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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 proud and powerful person, but he has a problem:  he has a skin disease, one that makes him unclean in the eyes of the people around him, one that threatens not only his health but also his honor and status.  So we can imagine that he has tried every treatment under the sun to deal with this problem, but nothing has worked.  But Naaman hears from his wife, who hears it from an Israelite slave girl they’ve picked up on a raid, that there’s a miracle worker prophet in Israel who can heal him.  Listening to this little slave, off Naaman goes to Samaria in Israel to get the cure, with all the pomp and circumstance of his position, even getting both kings involved in the situation – after all, he’s very important – and he winds up on the doorstep of Elisha the prophet.  But Elisha doesn’t come out to meet him, this enemy warrior on his doorstep; he just sends a servant out with his advice: go bathe in the Jordan River seven times.  No impressive miracle working, no trumpet fanfare, no bowing down to this great and mighty warrior – just the word, go bathe in the river.  Naaman, proud man that he is, gets royally upset and storms off, fuming at this insult to his honor.  But again, a servant speaks up to him and says, why not try it?  Just because it’s not a big grand thing doesn’t mean it won’t work.  And again, Naaman listens to the voice of one far beneath him, and goes.  And when he comes out the water, his flesh is restored like the flesh of a young boy – the great man, proud and vain, has become like a child, whole and clean.

What I find easiest to believe about this story is that Naaman’s skin disease is healed.  What I find hard to believe is that Naaman, the mighty warrior, seeks this healing from his enemy and his servants.  Why does he listen to a slave girl, a captive from the enemy, who tells him he can find healing in her homeland?  Why does he go to the enemy’s land to seek this healing, clearly believing that he will find it there?  Why does he listen to his servants even after he is insulted by the enemy; why does he do this strange thing he’s been commanded to do?  How is it that Naaman overcomes all his prejudices and the customs of his day and finds healing?  And what I also find hard to believe about this story is that Elisha, the great prophet of Israel, gives the enemy the healing he needs without question.  He doesn’t demand that Naaman renounce his allegiance to the Aramean king; he doesn’t even demand that Naaman renounce his worship of the Aramean gods.   After his healing, Naaman says to Elisha, ‘Now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel!’ – but immediately afterward in the part we didn’t hear, Naaman asks Elisha’s pardon in advance, for he plans to continue to worship the Aramean gods with his king, and so to keep his political position.  And Elisha says, sure, no problem, go in peace.  In the middle of the Old Testament and all its warnings against idolatry, the great prophet Elisha heals the enemy warrior and demands nothing in return, not even allegiance to Yahweh.  And in the very next chapter of this book, 2 Kings, Aram invades Israel – I wonder if Naaman the military commander is leading the charge.  Elisha heals the enemy, and the enemy is still the enemy.

And then there’s the gospel.  A leper is healed by Jesus, but this is a really annoying leper.  He disobeys the rules and comes right up to Jesus, even though he is supposed to stay away lest he make other people unclean.  And Jesus reaches out and touches him, knowing full well that to do so will make Jesus himself unclean.  The text tells us that Jesus was moved with pity, but there is good evidence to believe that the original manuscript says he was moved by anger – perhaps Jesus himself is annoyed at this leper barging up to him and challenging him with his request for healing.  He certainly has cause for anger at the leper immediately after the healing:  after all, he commands him sternly and clearly to go and present himself to the priests, to obey the requirements for being pronounced clean and to complete his healing in the eyes of the law – and not to tell anyone what has happened.  But instead of obeying, the healed man runs off in his rags, telling everyone what has happened to him, breaking the rules of what he should be doing.  Why can’t he just do as he’s told? And what makes him think that he of all people deserves Jesus’ touch, that he doesn’t have to do anything to deserve it?  In the official eyes of society, he is still unclean, still a leper and an outcast, and yet he has been healed by Jesus.

Well, if I were Elisha or Jesus, I’d be pretty frustrated. If I could bring a healing like they did, I’d want the person to start behaving the way I thought they should. I’d want them to stop being the enemy, rejoin society, live a more righteous life and manifest how important this healing was to them. But Elisha and Jesus just heal and move on – Elisha has to perform more miracles to fight against the Arameans when they invade; getting Naaman to sign a treaty or become an Israelite might have prevented that. Jesus has to deal with increased mobs of people and has to move out into the country to find space; controlling the leper’s reaction to the healing might have kept things quieter, the way he wanted them. But somehow, this isn’t what happens with healing – instead, everything goes out of control. It seems that grace is no respecter of persons; God doesn’t seem to care which side people are on or which people deserve more to be healed. God’s call to us doesn’t depend on our response.

As a document for enforcing good behavior, the Bible isn’t all that effective – these two stories today are only two of the many times in scripture where people who aren’t very good or who don’t exactly do the right thing are nevertheless offered healing and wholeness, a chance for transformation that doesn’t always result in exemplary behavior afterward either.  The grace of God, the power of God, acts with or without our deserving, with or without our own attempts to be good. Grace is offered with no strings attached – there aren’t any merit badges in God’s world.

But I suppose that’s a good thing for us, really – for as obnoxious as Naaman and the leper with Jesus are, they’re not really all that unlike us.  Prideful and sure of knowing the answers; disregarding those whom we see as beneath us; intent on our own dignity or our own way even when it goes against our own good; self-preoccupied, self-absorbed, pushy and peremptory in our prayers to God, ungrateful for all the blessings we receive – yes, that pretty much describes me. Maybe not you. Which is why even though I have moments of knowing God’s presence and love for me, I get wrapped up in myself again; every time I experience God’s grace I run off and do exactly the wrong thing. All the more reason to throw myself on God’s mercy, to push to the front of the crowd and beg for the 1,000^th time, help – or in the words of our opening prayer today, to ask for the help of God’s grace because in my weakness I can do nothing good without God.

The process of transformation and healing we are in is nothing like a straight line.  It’s a twisty, muddling kind of process, a kind of one-step-forward, two-steps-back dance with God who, thankfully, seems to have all the time in the world to work with us. The stop-start quality to our growth in faith can be frustrating, for we so rarely do what we know and say we ought to do. But the overpowering mercy of God takes the little bit of good intention we have and enlarges it, takes our desire for wholeness and brings us healing and life abundant beyond what we can ask or imagine. Naaman and the leper, for all their faults, were wise enough to know they needed healing, and to go where that healing might be found. What happened next was all possibility. May we also seek God’s healing, and accept the love and transformation that is offered to us in our journey. Amen.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 is searching for you, Jesus! they say. Yes, I’ll bet they are. Because Jesus may have healed a lot of people but there are more, still more, and the crowds are still coming and clamoring for his attention. But instead of going back to do more healings, Jesus tells his friends, Let’s go. I need to go proclaim the kingdom of God. That’s what I came here to do. And off he goes, and he manages to do some more preaching – and, by the way, some more casting out of demons too.

I think that time alone in prayer is a turning point for Jesus. I imagine him tired, overwhelmed by the crowds coming to him, trying to understand what this power is that he has and what he is supposed to do with it. And what he does is go away, regroup, and pray. Somewhere in that prayer he understands his mission again, so that when the crowds come calling, he’s able to say, this is what I’m supposed to do – not so much of that.

Compare that to the letter from Paul to the Corinthians today. He’s telling them just what he’s done in order to preach the gospel: I’ve made myself a slave to people, doing what they want me to do. I’ve been super-Jewish to Jews who were looking for that; I’ve eaten bacon with Gentiles who wanted that. I’ve hung out in bars to attract the party people, I’ve gone to the library to get the nerdy folks to listen, I’ve tried out for football to get the jocks to hear me, I’ve done everything in order to get other people, whoever they are, to hear my message. It’s all for the sake of the gospel. I’ll do anything, as long as it might win somebody over to the message of Christ. He’s trying to tell the Corinthians to get off their high horses and look out for other people, to stop being so smug and stuck in their ways and to reach out more to others who aren’t just like them. But like Paul often does, he goes to extremes to make his point.

So we’re kind of getting two different messages here, aren’t we? In the gospel, Jesus realizes he’s overextending himself in the wrong direction, and pulls back to regroup. He prays and gets in touch again with his true vocation, and starts out anew to spend more of his time that way. But in the epistle, Paul seems to extol the virtues of overextending himself, doing anything and everything he can in order to pursue his vocation and mission. Just what is it we’re supposed to do, exactly?

Well, really I think they’re different ways of living out the same thing. There’s a line of thinking in church growth circles that comes from corporate organization consultants. The idea is that you should figure out what your core identity is, who you really are at heart. Then everything you do should be aligned with that identity. This is the thinking that has helped companies like Coca-Cola and Nike refocus on what they do best, spinning off or selling parts of the corporation that don’t fit the core identity. Churches should do the same, goes the argument: instead of trying to do everything, churches should focus on who they really are and limit what they do to what is consistent with that identity.

The thing is, there’s a good and a bad to this idea: on the plus side, it can help a church stop expending its energy in unsuccessful ministries that aren’t really helping anyone and are just a drain on the community. If a church realizes its core identity is in social outreach ministries, then trying to start a preschool just might not work. But on the negative side, this kind of thinking can permit a church just to reach out to people who are like those already here. Who we are is white and older, so all we need to reach out to are white, older people. We don’t have to do more, because that’s just not who we are.

We can use this thinking in our individual lives as well, with similarly good and bad results. On the positive side, we can all of us get too busy and overextended. It helps to stop and say, I’m doing all of these things; what among them am I really called to do? Which fit with who I really am vs which are things I just kind of fell into doing? On the negative side, we can wall ourselves into boxes and never change: I just don’t pray out loud, that’s not me; I’m not the kind of person to share my feelings, so I won’t; and so on. We can use our identity as an excuse to keep from risking and growing.

But for churches and Christian communities, our core identity ultimately is that we are followers of Jesus and evangelists of the reign of God. Yikes! Yes, I did say evangelists. I mean by that that we’re both following Jesus and inviting others to follow as well. Each of us, and each of our communities, has our own particular spin on that and way of living that out. But ultimately that’s what we’re each called to do and be. And like Paul, everything we do should be with that goal and mission – in every conversation, in everything we agree or sign up to do, in every relationship, we should be living out our identity as Jesus people. As our baptismal covenant says, we should be proclaiming by word and example the good news of God – as St Francis said, we should preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary use words. Our actions should speak the good news of God, in other words.

And like Jesus, sometimes we need to stop and regroup and pray, to see whether what we are doing and how we are spending our time is really living out that call. Sometimes we can start something with the right reasons, but as time goes by we lose touch of the passion we started it with, or lose direction on who it’s for. Maybe that work, or that ministry, or even sometimes that relationship, needs to end – like pruning the wayward growth of a tree so that it bears more fruit.

It’s all part of the pilgrimage of faith: being discerning about how we spend our time and energy, saving ourselves for what God wants to use us for instead of frittering ourselves away on time-wasters. It raises good questions for us as a community of ECA, and it raises good questions for each of us in our own lives, especially as we move closer to Lent. How do we spend our time? Whom does it profit, what we do? And how can we more fully live into our real calling to follow God in all of our ways? Take some time with these questions over the next few weeks, for yourself and for our community, and share what you hear. May we together live into the freedom of God’s reign and love in this world. Amen.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 4^th 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 dangerous to do so, labyrinths and the Stations of the Cross became easier alternatives. By walking simply from icon to icon, pictures of Jesus’ journey towards death, the believer could be a pilgrim just like those who actually traveled all the way to Jerusalem. And local holy sites became important places to visit also, like Lourdes or Santiago de Compostela. In Britain alone there were numerous places for pilgrimage, places like Lindisfarne, the Holy Island off the English coast near Durham, Walsingham, a shrine to the Virgin Mary in Norfolk, and scores of other places where people had visions of God or experiences of prayer and miracles. By traveling there the Christian experienced God in new ways, returning home with a deeper sense of faith and a new understanding of God.

I’ve been to many of these places myself as a pilgrim. I got to go to the Holy Land about 7 years ago on a tour that took us to many of the main holy places connected with Jesus’ life and death. I went to Holy Island, Lindisfarne, many years before that with Harry Temple, whom some of you knew. I went to Walsingham while I was studying at Oxford, and to a cave in Scotland where the 5^th century Celtic saint Ninian is said to have gone to pray, and to a holy well in Wales that is said to have healing powers. Some of these places are a little silly or tacky or over-commercialized; some of these places commemorate events or miracles of dubious authenticity; but despite their limitations, each one of these places reeks of prayer. In each one of them people have gathered for centuries, traveling miles and miles and arriving sometimes broken and exhausted, praying to God and experiencing God vividly. The presence of God is strong in places like this – sometimes so strong it took my breath away when I least expected it.

It’s not only in what are known of as holy places that God shows up, of course. God can turn up wherever God wants to. There is something about traveling, however, about walking and journeying as a pilgrim, that opens you more to what God might be saying. When I walk, especially when I walk a long ways, like on a backpacking trip, my brain quiets down, I listen more, I’m more aware of the wind in the trees and the thoughts in my own mind. And I’m more aware of and open to the people I travel with, as well – companions who journey together learn about each other in new ways, things they wouldn’t know if they stayed put in their usual routines. Some of you who have traveled together know this. Sometimes even on a shorter walk it is easier for people to talk more openly than if you sit across a table from them. (Now you know why I do the Walk with the Rector.) It’s why the labyrinth has become a popular spiritual tool for many as well – it is easier while walking to be open to God.

Tom Wright, the former Bishop of Durham and a famous New Testament scholar, wrote a book about pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He confesses at the beginning that the value of pilgrimage came upon him unawares – raised as an evangelical he had little experience of the culture of pilgrimage, thinking of it as a superstitious old-fashioned practice. But having finally experienced it he couldn’t get enough of it. He writes that pilgrimage offers the traveler three things: you learn and experience new things as you go; you learn new ways to pray and deepen in your experience of prayer; and you go deeper and further as a disciple in your journey toward God in life. There’ s a reason John Bunyan and others have used pilgrimage as a metaphor for our journey through life.

So why do I want to use it as a metaphor for our journey through life, exactly? As the bishop pointed out in her address to convention, there’s something about ‘together-movement,’ as she put it, that bonds us. Even when we come from different places and have different ways of doing things and different reasons, we’re all on the same path. We’ve been walking along this year getting to know each other. You were already moving along your path and so was I on my path, and a year ago our paths converged together. We’ve traveled further along and we’ve each seen things that were new to us – you’ve shown me how you do things and I’ve shown you a few things too, and we’ve learned from each other to try some things that weren’t so familiar to us. Pig roasted in a pit, new folk songs, 15 different kinds of chili, strange liturgical practices, early morning Easter worship while being eaten alive by mosquitoes…that’s the beginning of my list, anyway. Oh, you do it that way? Hey, I never thought of that – we’ve each resisted a little, and we’ve each said, well, maybe I’ll try it.

And we’ve prayed together. We’ve prayed in so many ways – here in this space in different forms and postures and seasons, doing what is familiar and doing what is new. We’ve prayed in meetings, before ordinary business stuff and after challenging hard conversations. We’ve prayed in your homes in happy times and in a few sad ones, saying grace over meals, celebrating the Eucharist on TV trays, praying together for each other in our struggles. We’ve prayed in hospitals, with the oil of healing and with prayers of farewell and letting go. We’ve even prayed online with the prayer vine, news of friends and brothers and neighbors passing along through email to each of us praying in our homes and offices.

And I think as a community we’re going deeper in our discipleship, following more attentively and trusting what God is saying to us. I know I have gone deeper, and I know some of you have as well, because you’ve told me so. And as a body together, we’re asking the right questions, looking to see how the Spirit might be using us in our time and place. We’re more and more and more grounded in God.

In other words, we’re on pilgrimage. I found as I looked back over the year past I noted different events like signposts, little cairns along the way that showed how we’d traveled together. Markers of time and place that are in the past now. Remember how we did those conflict resolution sessions, and struggled with feelings of betrayal and anger? Those feelings have lessened now, grown easier even if they haven’t gone away altogether. Remember when we had different staff people in our positions of Christian Ed Director and Music Director? Now it seems like Susie and Kristal have always been here doing those jobs. We’ll talk in the meeting after this about these highlights, things we’ve done and seen along the way in our year together. You know when you look at things like that that you’ve moved along since then.

The other thing about the pilgrimage idea is that it is easy to invite others to walk with us as we walk along the way. Inviting others along as we travel says, We don’t have the answers, we don’t have a club with a secret routine you don’t know, we’re just walking and looking for God. It allows us to say, come along with us. Let’s see together what we learn; let’s pray together; let’s be followers of Jesus together.

So today as a community we mark another milepost. We look back along our path together and see and celebrate where we’ve been – and we start looking forward to where we could go. It’s a journey of faith we’re on together, learning and growing and inviting others to come along and see. Thanks be to God for the company he’s given us along the way – and may God continue to lead us and bless us as we go. Amen.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 a park ranger.

Now, tell me it’s not just clergy who have these kinds of escape fantasies. Are there some of you who know what I’m talking about? ‘If my life had turned out differently, I’d be a…’ or ‘I’d go live in…’ maybe I could still do it! Yes, ok, some of you know. When things aren’t quite how we want them to be, or in those idle hours when we wonder ‘what if?’ then it’s fun to indulge in these visions. It’s one thing to think about it; it’s another thing altogether when we act on them, of course.

