, not possessing the intellectual capacity to be educated beyond being servants and field hands. Certainly they were not capable of self-governance. The “White man’s burden” was in full play. These imperial representatives looked to the politically connected Arabs of Northern Sudan as having the intellectual capacity and sophistication to benefit from formal learning and the developmental skills of self- governance.
Consequently, in the nearly
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[Sermon by Melanie Weiner]
You might have heard of a series of novels called the Left Behind series, dealing with what happens in the world after the rapture takes the few away, leaving the rest behind. You could say that the Sunday after the Ascension, the day in the church year we’re on now, is the Left Behind Sunday – Jesus has been taken up into heaven, the Holy Spirit won’t be here till Pentecost, and in the meantime, we’re left behind. No, that’s not really true of where we are – but it seems to play out that way in the story, at least. So it seems like the logical question in the story is, what now?
There’s this long prayer towards the end of John’s gospel, the last words from Jesus before his arrest and crucifixion. John means for us to hear in this prayer a kind of summing-up of Jesus, everything he was here to show and say spoken aloud in prayer for his followers. What we just heard in the gospel reading was part of that, and Jesus prays specifically for his followers – his disciples, and all those who would be his followers in time to come, which includes us – that God might protect them, us, so that we may be one, as God and Jesus are one. It’s a prayer we still need.
This line from scripture has spawned all kinds of activity in the church throughout the ages. Elizabeth I brought an end to the bloody fighting between Catholics and Protestants in England by insisting on unity in worship and tolerance in other areas – people can believe what they like, she said, that is none of my business – I do not wish to have a window onto their souls – but we will worship
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One of the first churches I worked in after I was ordained was a church in Berkeley, St Clement’s. While I was in seminary in Berkeley, we had known of it as ‘that weird church that only uses the 1928 prayer book and doesn’t like women clergy.’ But we hadn’t quite had the full picture, and besides, things had shifted – so the rector hired me as the first woman priest for that congregation. I was amazed that I had the chance to be ‘the first’ so long after women’s ordination became the norm. And mostly the novelty went over with little comment from the congregation, which showed that they had been pretty ready for this change. There were a few, however, who were still opposed to women’s ordination, and who let it be known that my coming did not change that. If I presided at the Eucharist, they would not come up for communion; if my male rector presided, they would. But I tried to consider them my parishioners like all the others, chatting with them at coffee hour and the like. After I’d been there a few years, one day when I had celebrated the Eucharist, one of the men quietly slipped up to the communion rail and stretched out his hands. I gave him the bread and moved on down the rail. I didn’t mention it and neither did he, but from then on, he took communion from me.
It does seem to be that when someone gets to know another person, they’re less inclined to exclude them – that is, when people are against a category of people, like women priests or gays, and then they get to know a person in that category, they tend to change their mind. Not always, but usually. Because it’s
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So we’re all still here, eh? I was with my family over the last few days, and there was a lot of wondering about whether it was 6am or 6pm that the Rapture was supposed to happen, and whether that was 6:00 Pacific time or rather a kind of rolling deadline as it turned 6:00 in time zones around the world, a rolling Rapture. I guess it was supposed to be that way. But, well, it didn’t happen. I had to write a sermon anyway.
I think we’ve had predictions like this before come and go, but this one got a lot of press and conversation, it seemed to me. Even Doonesbury took it on, with Zonker quoting scripture to his neighbor Chester as a rebuttal to the prophecy of doom: Matthew 24:36, ‘about that day and hour no one knows.’
I doubt that anyone here seriously entertained this possibility of the world ending – such prophecies and predictions are popular among a pretty small subset of the population. All the same, it seems to be just a more extreme way of expressing the anxiety that we all feel when faced with what we don’t know. And there’s a whole lot about God and God’s ways that we don’t know – theologians in the Eastern Orthodox church came up with what is called apophatic theology, the idea that really, we can know nothing at all about God. All we can know is what is not true about God: God is not finite, God is not mortal, God is not powerless, etc. But to go further and say what God is, is impossible. God is by nature ineffable and mysterious and more than we can understand or imagine. There is nothing we can do to put parameters on God.
But we
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As many of you know, I spent last weekend in Yosemite, one of my favorite places on God’s good earth. One of my heroes is John Muir, the famous conservationist and lover of wild places. When he came to California in 1868, the first place Muir went was Yosemite, and he loved it enough that he returned for an entire season to work as a shepherd, taking a large flock of sheep up into the mountains, seeking out good pasture as the snow melted higher and higher up. It was a chance to get into the high country for a whole summer, but Muir lamented being with the sheep, which he referred to as ‘hoofed locusts.’ Later he made a point of showing people what sheep could do to a pristine alpine meadow, which helped lead to the designation of Yosemite as a national park – where sheep, and all livestock, were not allowed. As for being a shepherd, although he thought that they fared pretty well in his native Scotland, he wrote that ‘the California shepherd, as far as I’ve seen or heard, is never quite sane for any considerable time.’ It was not a job he was eager to take again.
Today is Good Shepherd Sunday, and we heard in our gospel passage about Jesus as the good shepherd. It has long been noted that the metaphor of Jesus as the good shepherd and us as the sheep is hardly a flattering image for us. Friends of mine who have kept sheep confirm that they are indeed stupid animals, that they will eat what is not good for them and wander off into danger away from the flock, getting themselves into precarious, life-threatening situations. They need a lot of guidance to keep them safe and healthy. I suppose
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Sunday services 7:30 a.m. - Rite II
11:00 a.m. - Rite II
(child care available)
Sunday school
10:10-11:00 a.m.
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