The readings we have today are all about responding ‘yes’ to call. But they’re also about responding with a ‘no,’ or at least the possibility of that. I’m thinking especially of the first one from Jonah. We heard just a part of Jonah’s story today, but of course Jonah is the one who ends up in the belly of the whale, really the big fish, for three days. God has called him as a prophet to go to the city of Israel’s enemies, the Assyrian city of Nineveh, to tell them that Yahweh the God of Israel will destroy them if they don’t repent. Jonah hears this and immediately takes off in the opposite direction, to Tarshish, ‘away from the presence of the Lord.’ This results in God rousing a great storm, which gets Jonah thrown off his ship and swallowed by the fish, where he prays to God for help. The fish spits him out safe and sound. And then God shows up again and tells him again to go to Nineveh – same call, same message. This time Jonah goes, the people of Nineveh hear and repent, and God changes his mind. Jonah is upset at this, since he was really hoping to see the horrible Assyrians destroyed by God. He and God have another fight along these lines, and God rebukes him. God’s mercy is greater than Jonah can take, and Jonah doesn’t really seem to come to terms with this in the end.

So Jonah at first says no to God and tries to escape. When that doesn’t work, he grudgingly says yes, but for the wrong reasons – he goes to Nineveh to watch its downfall, not to help God save its people.  As a prophet of Israel, Jonah behaves pretty poorly. It’s the people of Nineveh who are the ones who respond to God, not him – one of those surprise twists the Old Testament throws at us from time to time. The problem for Jonah is his lack of vision – he knows the Assyrians to be the oppressors of Israel, a dominating empire of cruel force with Nineveh its mighty city. Jonah is not a mighty prophet, and Israel is a land long overrun by Assyria and every other empire around. How is he supposed to make any difference in this situation? There is nothing in Jonah’s understanding of himself or of Nineveh to prepare him to accept this call from God. It’s little wonder he tries to escape.

In the gospel, we also hear about responding to a call – Jesus walks along the lakeshore and calls to Simon, Andrew, James and John, telling them that if they follow him they will fish for people.  Without a backward glance, they leave everything – jobs, security, family – and follow him. Something about Jesus is so compelling that they go without hesitation, or perhaps they’ve already heard his preaching and know enough to make an informed decision. But the road with Jesus gets rockier and rockier, and at the end of Mark’s gospel, these same disciples, the inner circle, abandon Jesus at the cross and run away. They respond to his call at first, but when they find out where it’s really leading, they flee.

Again, the disciples run into their own ignorance about how God is working. When they originally follow Jesus, they have visions in their minds about what this will mean, who Jesus is and what kind of power he will claim in the world. Maybe they hope they’ll get part of that power themselves. So when Jesus tells them he’s a Messiah who will suffer and die, they simply can’t hear it. And when indeed he does suffer and die, the visions they had in their minds fall to pieces. It’s no wonder they run away to hide.

This, I think, is what really makes us want to escape as well. It’s not that we don’t want to follow and respond to God’s call. I did get ordained, after all, and you all got up on a Sunday morning to come to church. All of that is worth something in the response department. But we each have a picture of how things are supposed to work – how God should be, what God should do, what the rules of fair play are that should be followed – and when life or God doesn’t follow the script, we don’t like it. My deep gladness meets the world’s deep need? Shouldn’t that mean that everything flows smoothly, I get a raise, I’m happy every day and everybody praises me?…that way I know I’m following my vocation, right? Isn’t that what my deep gladness is all about? Why should I be suffering if things are going according to God’s plan?

We might not get on a boat to go to Tarshish, but we all have our ways of running away – walling off whole parts of ourselves from God and God’s influence, so that God is only in the small box marked ‘spirituality,’ distinct from career, family, how we spend our time. We keep that box private so nobody else asks us hard questions about it. And eventually that box can get so small that it takes up no room in our lives at all – that’s when we opt out entirely from this faith thing and pursue our own way.

And yet God’s sense of the good, and of timing, and of fair play, doesn’t always match up neatly with ours. It may not be that our deep gladness correlates with a daily sense of happiness and fulfillment. There may be days, weeks, years, when things quite simply don’t seem to be going our way. We’re tempted then to bag it, to throw in the towel on trying to believe in and follow God. What saves us in these times is what carries us through in other ways as well – discipline, and community. When we are sick in body, the disciplines of rest and nourishment and medical attention, the community of caregivers and doctors and loved ones, all of those help to sustain and heal us over time. In the same way, these times of things all going wrong spiritually or in our lives require help and attention: the discipline of regular prayer and scripture even when we least feel like it, the community of fellow believers who can sustain us when we can’t do it ourselves. We can try to escape, of course, and run away – we might even be successful at it for a little while. But eventually the fish swallows us and we cry out for help in the darkness; or the resurrected Jesus unexpectedly appears to us and we find our joy again. After all, God’s call doesn’t come just once, but over and over again. ‘No’ is a fair answer from us; but ‘yes’ is what leads to real life.

So this week I invite you into a little reflection. Are there ways God is calling you right now in your life? Inviting you into deeper prayer and relationship, maybe, or nudging you into a new venture in your work? Calling you maybe to open your heart a little differently to somebody? And as you look at those possible calls, do you find yourself figuring out your escape routes? You know: I just don’t have time for this right now, the economy is terrible so I can’t seek new work, I just can’t reach out to that person one more time…whatever the excuses are. If you want to do something different, then apply a little discipline of prayer this week; talk to someone you trust about it this week. See if this time, for this one time, you might try saying yes – and find out what comes next.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 call.  We don’t know his back-story, but Jesus calls him an Israelite in whom there is no deceit – Nathanael clearly comes out of the Jewish tradition of study of the law and prophets, a strong heritage of faith. And he’s also skeptical about this new guy his friend Philip wants him to meet – can anything good come out of Nazareth? Philip just tells him to come and see, and Nathanael does so – and he is startled to find that this unknown rabbi knows about him already, and seems to be expecting to meet him.  From this time on Nathanael becomes one of Jesus’ disciples, a witness to the Messiah.

These two people, Samuel and Nathanael, are both ordinary individuals and larger than life characters – Samuel is the great prophet of legendary history, who goes on to anoint first Saul and then David as king of Israel, and is himself the type for all great prophets to come. But in this story, he is just a boy who hears God calling.  Likewise, in the gospel of John, some think that Nathanael is the representation of all Jews who come to Jesus as the Messiah. That bit from Jesus about an Israelite with no deceit in him refers to the ancestor Jacob, the one who is given the name Israel but who is a well-known trickster in the old stories. Nathanael has been under the fig tree, Jesus says, the symbol in rabbinical literature for the place where one studies the Torah.  But in this story, Nathanael is also simply a Galilean who hears Jesus’ call.

Today we can pair these two stories with a third story of call. Today, January 15, is the birthday of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., the great leader of the civil rights movement in this country. He was a powerful figure in the history of this country, a larger than life character whose birthday we mark with a national holiday every year. But in 1955 when he was first called into leadership, he was just a young preacher of 26, fresh out of graduate school and in his first church, an unknown newcomer in the city of Montgomery, Alabama.  Son and grandson of preachers, he was asked to do something larger, to lead the Montgomery bus boycott after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.  At the beginning, King was an ordinary person who heard a call into something new and very scary – and yet he did so, praying and feeling the presence of God as he began to live into this new level of leadership.

It is easy to focus on the larger than life parts of all three of these characters, to tell their stories in ways that distance them more and more from the lives of ordinary people like you and me.  Samuel the great prophet, Nathanael, disciple of Jesus, King, leader for social change – all of them have taken on mythic status.  We can tell their stories in ways that make them seem less and less like us because they are so great – or we can also do the opposite, tearing them down to show their clay feet. Either way, extolling their virtues or deploring their weaknesses, we can miss the point.

For any great story of God calling someone to do something shows us three things: it tells us about the person who is being called, about their personal qualities, strengths and weaknesses.  But it also shows us something about God and how God speaks to human beings; and maybe most importantly, it shows us something about us, we who are reading or hearing the story. The stories of today are about three people from rich religious backgrounds, yet who start from a place of ignorance – they have no idea just what they are being led into as they respond to this call.  They misunderstand, they’re skeptical, they’re fearful. But they respond with courage, whether they are immediately willing or no, in the classic words uttered by Samuel, ‘Here I am.’

But beyond their responses, these stories are all about God calling them. God’s voice speaks directly to Samuel; Jesus talks to Nathanael; King felt himself called by God to preach and to lead the fight against inequality of race and class in our society. God needed him to do it; as God needed Samuel to go and confront the abuses of his day; as Jesus needed Nathanael to come and follow him, as a disciple and a witness to his ministry.  Why God chooses to lay so much weight on such pitiful creatures as human beings I don’t know, but God does choose over and over again to act through people, not despite people.  Stories about call make it clear to us that God needs people to be agents of God’s will in the world.

And God needs us as well – even us.  Stories like these give us blueprints for how God acts with us.  None of us is exempt from being needed and called by God – as soon as we begin to open our ears we hear something, we begin to get some sense that there is something we are supposed to do. We may hesitate to name it a call or a mission; but each of us makes multiple decisions each day about how we live our life, simple things like how we speak to our children, where we shop, how we do our job. As we start dipping our toes in the spiritual water we begin to get a deeper sense that how we behave matters, that this faith thing is not just about some feeling inside us but about how we live our lives. God desires something from each one of us, nudges us in a whole variety of ways into responding, asks us to follow.

At the beginning of our journey it is confusing to know what we’re hearing and what we should be doing – and later on, well, it can still be confusing.  But as we go along we begin to learn how to hear, through the help of others around us; we begin to build up a history with God, you could say, as we make tentative choices and look back to where they led us; we begin to progress in what the writer Dallas Willard calls our apprenticeship. From the very first baby step we are disciples, learning as we apprentice ourselves to Christ how to live. And what we are learning is not how to be somebody else – it is not to emulate Martin Luther King, or Samuel, or even Jesus, to try to follow the paths they led.  It’s to live our own lives, as Jesus would live them: ‘learning from Jesus to live my life as he would live life if he were I,’ as Willard puts it. My life, my whole life, is the focus of my apprenticeship to Jesus.  Who I am and how I live right here in San Jose in 2012, is how I am a disciple of Jesus. To do this we have to seek guidance from people around us to hear God’s voice more clearly, and we have to give enough time and attention to God that we learn to recognize God when we hear him. In the words Eli taught the young Samuel to use, being a disciple is to say with our hearts and our lives, Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening. May we, each of us, stop again to hear what God might say to us. Amen.

Lesson Number

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Thanksgiving Dec. 1

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Christmas Break  

  Jan. 12, 2012

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Winter Break Feb. 23

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Spring Break Mar. 29

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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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 readings today talk a lot about the workings of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and what it’s like to receive that Spirit. We heard from the very beginning of the creation story in Genesis of the Spirit moving over the deep – the breath of God, the wind, the ruach, brooding and hovering over the waters of chaos. God spoke and there was light, and order began to form out of the chaos: day and night, a time of light and a time of darkness. Then we heard in Psalm 29 about the power of God’s voice, mightier than storms and stronger than anything on this earth. In Acts Paul helps the Ephesians know and receive the Holy Spirit with their baptism, and they begin to speak in tongues and prophesy. And Jesus has the Spirit descend on him like a dove as he is baptized, and again the powerful voice of God speaks the news that he is beloved. The Spirit, the part of God that acts in us and upon us and all around us, does many things: it creates out of chaos; it acts with power; it brings out gifts in us we didn’t know we had; it tells us we are God’s beloved.

There was an experience some had in the days of the charismatic renewal movement in the Episcopal Church called ‘being baptized by the Holy Spirit.’ The experience was a little different for each person, and yet somehow the same as well. In some moment of readiness and openness, whether because the person directly asked God for the gift or was somehow moved in worship or prayer, a feeling of energy and warmth suddenly came upon them and pervaded them. Sometimes it made them speak in tongues or faint away or show some other outward sign; sometimes it just happened inside. Unfortunately some in the charismatic movement took it as a sign of distinction, an experience that divided you permanently from others who had not had the experience. Those who hadn’t had this baptism of the Holy Spirit wondered why they were left out. And perhaps not everyone understood then or now that this is something people in all times and places have had, though they might call it by different names – religious ecstasy is not unique to a particular form of Christianity.  But before all the human misunderstanding, this experience came and comes upon people as a sense of God’s presence, something deeply personal and profound beyond explanation. It is not an experience of the intellect and doesn’t hold up well to systematic theology. But an experience like that does, at least for a moment, show you that God loves you.

And there are so many signs around us that God loves us: Creation itself, the fact that we exist and so many other things do too, whales, bees, lilacs, everything. The fierceness of wind and storm and the calm and quiet in what follows. The amazing will people have to heal and clean up after tragedy and loss. The teaching and storytelling of others testifying to love. That inner sense of God’s presence in our souls. The community that witnesses our baptism and other life events and who love us through it all.  There are so many ways for us to take the message of God’s love into our hearts.

But there are other things that point us the other way. Sickness and death, loneliness and pain, apathy and unbelief and doubt. Just look around us: budget cuts mean programs and parks and places we cherish are getting defunded on every level. With the presidential campaigns underway, we’re in for another year of negative, mean-spirited politicking.  People we love are getting new diagnoses of illness. It won’t rain. You can add your own complaints here – together we could make ourselves quite a list. Sometimes God’s voice doesn’t seem as powerful as those voices. Sometimes all we notice is what is going wrong, or what we’ve done wrong, or how unlovable we are. Sometimes the storms seem greater than the calm.

That’s why we need reminders. Whether it’s the unexpected movement of the Spirit upon us or the simple word of another person, we need to hear and feel again that God loves us.  We need to hear the voice that says, you are beloved. Jesus heard that voice at his baptism and then right away, off he went into the wilderness for 40 days of fasting and wandering and temptations and pain. Without that sense of God’s love, he could not have made it. He was reminded again, and reminded himself over and over in prayer, that in and through all that was to come, God loved him. Just as God loves us through all things.

Today we’re going to remind each other of that again. Today is the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, a day when the church baptizes new members. When we have baptisms in the Episcopal Church, everyone together says the vows in the baptismal covenant, not just the new ones being baptized. We say them again so that we affirm them again for ourselves. So even though we don’t have a baptism to remind us, we’re going to again renew that covenant. We did this last year at this same time, you might remember – it’s a good way of starting the new year. This year as you say it, I want you to hear the voice that says: You are beloved. All the words of what you believe and what you promise to do as people in this world are well and good. But underneath them all, hear that drumbeat: Beloved. You are beloved. God loves you. Forever and always. Amen.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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:

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 as they refused baby showers before the baby was born. Something about keeping the child a secret from evil spirits.

But beyond that, we don’t think a lot about names and naming. There are cultures where your name means who you really are – you don’t tell strangers your name, only family.  Your name is secret, because knowing a person’s name gives you power over them, something you don’t want potential enemies to have. In the stories in the Bible, the name of a person is always somehow connected to and descriptive of that person’s essence and personality. That’s why people have their names changed in stories where some radical shift happens to them – like Abram becoming Abraham, or Saul becoming Paul. Something of this is bound up with God’s Name – God tells Abraham in the encounter at the burning bush that his name is I Am, or Yahweh, a name that is written only in consonants (the four letters are called the Tetragrammaton) and never said aloud by an observant Jew. It’s interesting that God is willing to tell us his name, but we’re reluctant to use it.

So here we are today learning again the name of Jesus, a name that means ‘God saves.’ The essence of who Jesus is, in other words, is to show us that God saves. The name doesn’t tell us how this happens, but Jesus’ life does. Right from the very start we see how God saves: Ordinary working people, shepherds, are the ones to get the news about Jesus’ coming. They find him in the form of a baby, vulnerable, loving, loyal, forgiving. At the end of his life, this Jesus gives up his life for the world, emptying himself and taking the form of a slave, as our epistle reading today says. And in between we hear of a Jesus who welcomes all to table, who calls the powerful to account, who heals the sick, who blesses children. This is who Jesus is; this is how God saves. God saves through weakness and vulnerability; God saves in gathering in the lost and caring for the unloved; God saves through loving us. It’s very different from the idea that we picked up somewhere that God’s name shouldn’t be spoken, that God is too holy, too other than us to allow us to claim his name for ourselves. I wonder what it is that led us down that path, but I wonder if it isn’t partly to give ourselves an easy out.

Because if we claim Jesus’ name – God saves, through servant humility and love – if we pray ‘in Jesus’ name’ and ask God’s blessing in Jesus’ name and even hold up Jesus’ name as a talisman against evil, as some do – then it also implies something for us.  If we bear Jesus’ name as Christians, then we are ourselves supposed to live the way Jesus did. ‘Have the same mind in you that was in Christ Jesus,’ Paul tells the Philippians: do as Jesus did. Set yourself and your agenda aside, stop worrying about your own pride and ego, let God be the source of your strength and worth, and reach out in love to others.  Get out of the way, in other words, and let God do God’s work in you and in the world. It should be so simple.

I don’t know if any of you have made New Year’s resolutions. Usually resolutions tend to be something about eating healthier, exercising, quitting bad habits. Things we should be doing all the time but for some reason aren’t – so we take the new year as a time to restart again and do better. Self-improvement projects can do us some good, of course – but they can also run the risk of putting our focus thoroughly onto ourselves above all. We can do them for the wrong reason…I’ll look so fabulous at the reunion that everyone will be jealous; I’ll build up my confidence so I can tell so-and-so to get lost; I’ll stop spending time trying to take care of other people and go to the spa to treat myself instead; these are the kinds of things you see on the covers of the magazines in the check-out line. New Year, New You! they scream. Another chance to put ME first.

If you need to quit smoking or lose some weight or waste less time online, then by all means, use New Year’s as an opportunity to start. But I encourage you this year to pray as you do so – to listen to God’s desire for you and to pay attention less to what you want and more to clearing the way for what God wants to happen. It may not mean great power and strength and fitness in the way you think of it. God saves in humility and weakness. So allow a little weakness and vulnerability in yourself. Stop the distractions, whatever they are – the TV, the sports team, the gossip – long enough to feel your own need. Set aside the attempt to prove yourself – at work, at the church meeting, at home – and hear instead God’s love for you as you are. Listen to the needs of another person, and care for them first instead of later. Get the stuff out of the way, and let God do some work in you.

Jesus’ name means ‘God saves.’ Each one of us ‘Jesus people,’ people who try to follow Jesus, bears that name as well, secret or not. God saves. God saves me. God saves you. God saves you through me, and me through you. No one of us is complete unto ourselves; no one of us is the savior. But allowing God in us and through us to love – putting our egos to one side, and acknowledging God’s power – that’s how salvation works. That is how we honor Jesus’ name. Let the same resolution be in you that was in Christ Jesus: to love, to be consumed by love. Happy New Year.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 21^st 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 ago knew, and we know, that feeling of looking for room and being turned away.

I talked with the kids at the 5:00 service about how sometimes our bags and our rooms and our houses get full and cluttered, and it’s hard to find room to put new things. It’s easy for us to collect too much stuff, especially living at the level of affluence most of us have in America. We all have closets and boxes we need to sort through, old things to get rid of. But sometimes it’s not just our bags and closets that get full. Sometimes our hearts and our lives get full. We get full of worry over things big and small. Will the test show I have cancer? Is there time to do all the errands I have to do today? Do we have enough money to pay the bills? When we worry, it can be hard to think about anything else – it can keep us up at night, and there’s no room in our thoughts for anything else.  Or other things can take up our attention: our focus on getting ahead, succeeding and doing well in the world, can preoccupy us, so that we can think of little else. Our work gets a little workaholic and takes over all our priorities, and there doesn’t seem to be time for anything or anybody else. Or sometimes it’s just a bunch of little things that fill our minds – busy days with lots of different things to do, schedules packed with activities and tasks, TV shows and smartphones and all the other distractions that clutter our brains.  Even if we’re not busy, we find ways of keeping ourselves busy – somehow that looks better, more purposeful, than doing nothing.

But when our hearts and our lives get too full, it’s hard to have room for the things that really matter – room for loving our family and friends, room for concern and care for those less fortunate than ourselves. It’s hard to have room for God. Maybe you’ve seen those pictures of ‘Jesus knocking at heart’s door,’ with a wispy-looking Jesus standing with lantern in hand and his other hand raised to knock on a door. ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock,’ Jesus says in the book of Revelation. And indeed, God does come knocking, wanting to move in and love us, but we don’t have room. We don’t mean to tell God to go away, but sometimes it happens that way. We’re busy with other things and focused on other stuff, and we don’t have time to think about God and God’s desire for us – or to remember, even, that God loves us.

Of course, sometimes God will make room anyway. If we can’t stop to focus on God, God has ways of making us focus – bringing us up short in those times and situations when we realize we don’t control everything after all. God has ways of breaking our hearts open. A colleague of mine said the other day that it’s no wonder God came as a little baby, because babies have a way of breaking our hearts. Something in us softens when we see a baby, and especially so when we see a baby suffering. Having children of our own, or loving any child, is a sure way of opening ourselves to risk and loss – children are vulnerable in so many ways, physical and emotional. If Jesus had shown up in the world a fully-grown man, we could dismiss him the way we dismiss so many people we pass every day. But a baby – there’s a reason, not just a sentimental one, why we return year after year to the idea of this little vulnerable child sleeping in a manger, sleeping with the animals because there was no room for him in the inn. Our hearts soften just enough to notice our own vulnerability. We long to protect that poor little Jesus – and we long to be protected ourselves.

We could still turn away, of course. We can always choose to pass on relationship with God and with other people. All of those other things we spend our hearts and time on can fill us up so completely that we think it’s all there is. But deep down in each one of us, there’s a hole that’s made to be filled by God and God’s love for us. Nothing else satisfies that hunger – not even the latest Air Jordans. Give a baby a pacifier, and it will calm down. But give a hungry baby a pacifier, and it won’t – because what it needs is food and nourishment. We can pacify and occupy ourselves with all manner of things. But none of them feed us. None of them fill the hole that is there.

And so the other part that touches us at Christmas is that longing to be loved ourselves. So many secular Christmas carols sing of wishing to be home, in the perfect home where all is well, all is loving and bright. So few of us really find that in our homes, try as we might to make them perfect. We try knocking on a lot of doors ourselves throughout our lives, and sometimes we find ourselves turned out of them – people leave us, employers fire us, other people’s perfect lives don’t include us in them somehow. We long to be in that place where, as the poem says, they have to take you in.

God with us, Emmanuel, means just that. It is God making a home with us and in us in order that we can be at home in God. It’s mutual hospitality – we make room for God in our hearts, and God envelops us within the vast love he has for us.  When God knocks on our door, if all we have is just a little bit of room, God starts with that. God can be quite comfortable as a baby in a manger of straw. If all we can muster tonight is a little space, a little quiet within ourselves as we sing ‘Silent Night,’ then God can use that. Baby steps are ok – it’s not an all or nothing proposition God is making to us…at least, not at first. But as God grows within us, other things will start to give way. Some of those little things will become less important for us to spend our time on. Some of those big worries won’t be so anxious after all. Instead, what happens to other people will matter more to us; our hearts will break more easily at the need of another. We’ll have more room in us than we thought was there, to love. And we will find ourselves more and more at home in love.

It’s ok tonight to get a little sentimental and teary. You’ve come to a place where God is at home, and where others want you to feel at home as well. This is a chance, one of so many chances God gives us, to set aside some of that stuff that takes us up and let God come in instead. Your heart has room – it was made for this. May the peace of God and the joy of this season fill you tonight – and may you know always that God loves you. Merry Christmas.

By Dennis Moran

Our church is unique because most Episcopal churches are named after a saint. Ours isn’t. Fr. John Benz thought he was being pragmatic when he named us.  He didn’t know that he gave us a multi cultural and historical name. Our name, Almaden, comes from an Arabic word, correctly pronounced in Arabic, al-ma-had-in.   Around 700 A.D., the Moors carried the word across North Africa into southern Spain.  From there, the name was brought to the new world into Mexico then north to here.  We were multi ethnic and didn’t even know it.  A mine is a source of wealth.  I would suggest that you are the wealth in this mine because God’s Spirit is inside you.

What was mined here?  It was a vermillion colored rock the Ohlone Indians called “mohetka”.  The rich color was religious for them.  They would grind it into a powder, mix it with animal fat and put designs on their bodies for protection from evil and direction from the Great Spirit that is in everything.

When Andres Castillero saw the mercury sulfide ore in 1845, he saw something different: wealth.  The Mexican government was offering $100,000 to anyone who found mercury because mercury was used to separate gold from the quartz.  Castillero suspected it to be cinnabar.

Cinnabar is another Arabic word meaning ‘dragon’s blood’.   When it was heated to 675 degrees, it created the pungent smell of evaporating sulfur.  A mirror-like liquid called mercury was left.  After condensation, it was poured into a vat and the impurities would float to the surface. The refiner would scrape these off, and when he saw his own image in it, he knew it was pure.  Mercury’s value is that it was used to extract gold and silver from the native
[Read more ...]]]>

By Dennis Moran

Our church is unique because most Episcopal churches are named after a saint. Ours isn’t. Fr. John Benz thought he was being pragmatic when he named us.  He didn’t know that he gave us a multi cultural and historical name. Our name, Almaden, comes from an Arabic word, correctly pronounced in Arabic, al-ma-had-in.   Around 700 A.D., the Moors carried the word across North Africa into southern Spain.  From there, the name was brought to the new world into Mexico then north to here.  We were multi ethnic and didn’t even know it.  A mine is a source of wealth.  I would suggest that you are the wealth in this mine because God’s Spirit is inside you.

What was mined here?  It was a vermillion colored rock the Ohlone Indians called “mohetka”.  The rich color was religious for them.  They would grind it into a powder, mix it with animal fat and put designs on their bodies for protection from evil and direction from the Great Spirit that is in everything.

When Andres Castillero saw the mercury sulfide ore in 1845, he saw something different: wealth.  The Mexican government was offering $100,000 to anyone who found mercury because mercury was used to separate gold from the quartz.  Castillero suspected it to be cinnabar.

Cinnabar is another Arabic word meaning ‘dragon’s blood’.   When it was heated to 675 degrees, it created the pungent smell of evaporating sulfur.  A mirror-like liquid called mercury was left.  After condensation, it was poured into a vat and the impurities would float to the surface. The refiner would scrape these off, and when he saw his own image in it, he knew it was pure.  Mercury’s value is that it was used to extract gold and silver from the native ore and  mercury made the Gold Rush and Silver Comstock Lode in Nevada possible.

When I designed the multi ethnic symbol for the front of the altar, I made it with a reflective acrylic to symbolize the Almaden mercury.  Impurities are removed from gold, silver and mercury using the same methods.

Malachi 3:1-4, describes God as being like a goldsmith that refines the gold with fire.  We are the gold and God, the refiner, allows us to have our own trial by fire so that we see our character defects come to the surface.  Then we can eliminate them to better reflect God’s image in our lives.

A Parable

One night, Mary and I entered a restaurant.  We found Ron Howie and Melinda Jennings there.  We talked, they left and we sat down to order.  When it was time to pay our bill, the waiter said, ” You don’t have to pay.  That guy with the mustache paid for you.”   Ron and Melinda were reflecting God’s love in their mirrors by paying it forward.  Thus we are all mirrors to one another and we teach those around us by our example.  By paying it forward, like Ron and Melinda, we have an opportunity to reflect God’s love to others.  Think about your own image.  What does your reflection look like?

When I designed the mirror image for the front of the altar with the multi cultural names of God, my intention was that when someone stood in front, they would see their own image in the dove shape. Because the image on the altar is low, this doesn’t happen.  That motivated me to create this picture, “An Unfinished Portrait of God”.

The background is Super Nova 2006X from the NASA website and is about 50 million light years away from Earth.  That means that what exists in space now is not what we are seeing in Hubble.  Instead we are looking at the past.

This picture is not complete.  What is needed to complete the image is YOU.

You can make ‘paying it forward’ a part of your reflection to others in the way you use your time, talent, and treasure.  What can happen when you incorporate this into your image?

The Reflection of Ralph Borge

From Ralph’s reflection I learned more about drawing from him than anyone else.

As he grew up, Ralph had a talent for drawing.   He was drafted during World War II.   He carried a sketchbook with him and drew at every opportunity.  He could ‘out Rockwell’ Norman Rockwell.  After being discharged, Ralph and his generation had determination to make their lives meaningful.  So he enrolled in California College of Arts and Crafts to perfect his talent.  When he and his peers took a class they would compete to see who produced the best work.  If you entered that classroom, you would sense a intense electricity of learning in the air and it was contagious.  Those veterans raised the quality of work produced to a higher standard.

He began painting and became a respected artist in the Bay Area.  He gained national recognition and was interviewed in Time Magazine.  He started teaching drawing classes at the college and continued that atmosphere of intense electricity of learning to his students.  He was paying it forward.

Many of Ralph’s students became successful fine artists, graphic artists, fashion designers and interior designers.  Ralph’s reflection was reflected in their work.  Some even became teachers, re-creating the intense learning atmosphere of Ralph’s classes.  They, in turn passed Ralph’s reflection forward to their students.

Ralph has passed on to the other side.  He is no longer here, but like Super Nova 2006X, his reflection continues to shine.  When we cross to the other side, none of us knows what awaits us. I would suggest to you each of us has in our own mirror those gifts of time, talent and treasure that we can perfect and reflect forward to others.  We can show others how to use the best that is in them by our example.  In our real world, this is one way we create eternal life.

How do you know what God’s plan is for you?  Paul offers a suggestion in Romans when he says, “Present yourself as a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice to God.” As Samuel you say, “Here I am, Lord.”

Will the path be easy?  Not necessarily.  You will find bumps in the road.  How do you deal with them?  Paul offers an answer in 1 Thessalonians when he writes, “Finally in all things give thanks.”  That means I thank God, not only the positives in my life, but also the negative reflections. When we recognize God working in them, we allow God to use them for our growth. God gives us the gift of time to perfect our image.

I leave you with a final thought:

Yesterday is history.

Tomorrow is a mystery.

Today is all the gift from God you have.

That’s why they call it the present.

By Mike Schmidt

George asked me a couple of weeks ago to talk for a few minutes about how I feel about stewardship as it relates to my Christian journey. Without going into a lot of detail, after a long straightaway, my Christian journey has taken some unexpected turns. I became a Christian when I was 18, and was very active in a pretty conservative Baptist church, for the next 30 years. It was a growing and exciting church, the place where we raised our family and invested our lives. And for most of that time I assumed that things would just continue in that same way for the rest of our lives. But we gradually changed and began to feel uncomfortable and out of place. And through a series of events and realizations, we unexpectedly found ourselves leaving that church. We thought we’d quickly find another place where we felt more comfortable, but we didn’t, and we spent the next 15 years of our lives as somewhat disillusioned “semi-believers,” skeptical about much of what we had formerly believed so easily. I still considered myself to be a Christian, but that was about as far as I was willing to go.

Nearly 2 years ago, we first visited ECA. Why? There was some spiritual hunger and some loneliness there. Why ECA? We had learned a little bit about the Episcopal Church. We understood it to be tolerant of a wide range of spiritual beliefs and personal choices. The three-legged stool concept (scripture, tradition, and reason) was appealing to us. Why did we continue attending? People here were very welcoming. You kept inviting us to various events, breakfast, and into your homes; and we were hungry enough spiritually and socially to accept. We were invited to the two meetings
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By Mike Schmidt

George asked me a couple of weeks ago to talk for a few minutes about how I feel about stewardship as it relates to my Christian journey. Without going into a lot of detail, after a long straightaway, my Christian journey has taken some unexpected turns. I became a Christian when I was 18, and was very active in a pretty conservative Baptist church, for the next 30 years. It was a growing and exciting church, the place where we raised our family and invested our lives. And for most of that time I assumed that things would just continue in that same way for the rest of our lives. But we gradually changed and began to feel uncomfortable and out of place. And through a series of events and realizations, we unexpectedly found ourselves leaving that church. We thought we’d quickly find another place where we felt more comfortable, but we didn’t, and we spent the next 15 years of our lives as somewhat disillusioned “semi-believers,” skeptical about much of what we had formerly believed so easily. I still considered myself to be a Christian, but that was about as far as I was willing to go.

Nearly 2 years ago, we first visited ECA. Why? There was some spiritual hunger and some loneliness there. Why ECA? We had learned a little bit about the Episcopal Church. We understood it to be tolerant of a wide range of spiritual beliefs and personal choices. The three-legged stool concept (scripture, tradition, and reason) was appealing to us. Why did we continue attending? People here were very welcoming. You kept inviting us to various events, breakfast, and into your homes; and we were hungry enough spiritually and socially to accept. We were invited to the two meetings where the whole church met and tried to envision the kind of church they wanted to be, at the beginning of the pastoral search process, and we were attracted by the collective heart of ECA. You envisioned a spiritual community that loves God, looks after one another, and reaches out into the greater community.

So what about stewardship? To me, stewardship means that as followers of Christ, we wisely and faithfully invest the abilities, time, and money that God has given us. Look around you at ECA. ECA sits on a great piece of property, we worship in a beautiful sanctuary, the arrangement we have with our partner church through Joint Venture is very unique, ECA is involved in some great ministries, ECA had the wise foresight to invest in a rectory, there have been youth groups here that helped raise your children into caring, productive adults–these are all things we enjoy today because of the wise and faithful stewardship of others, including many of you.

So what does stewardship mean for me personally? For now, it’s the realization that if I’m going to be here, and benefit, I need to do my part. What should I do? I should be open to opportunities that arise, and say “yes” to a few of them, which I’ve tried to do. What should you do? The same thing–be open to opportunities and say “yes” when you can. How much should I give? That’s a little trickier, because there’s a history there for me. Last year I settled on giving a little more than I was comfortable with, and this year an increase. How much should you give? I wouldn’t presume to tell you. But I think perhaps more is expected of us when we’re giving out of a great abundance.  I don’t think of myself as rich, but when I consider how most of the world lives, it changes my perspective. There are a lot of good things happening here. It takes all of us, giving of our abilities, time, and money, for those things to continue and increase, which is what we all want.

The opportunity to speak is a blessing and I feel privileged to do so.  I was told to tell you “how I view stewardship as it relates to my Christian journey”.  So here goes.

Most of you know I have a passion for bible study.  It began in my mid 20’s but really ignited when I was diagnosed with an “incurable” cancer 26 years ago.   Since then, I have relied heavily on my relationship with the Lord to guide me in every trial and every decision I make.   By the way, regarding the cancer, the support ECA was to me during those dark days, especially in terms of prayers is something I will forever be grateful for.

Having a passion for Bible Study means that, when it comes to stewardship, I am a “by the book” type person.  I know you all know what the good book says on this subject.  Give of the first fruits.  Tithe.  I’ll share some of my implementations/interpretations of these.

The way I have put this into practice is still evolving.  God is still speaking.  I realize I am speaking to a faith community which could teach me a lot, but I was asked to speak which I guess gives me license.

When I think, “give of the first fruits”, I think not only of crops or money, but time.  My best time of day is in the morning.  I am fresh, alert, and energetic.  My kids are now out of the house, so my mornings are my own.  After breakfast and walking the dog, I sit down with a cup of coffee and read my bible, study, and pray.  By doing this, I am giving to the Lord the best part of my day, and his abundance has been profound.  He shows me
[Read more ...]]]> By Mary McPherson

The opportunity to speak is a blessing and I feel privileged to do so.  I was told to tell you “how I view stewardship as it relates to my Christian journey”.  So here goes.

Most of you know I have a passion for bible study.  It began in my mid 20’s but really ignited when I was diagnosed with an “incurable” cancer 26 years ago.   Since then, I have relied heavily on my relationship with the Lord to guide me in every trial and every decision I make.   By the way, regarding the cancer, the support ECA was to me during those dark days, especially in terms of prayers is something I will forever be grateful for.

Having a passion for Bible Study means that, when it comes to stewardship, I am a “by the book” type person.  I know you all know what the good book says on this subject.  Give of the first fruits.  Tithe.  I’ll share some of my implementations/interpretations of these.

The way I have put this into practice is still evolving.  God is still speaking.  I realize I am speaking to a faith community which could teach me a lot, but I was asked to speak which I guess gives me license.

When I think, “give of the first fruits”, I think not only of crops or money, but time.  My best time of day is in the morning.  I am fresh, alert, and energetic.  My kids are now out of the house, so my mornings are my own.  After breakfast and walking the dog, I sit down with a cup of coffee and read my bible, study, and pray.  By doing this, I am giving to the Lord the best part of my day, and his abundance has been profound.  He shows me his miracles daily.  My gratitude overflows.

God makes known to me where he wants my energies focused any given day.  It was during our morning time together, he called me to lead a bible study here at ECA seven years ago.

Kate talked a couple of weeks ago about finding the place where our deep gladness meets a need  – well for me that’s a story in its own.  But let me just say, I have never done anything so effortless and rewarding as the bible study is.  In giving Him my best time, He richly rewards me with his close presence, and I feel like I am where I am supposed to be.  Where He wants me to be.

When God brought up the subject of giving several years ago, step one was to assess where we were, and it helped to not look only at church giving.

If you are like us, there are many causes God puts on your heart to give to in addition to ECA.  My goal became to give away 10% of what we bring in.  It didn’t happen overnight.  And I do have a husband to add to the equation.

I have found that whenever I consult with God He makes things easy.  (Including giving me an agreeable husband.)  There are a number of causes John and I feel especially drawn to outside of ECA.  Feeding the poor, preservation of the earth, social justice, cancer research, etc.  It is easy to be overwhelmed by all the requests, but making a plan of intentional giving makes it much easier for me to throw away an envelope or two that comes in the mail.

Another implementation is that I may not have tithed my whole life, and may not be able to ever “catch up” but a very easy thing to do was to put in our will that we want 10% of our estate to go to the church and our favorite charities.  That seemed like a no-brainer.  Obviously we won’t be needing it.

Lastly, I know most of you are probably familiar with this, but I’ll mention it just in case some one out there doesn’t know about it.  It’s the practice of stock donation.

Being early high tech people, HP and IBM, John and I have some stock that has a very low cost basis.  That is, we got it for much less than it’s worth now.  If we were to sell the stock, our gain on it would be taxed heavily.   By making a donation in stock, ECA receives the stock at its full value, we get to write off the full value, and no one has to pay the capital gains!

In closing, let me say that I am proud to be an Episcopalian, and a member of ECA.  There is no other church body I would rather be identified with.

I think we are on a great path with the leadership under Kate, and even beyond ECA, I admire the work of both Mary Gray-Reeves, and Katharine Jefferts-Schori.  I can’t wait to see what we can do when we put our resources together and the programs and outreach we want to have are adequately funded.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 has other plans, and soon they are beset by all kinds of temptations. Booze, pride, gluttony, lust, greed, all are offered to the shepherds in various forms – but with only some success, because the angels appear over and over again to refocus the shepherds and remind them of their destination. So Lucifer sharpens his tactics. The old hermit is assailed with the idea that all his time praying has been in vain, that God never wanted his sacrifice and he’d better just go find a nice girl and settle down. The girl he has in mind very quickly disabuses him of that idea. But worst of all, Lucifer himself appears before them carrying a cross, telling them of the tragic life Jesus will lead when he grows up.  Acting out Jesus’ arrest and torture and death, Lucifer cries out at the last, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? ‘Why should you follow him?’ Lucifer asks. ‘His way is the way of suffering. Follow me and you will have all you desire.’ So, despairing and lost, the shepherds finally follow the devils off to hell – until Gila, the shepherd girl who heard the angels’ song, prays for help one more time, and St Michael and all the angels appear to battle Lucifer and his devils for the souls of humankind. The angels beat back the devils with God’s help, and at last the shepherds come to the manger to worship the baby Jesus.

So why do I love it – besides the wonderful music and the costumes and the fun of the whole event? Because the story it tells is so true. There are so many things that tempt the shepherds off the path of the angels, just as there are so many ways for us to lose our focus. Think of how many priorities we all have besides, and maybe hold higher than, following Jesus. Other more tangible goals are so attractive – success, the esteem of others, the perfect life our neighbors will envy, so on and so on. And even if we know better, if we try to keep ourselves on track and make our home in God, we are not immune from the ultimate temptation that faced the hermit and the shepherds in the end: the temptation of despair. It’s pretty easy just to let it all go and join the rat race around us instead of fighting against it. What good does it do to live differently, after all? It only brings more suffering, especially if things are going well for us in this world. When we’ve got a good job and secure investments and perfect health and nice teeth, why should we do any different? And even if things aren’t so good for us here – if suffering and tragedy has already touched our lives, as it has for most of us – what good does it do to whitewash it with religion? What does that get us in the end?

This is the point the shepherds come to, after Lucifer’s final attempt on them. They’re left with a sense of utter emptiness and loss, without hope. But their friend Gila holds out hope and prays for them, reminding them of the good news she has heard from the angels: that God has come, their Savior is born. And when she prays, the angels shine their light out and fight back the demons of darkness, fighting the battle for them because they can’t do it themselves. And finally the shepherds see the truth again: the light of Jesus does shine, and death is not the end. Lucifer is beaten by the power of the angels, but even more profoundly by the truth of love and its power.

Gila and the angels are witnesses to the shepherds that God is true. We need such witnesses too. We have them in scripture – today we heard again about one such witness, John the Baptist. The gospel reads, John ‘came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.’ The light is Jesus, of course, the light ‘that shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.’ But even with the light shining, somehow we need reminding about the light all the same – we need witnesses like John to point to it shining there. We can forget and think the darkness is all there is, or that our light is all we have – when things are good and when they’re not, both ways we forget about God’s light. There are more witnesses in today’s readings: the prophet Isaiah, saying, the spirit of the Lord is upon me, to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted.  And Paul, who tells us to pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, hold fast to what is good. Today’s scriptures are full of nourishment – take them home and read them again for yourself this week.

And we are witnesses to each other as well. The holidays are a hard time for some – all the emphasis on happy family can make it pretty stark when you don’t have that family, or when someone has left or has died. Think for a moment: Who do you know who needs to be cared for with a visit or an invitation or a note that tells them they’re not alone? I think each of us knows at least one person we could witness to that way. And Christmas is hard for others simply because of the busyness and the expectations – when we live with schedules that are too packed already, how do we fit in shopping and entertaining and decorating and all the rest? How do we factor in the expenses to budgets that are already spread too thin? So think again: Who do you know who needs prayer, or to have the kids taken care of for an afternoon so they can rest, or just some assurance that everything doesn’t have to be perfect? There are so many ways to point others toward the light.

The joyful good news of this season is true: God has come to us and dwells with us. We’re journeying towards the light in the darkness together. We’re making our way to the time when we relive the good news for ourselves, in the carols and the candles and the good things of Christmas. Spread the good news! But if the darkness or the glitz are too much for you, pray to God for help. Ask others for help. Allow witnesses, the ones of time past, the ones here around us, to point the way for you; again and again God will beat back the forces of hell before you to show you the light. Christ is come. Amen.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 created the Dead Sea Scrolls, who had removed themselves from Jerusalem to avoid the spiritual contamination of the Roman occupation. That may be where he picked up the practice of baptism, since the Essenes took purifying baths as part of their rituals.

But somewhere along the way, John became the strong, clear-minded figure we meet in today’s gospel and in the other gospels as well – still in the wilderness, but now attracting enormous crowds who heed his call to repentance. As one of my clergy colleagues put it, John was a rock star.  Look at how Mark writes it: ‘people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him.’ Wow.  This says that John must have been extremely charismatic and attractive, not the weird scary person I used to think he was. But it also says that there was a hunger, a deep intense hunger on the part of the people. They were living under brutal occupation, and they were hungry.  The revolt in Jerusalem that brought down the rage of Rome on their city happened in 69-70 AD – not too much longer after this, remember.  The people were looking for a leader, they were spiritually needy, and John appeared. He could do anything with this crowd – they would follow him anywhere.

But look at what he says: ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.’  He could have taken the power the people gave him, but instead he pointed elsewhere. These are the words of a man of integrity – he knows who he is and who he is not, and he is utterly honest with himself and others about that. He doesn’t know when the Messiah will come or what he will look like – but he believes the Messiah will appear, and he knows he is not it.

My colleague’s mention of John as a rock star reminded me of a U2 concert I went to several years ago.  It was a great show, I love their music, the whole thing was uplifting and amazing.  But what impressed me most of all was the lead singer, Bono himself, out there in front with thousands of screaming fans in front of him. He had us all in his hand – he could have done anything with us. It was near mass hysteria in that arena. But what he did was change the words of one of their greatest songs and sing instead, Alleluia.  Alleluia.  Alleluia. It was like in a moment he took all of our attention on him and focused it towards God instead – suddenly a rock concert became worship. It was incredible.

I don’t think Bono is John the Baptist. I think he is a believer, but my guess is that for all the humanitarian good he does, Bono still lavishes a lot of focus and attention on himself.  Then again, maybe John did too.  Human motives are always mixed, after all. But each of them pointed beyond themselves – each of them, in their own context, prepared the way for God.

We talk about how Advent is the season of preparation.  Isaiah tells us, ‘a voice cries in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.’ John is out there, literally in the wilderness crying out. He’s preparing other people for Jesus, telling them to get their hearts right and ready for God’s coming. But in order to do that, John had to prepare himself as well. He spent time himself in the wilderness, he prayed and fasted, he learned from a community of disciples, he did whatever work he had to do to be clear about his call to preach – and to clarify his purpose and his focus. A son of the elite, a charismatic person, he yet somehow was able to see that he wasn’t it – that he wasn’t all-sufficient and a big shot unto himself. He was only the pointer to the one who would save.

Our preparation too demands that we get out of the way. We can’t offer much of a home to Jesus if we’re full of our own selves. There’s a lot of wilderness in us and around us – not the spiritually cleansing kind of wilderness John the Baptist heads out to, but the confusing, distracting, busy kind of wilderness of everyday life. Rough places and uneven ground make it tough going. It’s not easy tearing our focus away from ourselves and the things that occupy our minds.  None of us have thousands gathering to hear us preach or sing, but it’s still easy to lose our focus.  The stuff of this world, the worries over money and employment and retirement funds and parenting our kids and taking care of our parents and health problems, all of that clamors for attention – and so do the advertisements and the celebrity gossip and the presidential campaigns – and now, so does the Christmas shopping and the decorations and the parties and on and on.  We have a lot of other things to think about besides preparing the way and making our hearts ready.

So how do we regain the right focus?  How do we remember to sing alleluia instead of our own song, to tell of God’s power instead of relying on our own? Well, there’s no one way – the techniques look a little different for everyone, you could say. I can tell you what I do. I pray. Once a week with Jim, we look at the week ahead of us and pray for each other, and we pray for our kids. Every morning on my run I offer thanks to God for what I’m seeing – bobcats, wild pigs, coyotes, sunrise – and I pray about what’s coming in my day. I have other people who tell me to stop doing tasks and sit down, to read or be with someone I love, and about every tenth time I listen and do it. I look for places to go where I can listen to God instead of go online. I go when I can into the true wilderness to slow down and hear the wind. Sometimes when I do all of these things, the chatter in my head quiets down just a little bit. Sometimes it makes a little bit of a difference in how I act with others.

That’s some of what I do. But like I said, it’s different for everyone. So what about you? what do you do? What puts your heart right again and settles you?

I want you really to think for a moment of these things. And then, guess what – I want you to turn to someone next to you and tell them one or two things you do, ways you prepare yourself and allow God to prepare you.  Talk just a few moments and then let the other person talk. It’s ok if you live in the same house.

……………

What did we just do? We just were community together – a spiritual community, walking the path together.  You just shared your wisdom with each other. You just helped each other a little bit. You just smoothed out the path for God a little bit, preparing the way. You comforted each other, as Isaiah says, you gave each other strength, you spoke tenderly to each other. That’s what Christian community is for. We prepare ourselves; we prepare each other; we prepare the world for Christ’s coming. Keep doing it, this season and always.

By George Romer

The meaning of Christian stewardship has focused many times on tithing, but this is not the priority definition when discussing the subject. The priorities involved are how time is spent, how relationships are retained, and then how money is spent. There are a lot of things that have to do with this responsibility that many people have never been aware of. Most agree that a good idea is to spend time studying ways to become a responsible Christian. The meaning involves how the precious gifts that God has given to all are used and cared for. The good steward is someone who is doing the best he can with the things that God has given them.

The reality shows up in how a person reacts in situations and how much they are willing to sacrifice to exercise their responsibility. These perspectives all have a common thread – unselfish behavior for the common good of our relatives, friends, neighbors, nation, and the world.  We have a common relational community which is strengthening as we go through this cycle of good stewardship, over and over.  We encourage one another and celebrate our successes.  We praise God for the opportunities He gives us to serve others as good stewards of the skills and talents He has bestowed on us.

On a humorous note, someone quipped that, “going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.”  You’ve got to get involved on the mission!  It is a journey.  Cars don’t go anywhere in the garage!

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 focus on preparing ourselves for the coming of Christ.  Like all of the great symbols of the church, Advent means many things.  We wait and pray along with Mary, expecting the birth of the Christ Child, the incarnation of God among us. We wait and pray for Christ to come again to us, wiping away the darkness and bringing about the ultimate Reign of God on earth.  And yes, we wait and prepare for Christmas, for fellowship and feasting and gifts to be shared.  There’s even a hint of the old waiting for the winter solstice, waiting for the light to come back into the dark, cold world.  All of these things tie up together at this time of year, and bring with them a whole range of emotions.

We wait in hope and anticipation, and we wait in dread and fear of disappointment.  We hope for joy and loveliness at Christmas, but perhaps we fear that the holidays may not be everything we hoped they would be.  Maybe things are different this year, the money’s tighter, or someone is missing.  We hope for good things in the coming year, but we might dread what further disasters and economic crises it might bring.  Add in the second-coming layer to it all, and we might just acknowledge the more existential fear that we will be found wanting when Christ comes again in judgment.  And maybe too, some of us might fear that this Christianity stuff might be terribly deluded, that there really is nothing ultimately that we wait for, that the poor stuff of this world is really all there is. No wonder some decide to opt out and look for something easier – a god that demands less, perhaps, like the artificial pleasures of consumer delight.

The good news, in some ways, is that we are not the first to face into the themes of this season with mixed feelings.  Our readings are full of mixed feelings today.

The reading from Isaiah began it all with dread and hope, the song of a people who have every reason to despair and yet continue to hope.  Their nation has been destroyed, they have gone into exile for generations and now they have returned to find nothing the same.  Where are you, God? the author writes, We remember what you did for us, all those mighty deeds of old, but you do not do them anymore.  And look, see how much we are in need of your help. We are overcome by our enemies, we are drowning in our sins.  We have failed you, we know, and you have every reason to be angry with us, but still we call to you – for we know that you are the one who made us, our potter, and that you are our Father, the one who loves us.  Despite everything they see around them, despite their own feelings of despair, despite all evidence to the contrary, the people persist in their stubborn faith in God, and wait for God to come to them.

Compare this with the attitude of the Christians in Corinth, to whom Paul writes in the epistle reading today.  Paul loves these people, but he finds them immensely frustrating as well.  The Corinthians were pretty proud of themselves and all the wonderful spiritual gifts they saw in their community.  Their giftedness was a sign, they were sure, of God’s presence with them, a sign that they were already living in heaven on earth.  They thought themselves to be so blessed that they felt free to live as they chose, thinking only of the present, not bound by the strictures of the law or any kind of morality, really.  And they were inclined to think that they were gifted because they were deep down really quite wonderful people, full worthy of praise and the love of God, more worthy perhaps than other Christians in other places. Paul’s letter is one big reminder to the Corinthians that their gifts come not from them but from God.  It is God who strengthens them on this journey, and not they themselves.

Two reasons not to have faith – in one, things are so dire and desperate that we might believe God will never come; in the other, things are so great that we might think it’s our own doing.  And yet in both readings, the people continue in their faith and their yearning for God. And the gospel continues this, telling us that our time is short, that we must be ready and awake when the master returns.  In all of these is a message that I at least need to hear.  It’s a reassuring one:  First, no, this world is not all there is.  Despite all the sin and degradation around us, our inhumanity to each other and our greedy grabbing for ourselves, God loves us.  God has created us for more than this; the time will come when we will see God’s vision clearly with our own eyes and, if we are ready, we will welcome it.  Our yearning and our hope and our despair will find their redemption in what God has in store for us.  There is better to come.

But at the same time, the worst of human nature is not all of human nature – we are showered daily with blessings and gifts from God, and most of them come through other people.  People who go out of their way for each other in little ways or big, people who spend their Black Friday picking turkey to feed the hungry next year instead of shopping.  People who pray for each other and care for each other and give to each other, making the holidays yet one more chance to love well.  There is so much to be grateful for in our community, and in many communities of love.  We have signs of light all around us if we only look.

So what are we to do with Advent?  Well, wait – wait, and trust.  But it’s not a passive state.  Keeping awake and being ready demands something of us.  If we’re going to see God face to face and like what we see, then we need to prepare ourselves now, by tuning ourselves more to God’s music.  In this season that is upon us, that means that we need to actively choose to love other people more than ourselves.  We need to consider the long-term good of the human race over our desire for another new thing.  We need to look for and serve Christ in people we disagree with, even those we might despise.  We need to daily give thanks for all the good that has happened to us.  We wait for God, and as we wait, we help to create what this world should be.

What God is about has not been fully revealed to us yet; God is still preparing and waiting:  preparing what is to come, and preparing us for that end.  Whether we are in line or not, whether we think it’s our doing or not, it is God who is working.  And God is faithful, as Paul tells the Corinthians.  We fail at the faithfulness thing, but God does not.  God is coming; God is already with us, one with us and understanding us, the best and the worst we have to offer.  So look for God in this season, and expect to find him – even in the darkness, the light is shining.  Amen.

The retreat will be the weekend of March 2-4, 2012 at the beautiful St. Francis Retreat Center in San Juan Bautista.  The cost is $196.00 per person/double ($246.00 per person/single) including all meals.  There is a $75 non-refundable deposit.  Space is limited to 24 women.  If you are interested in attending this exciting retreat, please contact Melinda Jennings by phone (408-225-0528) or email (melinda1948@gmail.com).  Scholarships are available:  talk to Kate if the cost is a problem.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 justice and eternal punishment doesn’t seem to fit into that. What do we do with this?

I suppose you could say that the shepherd is an image that goes both ways, just as the image of Christ as king, or God as loving parent, goes both ways.  God does care for us and love us.  But God also allows us to choose how we will live our lives.  We’re free to choose to do what Jesus taught us, to love our neighbor as ourselves.  We are also free to live as if that doesn’t matter; to mistreat other people and live for ourselves alone. Most of us do some of both at different times in our lives.  But as a good shepherd with his sheep, or as a good king with his people, or as a parent with her children, God is too bound up with us not to care about what we do.  What we do affects other people, and so what we do affects God, and one way or another, God requires some kind of reckoning from us, an accounting for how we’ve lived and what choices we’ve made.  Sometimes we picture this as a dramatic once-for-all ending like today’s gospel, where everyone gets sorted out and some get punished for all eternity; sometimes we picture this as each of us coming face to face with Jesus and reviewing with him how what we did affected other people.  C.S. Lewis once described purgatory and judgment as simply having to live our lives over again, seeing what our actions did to other people.  We might even picture this reckoning as an immediate one, the consequences of our actions made obvious by the person we’re doing them to.  We don’t know exactly what will happen, and we tend not to want to think about it very much.  Sometimes, though, the scriptures won’t let us escape it.

Look again at today’s gospel.  The sorting out is very clear – there are those who are righteous, and those who are not.  But the criteria for the sorting is also very clear, and it’s also quite simple.  Did you feed the hungry; did you give drink to the thirsty; did you welcome the stranger; did you clothe the naked; did you take care of the sick; did you visit those in prison?  If you did, even to one of the least of these, you did it to Jesus also.  The righteous seem as surprised to hear it as the accursed are – you can almost hear them asking, what? is that all it takes?  There’s nothing, you might notice, about believing a particular doctrine, or being part of a particular faith or church; there’s nothing about praying or not swearing or giving money to good causes or any of the things we usually think of as ‘being good.’  It’s all very simple stuff, things that any of us can do to take care of needs that every one of us have.  And I mean both physical needs and spiritual ones, for being sick and imprisoned and vulnerable can all be matters of the spirit as well as the body.  Loving your neighbor as yourself turns out to be the main commandment; and loving your neighbor is about how you act toward them, not about how you feel about them.  Pretty simple.

But even so, it’s all too easy to wind up with the goats.  If we live most of our lives according to the rules of the world around us, then we value making and keeping money, getting ahead and being successful.  Then, when we have some spare time and some spare change, we can be kind and help other people – the holidays are coming, so we give to charity.  Hearing that our acts of charity and kindness to others provide the ultimate and only litmus test at the final judgment is something of a shocker, but perhaps that’s what we need to place it more centrally in our lives:  love your neighbor, or else.  God makes it in our own self-interest to care for others.

But for many of us sitting here in church, we’ve probably already bought into the idea that Christians are supposed to help other people.  We might even feel like we should be doing more of this than we already do.  After all, there is so much need.  But there’s so much need, we can’t possibly address all of it.  It can be overwhelming.  If this is the litmus test, we might be thinking, then we fail if we don’t sell all we have and give it to the poor, if we don’t feed every hungry person, if we don’t spend all our time visiting prisoners and people in hospitals.  But you notice, Jesus says, just as you did it to ONE of the least of these, you did it to me.  It’s not about saving the world or being a hero – care for the people who come into your path.  Some people are given the opportunity to be heroes, but most of us are just offered the chance to be loving and ordinary human beings.

There’s a lovely little story of a girl who comes upon an old man on the beach.  The man is picking up starfish one by one and throwing them in the sea. The girl asks him why he is doing this, and he explains that the starfish are stranded above the tide line and will die if left in the sun.  The girl says, ‘There are thousands of starfish on this beach – how can you make any difference?’  And the man throws another starfish in the sea and replies, ‘I made a difference to that one.’  Performing one simple action, the man exactly meets the need in front of him.

We are called to love our neighbor – our one neighbor there standing before us, be they friend, stranger, or enemy – and to care for them, because to do so cares for God, and places what God cares about as our priority also.  Thomas Merton wrote that we are collaborators with God, called to use our freedom to help God build God’s kingdom in the world.  God is not standing far off at the end of time, waiting to see if we obeyed our orders; God is there in the least of these, in each person we meet, needing us to care for them, and desiring to care for us as well.  We are free to turn away from this need if we choose to, but it is not a matter of indifference to God what we do.  And the judgment on what we do is right there to be experienced in the world we create and live in.  If we love our neighbor, we cooperate with God in creating a kingdom of love and justice; if we do not, we help to tear it down.

Love your neighbor as yourself.  Find out what they need and do it for them.  Look for Jesus in them, whether you like them or not.  It’s pretty simple, and it’s everything.  It’s our task and challenge; it’s also how this world becomes a better place for all of us, here and now.  May we live into the model of life Jesus set for us – and participate in God’s love for all of us.  Amen.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 Levitical law – it was called usury.  And it was against the law because to earn interest meant that you were extracting more money from the poor – the Torah is very careful about issues of wealth disparity.  In the thinking of the Law, the poor were poor, and the rich were rich, because the rich were exploiting the poor.  Affirming that system, even metaphorically, seems pretty unlikely for a Jewish Messiah.

But even if we set that interpretation aside, we still have two more, at least.  We tend to automatically think that parables about a landowner and his servants are about God and us.  But perhaps in this case, the landowner is not God.  Look at how the third servant describes him – a harsh man, reaping where he did not sow.  This landowner is rapacious, one who makes a profit wherever he can, off of whomever he can make it.  Not my image of God, certainly.  And this landowner is wealthy beyond belief:  A talent would be about twenty years’ wages for a laborer – so 10 talents, given to the first slave, would be 200 years’ wages…which then is doubled by the slave’s investment.  The money in question is astronomical. And the landowner clearly expects to get richer while he’s away, assuming his slaves will continue his ‘legacy’ – continue his business, take risks to make a profit, and follow his example of wheeling & dealing.  Perhaps this isn’t a parable about God or God’s ways at all – perhaps it’s about the ways of the world, and how hard it is to be Jesus’ followers – the world reaps where it does not sow, and the rich are rich because they steal from the poor.  The first two slaves go along with that system.  The third slave is the honorable one because he doesn’t do that, and he pays for it.

On the other hand.  The parable tells of the landowner going away and then coming back to see what’s happened in his absence.  It comes directly after the wise and foolish bridesmaids, which is also a story about someone being away and returning, and that someone, the bridegroom, does seem to mean Jesus.  And right afterward Jesus goes on to talk about the coming, or the return, of the Son of Man.  So a story about someone going away and what happens when he returns does seem in context to be about, well, Jesus, and his coming death and resurrection.  In which case it is interesting to look again at the exchange between the third slave and his master.  The slave explains that he buried the money because ‘I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid.’  The landowner responds, ‘You knew that, did you?’ and then goes on to order punishment for the slave.  But nowhere does the landowner own up to this characterization.  So the question is, what if that is not really what the landowner is like, but simply what the third slave expects him to be?  And what if the expectations of the slave shape the way his master acts toward him?

It might just be that God lives up – or lives down – to our expectations.  There’s a way in which our belief shapes our reality here:  what we think we’ll get is what we look for.  We don’t notice what we don’t expect.

I’ve seen that happen among people.  People can get their minds made up about other people, so much so that they can’t see what’s really true.  Think about what you might have heard someone say about another person:  ‘She’s pushy, she’s always been like that.  I can tell you all kinds of stories about how pushy she is. ‘ And the more we focus on those stories, the less that person seems anything but pushy – the less she seems like a real person, the less we have to be careful of her feelings.  Or, ‘He’s always trying to be in charge of everything – every time he gets into a group he tries to run it.’ So you don’t have to listen to him, because you know already just what he’s going to say.  And so on.  The more we expect other people to be just what we expect them to be, the less they’re able to be anything else to us. We’re blind and deaf to them.  Our minds are made up.

I think this can happen with God as well.  The parable of the talents might just be more about our perception of God than anything else. Do we see God as abundant and generous? If so, then we’re able to risk what God gives us to do something big.  We’re like the first two slaves, who take a chance and try something and do new things as a result.  Or do we see God as punishing and vengeful?  If so, then we’re fearful, and whatever happens, we’ll see it as God’s punishment.  We’re like the third slave, who acts according to his own worst fears of what his master is like, and so loses everything.

When the landowner leaves, he expects his slaves to carry on his business in the same way he did it.  If this is meant to be Jesus, then he expects us to continue his business of loving, healing, preaching, teaching.  He expects us to take risks to do so, just as he did – risking rejection and death for love of us. He expects us to follow his example.  What is it we expect of him?  Do we expect him to be a harsh judge, a vengeful master, or to be a loving God who wants us to love as well?

The thing is, the example Jesus gives us is not one that encourages us to be fearful.  Look at how he lived here on earth: he loved people; he gathered in the lost and outcast of society.  He did call people on their bad behavior, particularly when that behavior hurt other people.  But he told stories about how when sinners return to God they are forgiven.  He embraced children and taught people to care for the poor and the weak.  He gave up his life in love.  Jesus’ revelation of God is of a God who is supremely and deeply loving, always welcoming us back, always reaching out to us.  It’s not an image that should inspire our fearfulness.  It’s an image that could inspire us to risk a little bit ourselves in order to love.  And to allow others also to be full human beings, trying in their way as we are to love and follow the way of life Jesus taught.

So here is my challenge for us all in these next few weeks, as the holiday season begins.  Notice just what you’re expecting of God, and what you’re expecting of other people.  Try out risking a little bit – try risking the belief that God really does love you.  Try risking love for other people, even the ones you’ve written off.  Live into the possibility of what could be instead of fearing what might be.  The return on your investment may be more than you could ever imagine.  Amen.

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;
[Read more ...]]]> 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; are you in the in-group, or the out-group; will you be saved, or not.  There’s not a lot of Anglican wiggle room in there – you can’t answer ‘both-and’ to this one.  It’s either one way or the other, it seems.  There are ten bridesmaids, some of whom planned ahead with extra oil for their lamps, and some of whom did not.  And those who did not have enough oil to wait for the late-arriving bridegroom ask the others for help, and are refused.  And then those foolish bridesmaids are locked out of the party when they return from buying more oil for their lamps.

This parable has always reminded me of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper.  In that story, the ants work all summer long gathering food and the grasshoppers play all summer long.  When winter comes and the grasshoppers are starving, they beg the ants for some food.  The ants refuse, sounding self-righteous and snotty, and say, ‘You should have been working over the summer, lazybones.  This is your own fault!’  Rather the same response the wise bridesmaids give the foolish ones.  The ant and grasshopper story, of course, extols the virtues of hard work, that each one of us needs to pull our own weight and not be lazy and rely on others to take care of us.  There are consequences for our behavior.

Jesus’ parable gives a picture of consequences as well.  The bridesmaids, of course, are the followers of Christ, and Christ is the bridegroom.  The bridegroom takes a while in coming to the feast – the first-century Christians realized that Jesus wasn’t coming back immediately like they’d originally understood, but that it might take a while.  The oil for the lamps symbolizes our readiness for salvation: sufficient good works, right living, faithfulness.  The commentaries take pains to point out that the wise bridesmaids refuse to offer extra oil to their unprepared friends not because of a lack of charity, but simply because readiness for the kingdom isn’t something you can just pass on to another who needs it – we each have our own path to follow and choices to make.  All the same, they still sound pretty snotty to me.

I think that the story of the ant and grasshopper has infected this parable about the wise and foolish bridesmaids.  The American virtues of hard work, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, personal responsibility – they’re part of our idea of salvation.  You could say that hard work and industriousness are seen as the keys to salvation themselves – ‘Jesus is coming – look busy,’ as the bumper sticker says.  Wisdom, then, is in preparing for the future, stocking up enough to last, making sure there’s enough oil to make it through the long dark night ahead.  It’s our job to make the right choices, and if we don’t, it’s no one else’s fault but our own.

But when we take the parables to be all about ‘common sense,’ then chances are we’re not reading them well enough.  Wisdom in the gospels is often worldly wisdom turned on its head:  sell all you have and follow me; leave the 99 sheep and look for the one that is lost; eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners, for they are going into heaven ahead of the righteous; die, and you will live.  Are we really meant to understand that Jesus applauds the wise bridesmaids for their industriousness?

Garrison Keillor once told a story of a church in the dead of winter, running low on fuel for the oil furnace.  The order was made in due time, but then the blizzard hit – snow piled up several feet thick, roads were blocked, no delivery truck could possibly get through.  And Christmas Eve was coming, when folks from the surrounding town would come to gather for the traditional service – with a dead furnace, it would be too bitterly cold to worship.  But the pastor decided to go ahead, not to cancel the service – and the oil furnace kept running, keeping the place warm, running long after the fuel should have given out, running through Christmas Eve and on to the day when the delivery truck could finally get through and restock.  It’s a story like the one celebrated in the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, remembering the oil lamp in the newly rededicated Temple that kept burning for eight days even though there was only enough oil for one day.  But Hanukkah doesn’t commemorate that someone planned ahead and saved for a rainy day.  And Garrison Keillor’s story doesn’t depend on that either – even though someone placed the order in time, the blizzard kept the oil from being restocked.  Both of those stories tell of miracles, of God doing what humans could not.  People did their part, setting up the lamp and lighting it, starting up the furnace, but then something else kept them burning.

Something else keeps the lamps full and burning for those wise bridesmaids as well.  If our lamps are meant to be burning bright when Jesus comes again, it will in some part depend on us – it is our part to work on our souls, to attend to spiritual disciplines and just living, caring for the needs of others.  It is our part to ask where God wants us and what God wants us to do.  But it does not only depend on us, thank goodness.  It depends on God, on the Spirit burning in us, sustaining us through dark times and dry times when we don’t feel like we have the fuel in us.  It depends on the community God brings us, others through whom God shows us what love and compassion look like.  It depends on all those connections visible and invisible, the communion of saints throughout the ages, the legacy of those who went before and the gifts we will leave to those who live after us.  We don’t just fuel up and burn our lamps, each one of us by ourselves.

We are here because of what a group of people did 40-some years ago.  We give thanks today for them and their vision, the spirit that led them to create something that lasted beyond themselves.  And we’re here because of people who came long before 40 years ago, saints and sinners throughout the generations who one way or another tried to follow Jesus and love God and care for their neighbors.  And we are here to do the same, to continue the gift, to pass along to generations yet unborn the blessings that we have received.  Our lamps do not burn for ourselves alone.

May we today allow God to fill us, to breathe the Spirit into us and fuel us and purify us.  And may God make us all saints, people who show God’s love and light to the world.  Amen.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 clergy who lord it over others, or plenty of lay people who give those clergy too much power to do so – but as a whole, it’s not bad.  So taking Jesus’ words purely literally, the Episcopal Church has done better than some at maintaining some equality and balance of power between its different orders.

But the leaders Jesus talks to aren’t just religious – they have power and influence in the political world as well.  Looking outside the church at the greater culture around us too, we see things haven’t always worked out equally.  As our economy reels closer to collapse, it’s becoming more and more obvious that things have become grossly unequal in our country, in power and in resources.  Six weeks ago people began the Occupy Wall Street protest, which has now spread to 1768 cities, according to the organizers.   Close to home, that protest got very ugly in Oakland this last week, which has drawn more attention to the protesters and to the cities where they are protesting.  There are a wide range of causes all gathered together in this movement, but one common thread is the attempt to give voice to the frustration many feel that things have become grossly unfair in our country.  As this has grown, some analysts have noted that the Tea Party supporters have also been outraged about the disparity of wealth and power – each group is very different demographically, and holds different entities accountable for this problem, but there’s at least one common point in their protest.  Groups to the right and the left of the mainstream are agreeing that something is not right in this country.  On Tuesday the Congressional Budget Office released a report on trends in the distribution of household income from 1979 to 2007.  Over those nearly 30 years the top 1% of earners increased their income by 275%, while the middle class increased income by 40% and the poor by 18%.  In other words, people’s sense of things isn’t off at all.  In clear ways, the exalted have exalted themselves way above the rest of us.  There’s a reason a lot of people, people on the extremes of the political spectrum and many of us in the middle, are angry.  We know what’s fair, and we were raised with the idea that our democratic system ought to be fair, and things clearly are not fair now.

So when is it they get made fair again?  When is it the humbling of those who need humbling starts?  How long, O Yahweh?  There are a lot of Psalms that speak to this same question, one that is asked by the Old Testament prophets as well.  The rich and powerful are getting away with murder, and the poor continue to be oppressed – it was true in ancient Israel and it’s true today.  Somehow we continue to believe that God will right the scales, but we wish it weren’t taking so very long.  Those people will get what they deserve some day, we hope, and so will we.

Here’s the problem with hearing Jesus’ words in that light, however.  Jesus roundly condemns the religious leaders of his time – and in Matthew’s gospel for several verses after what we heard today, he continues to do so.  But Jesus is not offering us a chance to point our fingers and say, Yes, Jesus, we agree – they really are a problem!  Whenever Jesus condemns someone in the gospels – and he can be very condemning indeed – he adds one or two more phrases that manage to round everybody up into the condemnation – and offer everyone the same grace and forgiveness, for that matter.  That’s what made him so infuriating to his listeners in 1^st century Palestine, and that still makes him infuriating – it’s hard to get Jesus roped in to our agenda, as long as our agenda runs something like, God, please deal with/bring down/get rid of/punish those other people, and make things better for ME.  Jesus paints with a broad brush.  We are all of us, all of us human beings, implicated in what he says.  And, perhaps even harder to take, his embrace is broad as well:  we are all of us invited in.

‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled – and all who humble themselves will be exalted.’  All – that means any one of us is capable of either path.  We tend more often than not to exalt ourselves, of course.   Perhaps we aren’t billionaires or political tyrants, but we have our own ways.  Things like excusing ourselves for our own ‘little’ wrongdoings while critiquing others for theirs; holding tightly to our own pride and egos and taking offense at what we think are slights from others; muttering to ourselves that I deserved that raise, not her, I should have got a better grade on this than he did; and so on and so on.  Think for a minute what it is like to nurture those thoughts and grudges.  It feels small, and angry, and tastes bitter. Now imagine if we did the opposite instead:  forgiving others for things they do while working to do better ourselves; rejoicing in the good of the whole and enjoying simply being a part of it; being glad for others’ joy instead of envying them – all of it really feels a whole lot better, when you think about it.  It’s freeing to think less of ourselves.  There’s a lot more to delight in when we look for what’s good in others’ lives.  There’s a lot less bitterness to carry around when we forgive people and move on.  All of it allows for a lightness of being, a, shall we say, exalted feeling.

That’s what it means to humble ourselves.  When we humble ourselves, we let God sort out where we stand in the hierarchy.  We don’t worry about other people and our status vis-à-vis them – better than them, or worse than them, in whatever way.  We simply focus on God, on being a servant, a student, learning and serving among our fellow human beings, and living free.

It is still true that our call from God, our place in God’s kingdom today, might require us to speak out on injustice.  God might be laying a burden on us that demands that we work to change an unfair system, to care for the poor and the powerless in any number of settings – in our workplace, in our society, in our churches.  But when we answer that as God’s servant and student, not acting on our own, then we act not out of bitterness and personal vendetta, but out of love.  Anger becomes more righteous and less self-righteous.  It becomes easier to talk to people who disagree with us because it isn’t so much about us.  However we understand the root of injustice in our world, we’ll get a lot farther in the dialogue if we aren’t so insistently looking out for ourselves first.

So wherever we are on the political spectrum, we should care for the Occupying protesters, and for the Tea Party members alike.  We should reach out to the 1% with so much wealth and care for the 99% with so much less.  And we should do what we can to right injustice and work out a more fair economic and political system at all levels.  And praying as we do so, we might just remember that God is working on us, on the small injustices and the unfairness in our hearts also.  And we might recall that our proper place is as children of God among other children of God, each of us loved, each of us welcomed every time we return home.  May the grace of God exalt us to that light and that love.

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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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 John makes this same point later:  ‘Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars.’

Anyone here ever hated somebody else?  OK, if not that, then anybody ever felt uncharitable feelings toward somebody else?  Well, whoops.  Guess this incriminates all of us, doesn’t it?

Well, there’s good news and bad here for us.  Jesus isn’t talking about our feelings, per se.  His emphasis isn’t on what we think of other people or how warm our hearts are toward them.  He’s talking instead about actions, about whether we care for others’ needs.  Whether we feed the hungry and give water to the thirsty and look out for each other’s children; whether we maintain relationship and put the wellbeing of the other person as a priority.  Whether we tell the truth about other people and insist that others do as well.  If we do all those things, then we are loving our neighbor – and we are loving God as well.  Good news to realize that we don’t have to adore each other all the time – but tough news to hear that we have to look out for each other all the same.

On the other hand, it’s nice to realize that we don’t have to conjure up warm enthusiastic feelings about God all the time either.  For some people, God remains a distant idea, not a close companion – maybe because of early teachings we imbibed as a child, or for lots of other reasons.  And for many of us, there are times when we feel terribly angry at God for allowing something bad to happen – we might not admit feeling angry, but we do all the same.  For others of us, even if we are consistent with our prayer and spiritual practice, sometimes it can start to feel dry and lifeless, even boring.  We can feel guilty about this, like we’re not loving God the way we should.  Hearing that loving God is really about caring for and serving others, and staying faithful in our intentions and practice with God, can be something of a relief.  But it does place an expectation on our behavior, even if not on our feelings: it means we do have to serve and care for and be faithful to others and God – something we’re not always so consistent about.

A few years ago, after Mother Teresa died, her spiritual director published her writings.  Many of these were letters that Mother Teresa had no intention of making public, and they revealed a long, lonely period of spiritual darkness in her life.  Even as she continued to serve the poor and the dying, an icon for people around the world, she was struggling with God’s silence and feeling abandoned by God.  The warm connection to Jesus that had drawn her into her ministry had disappeared.  And yet she persevered, not speaking of this to others, offering what she could to those in need around her.  The Vatican, which is in the process of considering her as a saint, declared that these revelations of her spiritual angst will not impede her process toward sainthood – after all, so many of the great mystics of the Christian tradition have written of just that same thing.  The point was that despite her struggles, Mother Teresa lived out just what Jesus calls us to do – loving in tangible action.  That itself is the path of sainthood.

We’re not all Mother Teresa, of course.  But hearing of her inner struggles and reading some of those letters made her much more real to me, more human.  Which also meant that I realized that I’m less off the hook.  If Mother Teresa could reach out to the people in need around her, even when it didn’t feel good to do so, then so can I.  I don’t have a call to the poor and dying of Calcutta right now, but I do have a call to serve those right here in my life.  And I’m not always so great about it.  We as a community, here at ECA, have a call to serve people in the neighborhood around us, and to love one another well.  But we’re not always so great about it.  So what then?

If it were all just up to us to love one another well, that’s right about where it would end.  We would try and fail and try again, and more often than not just give up.  It’s tiring to do this.  It takes a lot of effort and work, going against our lesser nature.  It would be easier to settle into our prejudices, ignore the people who annoy us, disparage the ones who we can’t stand.  We’d pick the people we liked and be nice to them, and no one could expect us to do differently with those we didn’t like.  But loving our neighbor as ourselves isn’t just an effort of our will alone.  It’s connected with the commandment to love God because only then can we really love others.  Offering to God our whole heart and mind and strength – directing all our attention and intention to God first – is offering God all of us.  And when God has all of us to work with, then God can use all of us to do what God would do in the world:  namely, to love.  ‘Increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity,’ we prayed in our opening prayer today: God, give us the ability to love.  It’s the only way we really can – the only way to reach out beyond our own self-absorbed limitations and let God give Godself, through us, to others.  That’s what made Mother Teresa a saint – that she could be a conduit for God’s giving to others.  Even if she didn’t feel that warmth herself, she never seemed to tire of the work – she allowed God to use her to love.

So how do we do all of this?  It begins with discipline, of course – intentionally bending our mind and will to choose in every decision to do what is good for others.  Every decision – what we buy, what we eat, what we say, everything.  And simultaneously being intentional about praying – talking to God, in formal and more often informal ways, allowing our minds to fall open to God, asking God what God would have us do next.  Loving is an act of will – it can’t help but require work on our part.  But as we do this, as we grow in this process and progress in this path, it gets easier – it gets to be habit, it gets to be just how we are.  And more and more as we do this, God is able to use us, to pour light through us, to love the world.

So you could say that it all comes back to stewardship.  We love God and each other by giving ourselves – not worrying over reciprocity or what we’ll get out of it, but simply giving.  The same kind of giving that Jesus did for us with his life, that God did in giving us God’s self in Jesus.  It is giving that makes more of us – enlarging us from the shrunken little place we’d pick for ourselves to live in, into something far greater, big enough to share God’s love and light with others.  This is how we love: by letting God’s love be the source of our love.  Amen.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 yes, it is lawful, he’s supporting the pagan oppressors, and the crowds will hate him.  You can feel the elders salivating, waiting for the answer.

Jesus doesn’t seem to flinch.  Hypocrites, he says.  Bring me a coin.  And they do.  What are they doing carrying this coin?  They usually claim not to want to touch it.  Jesus, it seems, doesn’t carry those coins with him.  But they bring one out anyway.  Whose head is this, and whose title? Jesus asks.  Well, obviously.  It’s Caesar, the Roman emperor, the son of God, and the title says something like ‘Tiberius Caesar son of the divine Augustus, great high priest.’  So give what is due to Caesar, and give to God what is due to God, Jesus says.  There they are, in the temple, confronting the son of God with a coin that bears the image of the so-called son of God, and they don’t seem to realize what they’re doing.

This is a scripture passage about money.  It’s one of many, many times Jesus engages the topic of money.  As has often been noted, Jesus talks about and refers to money more often than any other topic, except for the Kingdom of God.  11 out of the 39 total parables Jesus tells in all of the gospels are about money.  Strange then that we so recoil from talking about money in church.  (And that many churches spend so much time talking about sexuality instead, something that Jesus said, hmm, nothing about.)

But this is also about more than money.  It is not, however, about the separation of church and state.  Jesus was not upholding the American constitution in first century Palestine.   We often want to read backward into the Bible, forgetting just how long ago and different that culture and time were.  The idea of private morality vs. public citizenship is not one that culture would have espoused.  But the larger point Jesus is making very much hits home with us, and with all people in all times and places.  It is about who and what we worship, and where we place our allegiance.  Do we worship God? Or do we worship other gods instead?

That gospel is paired today with the story from Exodus, the conversation Moses has with God.  God has told Moses that he will not continue on personally with the Israelites through the desert.  Remember the story from last week, the incident with the golden calf?  The people grew impatient with how long God and Moses were off talking on the mountain together, and asked Aaron to create a new god for them that they could worship more easily.  When Moses returned and saw their creation, he burned the calf, put the ashes into water, and made the people drink it.  And God was so angry God destroyed some of the people.  To prevent this from happening again – since God knows that the people will continue to wander away after other gods of their own making – God says, I’d just better not go with you.  Moses argues him into coming, saying, how will everyone know that we are your people, if you aren’t with us?  So God agrees.  And then Moses talks him into showing himself to Moses – and God does so, though only the slightest glimpse of his back, lest he overwhelm Moses and destroy him too.

The message:  God is a dangerous companion.  If we love and obey God’s commandments and live as God’s people. if we fulfill our side of the relationship, God is a glorious friend.  God is strong and powerful and fiercely loving, and being people of God opens us to the glory of that love.  ‘I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious,’ says God, ‘and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.’  God is not something we can put bounds around and manage.  But God takes us up into life that is greater than what we can make for ourselves.  If we choose other gods for ourselves, it does tend to blow up in our face.  You can call that God’s retribution, or you could just call it consequences.  Other gods don’t satisfy what we most deeply need.  They have a way of taking control of us themselves.

The thing is, there’s a reason we create other gods for ourselves, whether it be money or success or family or a golden calf.  We think we can manage those gods.  We believe we can be in control of them and make them act the way we want – that they can serve us, rather than the other way around.  It’s tangible and understandable, worshiping a god of our own creation.  If it’s money, we can see the numbers add up, we can relish the possessions we buy.  If it’s success, we can climb the corporate ladder, bask in the praise, enjoy the perks.  If it’s family, we can look around the dinner table and see them all there beaming back at us.  It’s all so good and so, well, there.

But of course that’s not all those gods do, is it?  Money these days doesn’t neatly earn interest and pile up.  The numbers have a way of going the opposite direction.  We worry, we sweat, we chew our nails and cut our charitable giving.  Success is always slippery, here one day, gone the next, depending on the whims of the market and people in power, and on our own vague feelings of well-being.   Have we made it, are we still trying to make it, or have we actually failed?  We wonder where we are on the ladder.  And family, well, family just doesn’t always act the way we want them to.   What did we do wrong?  Why can’t they be how we want them to be?  Suddenly the gods don’t deliver, or rather what they do deliver is control over us.  We give them way more than what they’re due.

Give to God what is due to God, Jesus says.  The coin with Caesar’s image and title on it, you can give that to Caesar.   But look at yourself.  Whose image do you bear? Whose title?  You are made in the image of God, says the book of Genesis.  Your title is, Child of God.   You are marked as God’s right from the beginning.  In fact, all of creation is, including Caesar and his coins.  We want to partition our lives into church and state, public and private, mine and yours, and stay organized in our categories.  But those distinctions are false, of our own making.   They carry us into that desperate place of struggle and scarcity, of worry and anxiety.  We can’t control other people and make them how we want them to be.  We can’t control the forces of chance.  We can’t control anything, really.  Least of all God, which drives us nuts.

All we can do is give God what is already God’s.  Let go of our own control issues.  Allow God to make more of us.  Trust God to manage the money and the success and the family and all of the other stuff we worry over, and lay down our worries.  It sounds ethereal, but it can be very practical, as simple as praying before we sit down with our checkbooks, or as we drive to our office, or as we start our day with our kids and spouses:  God, I can’t do this by myself.  Help.  I give myself and all in my life to you, and ask you to do what you will with it.  It makes a difference to do this.  Try it this week.  See what it is like.

Give to God what is due to God.  Which is everything.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 7^th 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 last little twist, the one about the wedding guest who’s there without the right clothes on.  It’s kind of a fly in the ointment to the grand inclusive vision, isn’t it?  Y’all come, but you darn well better come, and come ready and dressed, or else.  Yikes!

In Jesus’ time the meaning of the parable of the feast would have been clear.  God has come and invited Israel to the feast – the people of God, called throughout history to be a blessing, are now called to the banquet of his son the Messiah, Jesus.  But Israel refuses to come.  So God instead invites the nations, all the good and the bad of the Gentiles, pagans and Godfearers alike, and they come instead.  By the time Matthew’s gospel was being put together, Jerusalem had been destroyed in 70 AD – in Matthew’s eyes, this is God’s judgment on Israel’s failure to respond to Jesus.  But Matthew’s version doesn’t let everyone else off the hook either:  the Gentiles have a responsibility as well – they too must respond to God’s invitation and be ready to be God’s people, or else.

Well, today is meant to be a sermon on stewardship.  I see a wonderful opportunity here before us with this parable.  We are invited, urgently, to the feast.  It is a royal banquet, lavish and generous.  It’s spread out right in front of us.  One form of the feast will be offered here next Saturday with sausages and lederhosen.  Will we accept God’s invitation?  Here’s a pledge card.  You know what will happen if you don’t fill it out and return it.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s really look at this invitation.  It is a lavish feast spread out before us.  It’s God’s offering to us:  all of creation in its goodness, the gift of life, the gift of loving relationship with one another.  Stop for a moment and really think of it.  We all have a long list of blessings to be thankful for, starting with being alive today.  People to love and be loved by.  Work to do.  Sunshine and rain.  We take all of this for granted far too often.  Stop and think right now – I mean really do it – think of 5 things you are thankful for.

…Was it easy? Or was it hard?  Did you know that they’ve done brain scans on people who spent 30 minutes thinking of things they’re grateful for, and then another 30 minutes thinking of negative things, things that aren’t going right.  After the gratitude sessions, the brains were healthy and functioning.  After the negativity sessions, the brains showed seriously decreased functioning in the areas responsible for processing information, memory and emotional control.   There have been other studies on the effects of gratitude on stress levels and blood pressure and the like.  The message:  It’s good for us to be grateful.  It’s bad for us not to be grateful.  Surely we can each think of five things to be thankful for?

But we don’t do it that often, do we?  We get distracted by the negative things, the worry things, the tasks.  Sorry, we say, I can’t come to the feast today.  I’ve got work to do, I’ve got things to attend to.  There’s a lot to distract us.  It all seems important.  Someone has to look to the bottom line, after all.  Spiritual talk is lovely for Sunday, but Monday morning rolls around and then we have to get serious.  Paying the mortgage and buying gas and food bills are all important, and we’ve got to keep our nose to the grindstone to focus.  Sometimes those other things seem so important that the feast just doesn’t measure up.  Gratitude?  Whatever.  Stop and pray?  I’m too busy for that.  Quiet time with God, or time spent serving others?  Sure, if I have some time left over after I get everything else done.  Give my money?  Like I said – if I have some left over.

One commentator on this gospel parable pointed out that the real problem with those invited folks who refuse to come is that they essentially kick God out of the kingdom.  They’ve got it sewn up already.  They have important things to do and they’re busy doing them, and they don’t have time for silly dinners.  This is what it looks like to live righteously and as a model citizen.  That’s a waste of time.  No thanks, God.  I’m busy.  No wonder Jesus is a little put out.

Do you remember the Pixar movie, ‘Finding Nemo’?  The seagulls were some of the more despicable characters in the film, as they are in real life.  And while all the other characters talked, the seagulls only said one word:  ‘Mine.’  Mine, mine, mine.  It’s our fatal flaw.  God creates, God gives, and we say simply, Mine.  My money.  My time.  My garden.  My priorities.

I recently saw a set of reflections on stewardship.  One of them was written by a lay person from a church in Kansas.  He wrote about how when he and his wife were young, they joined a church and were asked to pledge.  They were barely making it financially, and they simply didn’t see how they could spare anything for the church.  It was a struggle to find enough to give to the church after they’d paid all their bills.  But then something inspired them to reverse the order.  Instead of paying all their bills first and then giving what they could to the church, they gave to the church first, and then lived off the rest of it.  The writer doesn’t say what led them to make that choice, to be a ‘first-fruits giver,’ as he called it.  But he said that as soon as they did it, they always had enough.  The more they gave, to the church or to other charities or to people in need, the more they seemed to have.  And the more they received in other ways as well, in gratitude and in their own sense of joy.

I think what this couple did was realize a truth that’s hard for the rest of us to understand:  instead of thinking of their money as theirs, they thought of it as God’s.  They returned the first fruits to God, and trusted that God would take care of them for the rest.  It’s radical faith and trustfulness, living this way.  But what a witness:  to treat our resources, whether they be time or money or skills or other gifts, as real gifts.  Not ours to dole out as we see fit, but God’s.  God’s gifts to us, best used as God’s resources – us as stewards, not owners, of what we have.

That’s what accepting the invitation to the feast is about.  It’s realizing that everything is the feast – that life itself and all we have is a feast spread for us by God.  There’s nothing more important than this – there’s nothing else we have to go do instead.  Even pretending that there is anything else outside of the feast is false thinking – trying to have the kingdom while shutting God out of it.  We are invited to the feast and God wants us there wholeheartedly – not just coming for the food and leaving, but being there with our whole self…knowing and remembering that our whole self belongs to God, not to us.

When you start from that place, you can’t help but be grateful.  What you don’t have weighs a lot less than what you do have.  There’s such a feast – take and eat, and feast in your hearts, and be thankful.  Amen.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 vineyard, builds the fence, digs the wine press, and builds the watchtower.  There are the tenants, who are hired to come care for the vineyard.  There are the slaves of the landowner, who are sent as messengers to the tenants.  There is the son of the landowner, the final messenger.  And then there are the ‘other tenants,’ the ones to whom the landowner will lease the vineyard to when the first tenants don’t do their job.

In the middle of them all is the vineyard itself, with fruits ripe for the harvest.  But those fruits never seem to get harvested.  No one ever seems to enjoy them and make them into the wine they are intended for.  Instead, every character pursues his or her own agenda, whether it be in conflict with the others or not.  The landowner wants the produce of the harvest but needs others to do the work.  The first set of tenants either don’t want to do the work or want to keep the produce for themselves.  The slaves just do the bidding of the landowner, as does the son, and meet with terrible ends as a result.  The new set of tenants – well, we don’t know yet what their agenda will be, but it is hoped that they will give the produce to the landowner, as originally intended.  But in this mix of agendas, it’s not clear that the harvest ever does get collected – the purpose of the vineyard is lost.

I’ve been talking these last two weeks about what I see as my vision for ECA.  We come from a tradition from the Church of England where the church’s role is in part to serve the needs of its parish, the geographical area around the church.  My vision is that ECA live into that model, and truly seek out what are the needs of the neighborhood around us.  I’ve talked about who lives around us now, what I imagine their needs might be, and what I think some of our strengths are.  I think it’s quite possible that the two intersect pretty well.

But as I said last week, we don’t really know what the needs are around us until we ask.  And we might need to explore further to really see what our strengths are – and what of those strengths we truly want and feel called to use.  A well-known Christian writer named Frederick Buechner gives a wonderful definition of vocation.  He writes that our vocation, that is, what God is calling us to do, is ‘where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.’  ‘The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done.’   Or as a friend of mine puts it, God is efficient.  When God calls us to do something, it is for the blessing of others and for the blessing and growth we need ourselves.  Following our vocation means that the work we do will be joyful, not a drudgery.  It doesn’t guarantee smooth sailing and happiness every moment, but it does mean that deep-down, we are glad to be doing what we are doing, and others are blessed by it.

Put the other way, just because there’s a need doesn’t mean we’re the ones to fill it.  And just because we want to do something doesn’t mean there’s a need for it.  It takes careful discernment to know that we’re doing what God wants, that we really are at that intersection between our gladness and the world’s need.  It took me a while to learn this in my own life.  I remember distinctly a time before seminary when I had gotten myself involved in a particular ministry, an interfaith hospice chaplaincy for people with AIDS.  It was a wonderful ministry, it was run by wonderful people, I had good reasons for being involved in it.  But I was simply not gifted for the work. I was not at all ready or seasoned enough for it.  The more I tried to do it, the less I wanted to do it.  I felt guilty, I felt like I should be able to do the work, but I simply couldn’t.  I finally called the director – no easy task, since she was by that time quite ill herself with cancer – and confessed my difficulties.  And she was wonderful, and talked with me for a long time, and allowed me to realize that this was simply not where God needed to use me at that time.  It was a big learning for me then, and one whose lessons I still heed – it is easy to throw myself into new and interesting things, but I know now that if I’m not truly called to them, I won’t sustain my interest, and I won’t be serving people or God well.

I’ve been telling you what my vision is for our future.  But just because it’s my vision doesn’t mean it’s our calling.  I can get as excited as I want to about our possibilities – but I can also see the potential for going out on a limb and then turning to find that none of you are behind me.  My vision doesn’t mean much if it isn’t our vision.  A bunch of competing agendas do not a harvest make.

So I think we are now in a time of preparation together in this vineyard.  We’ve gotten to know each other a little.  We’re welcoming new people in, and other people back, to our congregation.  We’re taking care of some basics, tidying up the planted rows, pulling out a few weeds, watering and fertilizing to help the new growth happen.  And we’re feeling some tugging – the tugging that has made some of you turn to me and say, so where are we going??  We’re eager for the harvest.  There’s a goal in here somewhere – as Paul says in the bit of Philippians we heard today, we’re pressing on for it, ‘straining forward to what lies ahead.’  It’s not time to sit around; there is decidedly work to be done.  And there are some obvious tasks right there in front of us, if we’re all on board with this same vision of serving our community.  Part of that work is going out and gathering information – some of you jumped right on it this last week, checking out the possibilities of homework help on the days the library is closed.  We all have neighbors we need to meet and get to know better.   As I mentioned last week, we might even explore community-organizing training – it’s something our diocese is beginning to push for, and that will be given to clergy early next spring.  There’s a lot we all need to learn, even to know whether we could serve with the gifts we have.

But part of our work also is simply to pray, and to listen.  We need to hear what our heart of hearts is telling us.  What is our deep gladness?  Or if we don’t feel glad yet, what would make us deeply glad?  We need to each of us ask that question of ourselves; we need to ask that question of each other.  What do you long to do?   What is the thing that keeps you up at night, the still small voice that whispers so insistently?  What, just what, is God wanting of ECA here in the Almaden Valley at the end of 2011?  What do our prayers tell us?  Do we feel willing to respond?  It might be the kind of prayer that gets a ready answer – you might be sitting here today with a strong sense of what you want to do and how you want ECA involved in that.  Or it might be the kind of prayer that takes time, that begins just as a question held up to God and to our imagination, that gets passed around at the dinner table or on the phone with a friend, and only over time begins to find clarity in our life together.  I want each of us to pray about it, and I want all of us together to pray about it – here on Sundays and in other times.  Where does our gladness meet the deep hunger around us?

The good news I see in the parable is in that first sentence:  it is the landowner who plants the vineyard and sets everything up for it to work.  The fences are built, the wine press is ready, the watchtower is up.  All that is needed are the people to care for the crops.  God has set everything up for there to be a harvest.  We are some of the tenants of this vineyard of Almaden Valley.  All we have to do is tend to it and return the harvest to God – to do our part to help and not to hinder the journey others in our neighborhood have to wholeness and new life.  There are so many different jobs to do, so many different roles to play in bringing forth the harvest.  There are so many different ways we could be called.  But we don’t have to make the harvest happen – we just have to care for it in the way we are called to do.  And we’re not the only tenants here either – other churches and community groups may be working on the same things.  But that doesn’t let us off the hook, waiting for someone else to do the work.  So pray about it.  Listen.  Talk amongst yourselves, talk to me.  Let’s hear and respond, and continue this work of ECA.  Amen.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 10^th 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 parable about what God does to the people who are supposed to be caring for the vineyard but who aren’t doing their job.  That one will give us the impetus to move, if we haven’t felt it already!  But more on that next week.  Today we still have a choice presented to us.  Will you go and work in the vineyard?  Yes, or no?  Whether we go or not, this parable says, will be the sign of whether we have fully entered God’s kingdom or not.  Jesus was pretty clear in what he said:  the good intentions and pure living of the Pharisees and chief priests wasn’t enough to get them in if they refused to follow Jesus and his call to mission.  Our good intentions and past records won’t help us either.  People who live their lives in the kingdom of God live the ways of Jesus.  It’s not so much about rewards in the afterlife.  It’s about what our lives look like here and now.

I talked last week about how good ECA is at the fundamentals, of loving, of welcoming, of growing in Christ.  Those are the basics, and we know, you know, they’re the essential components of being a church of people who do Jesus’ work.  I think I can list some other strengths this community has as well – strengths we all have together, even if not every one of us can claim every one of them.

We have history.  This church has a few folks who remember the founding of ECA in 1967, and many more who came along in the next 20 years or so.  That kind of rootedness is a gift.  The culture around us is increasingly transient.  But collectively as a church culture, we know the history of the land here, what was here before all the houses, what will grow in the gardens.  We know how to be in friendships that last decades and carry us through life changes and tragedies.   We know how to maintain marriages that last 45 or 50 years or longer.  We know how to raise children and love the children they have.

We have educated people.  By and large, everyone else in our neighborhood is well educated too.  But the children around us aren’t yet.  We have a lot of learning under our belts, in schooling, in work experience, and in life experience.  Some of the guys at the men’s breakfast call themselves the repository of obsolete knowledge – yes, maybe with the constant change in technology we’re not up on every last thing, but most of you know and understand way more about math and science than I do, for one, and more than lots of kids do yet.  And many of us know how to teach and to mentor others along the way, because we’ve done it as part of our work and in our families.

We have time.  I know you don’t feel like you do.  But collectively as a culture, this church has people with the luxury of time on their hands – without kids at home, without the requirement of showing up for a daily job.  We’ve found ways to fill that time pretty well, of course.  But we are more the masters of our time than most people in the culture around us.  With some personal assessment of priorities, we could have time to give, I think.  That indeed is a gift – something that is in short supply for most people.

We have financial resources.  I’ll say more about that in a few weeks when stewardship time comes along, but despite our handwringing about deficits and dipping investments, this church is a pretty privileged community.  We have a lot to give in terms of resources.

And we have a facility with space that goes unused to its full potential many days.  Some groups use parts of it some of the time; but there is always more space that could be used than is used.  We have a big acreage of land and open space, with trees and birds and beauty.  We have a place that we can offer to others.

Those are our strengths: history, education, time, money, space. Those are some of the gifts God has blessed us with at this point in our church history.  We have the ability to go and work in the vineyard.

So what is the work that needs to be done?  Here are some guesses I have.

We know there are a lot of kids here – over a quarter of the population of the 95120 zip code is under 18.    In the 2000 census, half or more of them lived in families where both parents worked.  I haven’t seen that updated yet, but I’m guessing it’s more by now.  People move here for the schools, and the parents are well educated, so we know they value education.  But parents aren’t home all day to tend to their kids’ education – they need help caring for their children during the times when they’re not in school, they need help shuttling them from school to afterschool activities and back home, they need help assisting them with their homework.  There was an article in the Mercury News recently about the effects of reducing library hours down to 4 days a week.  The head librarian of the Almaden library noted that parents often drop their kids off there to do their homework – but now that library isn’t open on Mondays and Tuesdays.  There are kids in our neighborhood who need afterschool care and homework help on Mondays and Tuesdays.  There are other kids who need help other times.

People have become more transient than they used to be.  In the larger San Jose/Santa Clara/Sunnyvale area, according to the most recent American Community Survey, 2/3 of the population moved to their current house in the last 10 years.  Some of those moved here from other parts of the state or the country.  Some of those moved here from other countries.  In my census tract around the rectory, 1/3 of the population is foreign born.  When you move every few years, when you move away from your families and those who knew you when, some things get a lot harder.  Your kids live a long way away from their grandparents.  It’s harder to make and keep friends.  I know from experience that it takes a long time to feel settled in a new place.  People told me 6 months; in some ways it’s taking me longer than that, and I’ve moved back to a state I used to live in, and back to the kind of neighborhood I grew up in.  If I moved here from another country, speaking another language, I can’t imagine how long it would take to feel settled here.  Not feeling settled is isolating, for grown-ups and kids alike.  People need community to connect to.  They need a mix of generations so their kids have elders to relate to.  They need people around them that can play the role of their extended family.

People are anxious about the economy.  A few weeks ago I met with Katy Carter, the director of the Almaden Valley Counseling Center, and I asked her what she was seeing in our neighborhood.  The counseling center serves as a genuine community place, open to teens who need someone to talk to and families and parents who need support, so they see the problems firsthand.  Katy said that the recession had taken its toll on families – families who had been foreclosed on and so had to move, with all the upheaval that causes; families who are simply stressed because of someone losing a job and not being able to find another one, or because a parent works enormous hours because they’re afraid of losing their job.  The whole family suffers the economic and emotional toll.  The unemployment rate in San Jose right now is hovering just under 10%.  People are stressed, and so are the kids.  People need hopefulness and a chance to play together; they need time together as a family.

Do you start to see where our strengths might intersect with the needs here?  Time, resources, life experience, open space, community – childcare, tutoring, isolation, play, pastoral support.  Are you getting inspired?

Here’s my last piece of food for thought:  there’s one more big area of need here in our community.  As I’ve pointed out, there are a lot of new people who have moved into the area in the last decade or so, and some of them have moved here from different countries, like China or India.  The makeup of the neighborhoods has changed a lot.  It’s harder to get to know your neighbor.  And there are other reasons for that too.  According to the Nielsen rating company, 2/3 of American households have 3 or more television sets in their households, and the average American spends 4 hours a day watching television.  The average American also spends 32 hours a month online (45-54 year olds spend 39 hours a month).  In the greater San Jose-Santa Clara-Sunnyvale area, 77% of commuters drive alone in their car to work.  I could probably find more statistics to suggest what is already pretty obvious to the naked eye: people don’t spend a lot of time getting to know their neighbors these days.  Our commuting lifestyle, our leisure activities, our transience all contribute to a lack of community with each other.  And in neighborhoods like ours, lack of cultural understanding just makes it that much harder.

I think neighbors need to know their neighbors.  Some of us remember what neighborhoods used to be like; some of us have only heard stories.  But there’s a lot of good in those old neighborhood ways, of people looking out for each other and kids playing together.  The church could help neighbors know each other.  We could host conversations and events that help people from different cultures understand each other.  We could provide a place of common ground for people who come from very different walks of life.  But this will mean us getting to know people who are different from ourselves.  It will mean educating ourselves and learning about others.  Are we willing?  I hope so – but I don’t know yet.  You tell me.

Ultimately, all of what I’ve just said about the needs people have in our neighborhood are just guesses.  Educated, statistically based guesses, but still guesses.  As one person pointed out to me last week, we really don’t know what people need until we ask them.  There are ways of doing that, intentional focused community-organizing kinds of methods.  We’ll look into those as we go forward.  But I want to encourage you to start asking now.  Ask the neighbors you’re already friendly with.  Then ask the ones you haven’t met yet.  Host a block party and go door to door to invite neighbors over.  Bring the information back here and share it.  And let’s go, let’s say yes and go, to work in the vineyard to bring God’s mercy to all.

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,
[Read more ...]]]> 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, competing with other churches to attract folks to come to them.  You can’t just sit there and expect people to come.   This has led churches into all kinds of attempts to get people to come, from better signage to jazzier worship music to cooler Sunday Schools.  Some of it has worked and some of it hasn’t.  Underlying it all is the anxiety of the marketplace, the anxiety of scarcity.  Somebody else is winning.  Somebody else is getting the people.  Why aren’t they coming here?  What are we doing wrong?

When I studied in England I saw a different model of church.  There the Church of England is still the established church, and as such it is the default for people who want to go to church.  Many do not go to church at all; some choose to go to another denomination, or to a Catholic church; increasingly, many are of another faith and worship elsewhere.  But for most folks, church means the neighborhood Anglican church.  And the churches see themselves as the church of the neighborhood.  A parish is not a congregation of people who worship on Sunday; it’s the geographical boundaries of an area.  St Michael’s in Summertown, Oxford, where I did my field placement, is a geographical location.  People who live within the boundaries of the parish may or may not come to church there on a Sunday – most do not.  But the church understands its role there to be the cure of all souls in its parish – old language that means it has responsibility for the welfare and well-being of people around it, whether they come to worship or not.  And in times of crisis, people in the parish know they have the church to turn to – even if they rarely think of it on a Sunday morning, they go there when their mother has died, or when they are in financial desperation, or when they have nowhere else to turn.  Churches still fret over Sunday attendance, and the overall health of the Church of England, but at some basic level, parishes do not exist to get people to church on Sunday.  Their mission is more than that.

It’s been nine months since I began with you at ECA. Since then I’ve gotten to know and love all of you and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the past, the present and the future of this congregation. One thing I have noticed is that there tends to be a lot of anxiety about the future, why the church doesn’t seem to be growing and why things feel so different from the way they felt back when the church was full of the families moving into this new neighborhood. I have been in several situations where a casual dinner table conversation suddenly turns intense.  What are we going to do to get people to come?  Why is our Sunday School so small?  What are you going to do about it?  Everybody’s blood pressure goes up and no one touches their dessert.  We love this place.  We don’t want to see it die.

Sometimes it’s felt like folks are looking for the magic bullet that will suddenly cause ECA to start growing and filling up with the families who live here now. I don’t have that magic bullet. But as I think about the future of ECA, I keep returning in my mind to the idea of the parish church I just talked about.  I think that the key to ensuring that this church thrives for many years to come is to serve those who aren’t here.  I can’t promise that by reaching out to our community we will suddenly burst our seams and overflow with pledging units. But I do know that thinking and acting like a parish church is what we’re called to do in the gospel. It’s good for the community around us, and it’s good for us.  What is my vision for ECA?  It’s to make it a true parish church.

The gospel today gives a great parable for us.  There is a vineyard that needs work.  It needs so much work that the owner can come back over and over again to the marketplace and hire more laborers, all the way through the day.  And whether those laborers work all day or an hour, the owner of the vineyard has enough to pay them, each the same.  There’s plenty of work to go around, and there is plenty of compensation for doing it.  God’s mercy is more than enough.  Everyone gets their share.

The parable argues against our anxiety, our fear of scarcity.  There are plenty of mission opportunities in the neighborhood around us – unlimited opportunities.  The needs are great.  We’ll find a way to make a difference.  And there is enough reward for everyone who labors.  For everything we do, we will gain ourselves.  People come to a church that is active and engaged in its community.  Reaching out more will draw more people to us.  So on the one hand, we don’t need to be anxious.

On the other hand, the parable gives us a challenge.  The work is there to be done; God’s looking for people to do it.  We can’t just sit here and expect the harvest to happen.  If people don’t know what we have to offer them, there’s no reason for them to come looking to us for help.  And if we aren’t aware of what they need, we won’t be offering them anything useful anyway.

The 2010 census data is being released, and with some fishing around, we can now learn some real facts about who does live in our geographical parish.  This week I looked at eight census tracts, that cover an area that about equals the zip code 95120.  There are a little over 38000 people in this area.  63% of them are white.  29% of them are Asian, mostly Chinese, with a smaller number of South Asian Indians, Koreans, and other groups.  Over a quarter of them are under the age of 18.  Half of them are between the ages of 35 and 64. 15% of them are 65 and over.  Most of them live in families of 3 or more.  Some of the tracts, like the one I live in in the rectory, are 40% or higher Asian.  Those tracts also have younger people:  there the percentages are more like 12% 65 and over, and 28-29% under 18. These are the tracts near the schools, Williams and Graystone elementary schools, which are both known as good schools – white and Asian families want to have their children in a good school.  People still move here for the same reasons they’ve always moved here.  In age and family makeup, the neighborhood is like what it was 30 years ago.  In race and ethnic background, the neighborhood has changed a lot.

If our church reflected our neighborhood, then, we would be one-third Asian, two-thirds white.  Half of us would be parents, aged 35-64.  Over a quarter of us would be children under 18.  Only 15% of us would be over 65.  This is not what our church looks like on Sunday morning.  Maybe this makes you anxious.  It doesn’t have to.

Here’s the thing:  If what we were here for was to preserve ECA, then it would make us anxious.  If what was most important to us was to have things just as they used to be when your kids were still in the youth group, this would be upsetting.  If what we cared about most of all was preserving a kind of museum piece, the Episcopal Church in Almaden in 1991, then we could all break out in a cold sweat.  But here’s something Nolan Redman said to me when we spoke a few weeks ago.  Nolan was rector of this church from 1986 to 2002.  He said, “One of the great things about ECA was that it was so young and new.  You never heard anyone say, ‘But we’ve always done it this way.’  Everything was possible.”

He’s still right.  Everything is possible.  Because what is really most important to this community of ECA is not preserving the past or keeping things how they’ve always been.  What is most important to this community is loving others.  Growing together in Christ.  Welcoming and being welcomed.  You do all these things really well – not perfectly, but well.  You get the fundamentals.  And no matter what age or what race or what ethnic background people come from, they need these things.  People need to love and be loved.  People need to welcome and be welcomed.   People need to come to know God and to follow the ways of Jesus.

This is our mission.  Not to get every one of those 38000 people here into the pews on Sunday, but to reach out to them.  To get to know people who aren’t here.  To find out what they need.  To ask how we can serve them.  They’re God’s vineyard, just as much as we are.  We’re all of us the laborers, and whether we founded this church 44 years ago or we’re just coming here today we have a job to do, God’s mercy to spread, God’s mercy to have for ourselves.  In the next few weeks I’ll be talking more about what I think we can do.  I invite you to think about it as well.  It’s good news – it’s the gospel for us today.  Amen.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 10^th 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 king an absurdly huge amount of money is forgiven his debt when the king takes pity on him.  That same slave turns around and refuses to forgive the much smaller debt a fellow slave owes him.   He’s thrown into prison and tortured for his hardheartedness.  The message:  We’re supposed to forgive.

Just to make it extra crystal clear, it helps to know the amounts in question.  The first slave owes his king 10,000 talents.  A “talent” is a measure of weight, close to about 130 lbs., which could be used for gold and silver. In monetary terms the talent had to do with a weight of (most likely) silver, and was roughly equal to about 15 years worth of wages for the typical worker.  10,000 talents, then, is about 150,000 years worth of income.  How on earth a slave could come to owe this much is not explained.  Meanwhile, a denarius is a small silver coin that was roughly the daily wage for the typical worker. 100 denarii, then, is 100 days’ wages – still a significant debt, but one that’s more reasonable. 
One talent is equal to 5,475 denarii.  So the comparison is, a debt of 100 denarii is not forgiven; a debt of 54,750,000 denarii is.  The first slave would rather throw his fellow slave in jail than forgive him 100 coins; the king – or in the meaning of the parable, God – holds the slave’s life as more precious than 54,750,000 coins.   The point is:  We are forgiven so much – we must ourselves forgive also.

Forgiveness was not in the air after the events of 9/11.  There was a brief period of confusion and loss, and then very quickly the desire for revenge took over, with a lot of nationalistic patriotism and eagerness for military action.  Suggestions of forgiveness and self-analysis were labeled unpatriotic, and the national argument got pretty bitter for a while.  But again, that seemed to fade over time.  When bin Laden was finally killed earlier this year, the response was subdued.  Did we forgive?  Or did we just kind of move on and lose interest?

One of the most amazing stories of forgiveness happened after the period of apartheid in South Africa came to an end.  The government formed a Truth & Reconciliation Commission as a way of healing the nation – providing a forum in which perpetrators could tell the truth of what they had done, with the promise of forgiveness rather than retribution from their victims.  It offered a place for witness, so that those who had suffered terrible crimes were not left to bear it in silence.  Instead of assuming that wounds would heal on their own, the commission offered an intentional way to cleanse them.  It wasn’t a perfect system, but it did offer a chance for a whole people to come to terms with a horrific past.  Similar efforts happened in Rwanda after the genocide, in Liberia, in Sierra Leone, and other places living in the wake of terrible things.  Because when you are living next door to people who killed your family members, that’s when forgiveness – and moving on – becomes essential.  There’s not any other way of going on.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the chair of South Africa’s commission.  Several of those who knew Tutu said that he aged visibly, hearing the horror stories day in and day out.  But he said this in response to his experience:  ‘Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously and not minimizing it; drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire existence. It involves trying to understand the perpetrators and so have empathy, to try to stand in their shoes and appreciate the sort of pressures and influences that might have conditioned them…By forgiveness we are saying here is a chance to make a new beginning.’  It’s not easy work.  But there’s not any other way of going on.

Sometimes we make Christian forgiveness out to be something kind of weak and passive – being a doormat instead of fighting back.  But true forgiveness takes a certain amount of strength to really offer.  It’s not saying, oh well, it doesn’t matter what happened.  It requires us to be honest about the hurt, to tell the story, to investigate it deeply enough within our selves that we know just where the hurt really lies.  It takes bravery to say this aloud to those who have to hear it.  And then it takes the effort of letting it go – of looking at it clearly, and then setting it down and moving on, so that new life can happen for us.  It takes work to do this.

But ironically, so does not forgiving.  Have you ever practiced not forgiving?  Have you ever held onto something, a grudge, anger against someone else, for a long long time?  Sometimes doing that takes work – work to keep stoking your feelings and riling up your animosity toward that other person or group.  Over time things tend to fade, but if we don’t let them fade, they stay just as bitter as they were at the beginning.  Sometimes hurt just stays intense on its own, if the violation is terrible enough.  But whether we try to keep the flames fanned or not, the anger and the hurt take so much out of us.  Holding onto hurt holds us captive, it clouds everything else, it turns all the water bitter.  It takes more out of us not to forgive than it does out of the one who offended against us.

But more than this, what the parable points us to is that what undergirds our ability to forgive is the vast overwhelming generosity of the forgiveness that we are offered – the king forgives the slave a debt that is so big it defies belief.  It is such a huge piece of forgiveness that it points up all the more how stingy the slave is at forgiving another.  The king offers the slave his life – rather than selling him and his family to pay the debt, they are released.  The freedom of a new start, the releasing of the burden – it’s an enormous gift of new life, of new hope where there was before only burden, obligation, and slavery.

When we can accept this kind of forgiveness, then we are free.  Free to forgive others without losing out ourselves.  Forgiving another is not the same as pretending it never happened – it doesn’t take us back to how things were before.  But it begins us anew, allowing us to set down the burden of hurt and bitterness and start over again with love, the love that we are offered ourselves.

The picture on the front of today’s bulletin was one of the potent symbols that came out of 9/11.  One of the first rescue workers at the World Trade Center came upon these steel girders in the shape of a cross, just as he was praying to God for some sense of God’s presence in the horror.  They set up this cross and it became a kind of chapel in the rubble for a time.  There’s been some controversy about what to do with this cross, such a Christian symbol in a place where people of many faiths and no faith are trying to find meaning.  But setting that aside, to me it’s a symbol of new life.  The rubble was not gone; the buildings were not rebuilt; people’s lives didn’t go back to how they were before.  But there in the midst of them is the cross, the empty cross, a sign of God’s love, of forgiveness and the releasing of debt – some of Jesus’ last words on the cross were, Father, forgive them.  And from that cross came new life, a new start, a new beginning – the scars of the crucifixion still there on Jesus’ body, but Jesus alive in a new way.

I don’t know if any of you still carry burdens from 9/11 that need to be released.  This anniversary might find you still angry, unable to come to terms with those who perpetrated the attacks.  But I know that we each of us have burdens that need letting go, things we have not forgiven or allowed ourselves to be forgiven for.  How many times must we forgive? asks Peter of Jesus.  As much as you yourself have been forgiven, is the answer.  Allow the burden to be lifted and be released – and release others and yourselves from the burden you’re carrying around.  Let new life happen and let go of the old.  It’s the way to a new start for you and for the world.  Amen.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 Jim, ‘That’s funny, I run, and I’m not really Type A.  Well, maybe a little bit.  What do you think?’  Jim just started laughing.  ‘Of course you’re Type A!’ he said.  I was shocked.

I come by it honestly.  My mom is one who was always controlled by things to be done.  If I sat and read a book, she would be sure to walk by and say something about ‘shouldn’t you be getting your homework done/cleaning your room/doing your chores first?’  as she carried another load of laundry downstairs.  For her, leisure and rest were things you had after everything on your list was crossed off.  And everyone else had to wait too – if we were all ready to leave for a family day out and she hadn’t yet unloaded the dishwasher, then everyone had to wait till she unloaded the dishwasher.  Because who else was going to do it? she would say.

So there I was, Type A Takes on the Wilderness.  This is not the way I want to be.  I used to be more contemplative.  I used to love sitting and doing nothing and staring at the view in silence.  Somewhere along the way I’ve lost this.  Not to blame everything on my kids, but I think parenting has been a part of it.  Every day is a long list of chores and tasks, from the moment we get up till the moment we fall into bed at the end of the day.  It takes a lot of work to push small children through the day and do our own work as well.  And then we go backpacking and it’s the same – get the stuff packed into the pack, hoist it on, walk walk walk, pick a campsite, set up the tent, filter the water, cook the dinner, fall into bed exhausted.

I’m telling this on myself, but I bet some of you know what I’m talking about.  This is our way now.  Go, go, go.  For those of you who are retired, you may have happily escaped this – but I’ve heard from more than one retired person that they feel busier than they did when they were working.  For those of you working, or with kids still at home, you’re stuck in it.  There’s a long list of stuff to be done, and you’re the one who has to do it.  There’s no time to stop.  Keep going, because you’ve got to get all the way to the end.

This weekend is Labor Day weekend – traditionally the last bit of leisure before kicking back into high gear for the fall.  There’s a pro-union bumper sticker that says:  Support Labor – the folks who brought you the weekend.  Working people didn’t used to get time off – it wasn’t part of the culture.  There was the leisure class, and then there were those who worked to keep it all going, and they never got a break.  Now the ‘leisure class’ is the busiest of all, as if being busy is a sign of status.  Time off is quickly disappearing from our culture again, thanks to smartphones and email and expectations of constant availability. But this weekend is just a little different.  We honor workers by taking a day off, having barbecues, hanging out.  It’s paradoxical, but I think it could be exactly what we need.

When we lived in New York I had more exposure to Orthodox Jewish culture and tradition.  One of the things I learned quickly was that if I visited someone in the hospital on a Saturday, I should not get on the Sabbath elevator.  That elevator would stop at every floor, so that a Jew observing the Sabbath would not have to violate their observance by pushing a button.  If you wanted to get to the 11^th floor, say, it would take a long time on that elevator.  It sounds a little silly.  But I find a lot to respect about the idea of truly taking the Sabbath.  It’s there in the 10 commandments, after all:  honor the Sabbath day and keep it holy.  By some extra work and attention to detail, Orthodox families are able to do that, to spend their Friday evenings and Saturdays together, worshiping, resting, breaking bread together, and enjoying each other.  It’s an ideal that in practice has problems – the only way families can observe Sabbath strictly is for the women to do an enormous amount of work on Friday before sundown, and sometimes for a Gentile friend – a goy – to do things for them that they are prohibited from doing, like turning on the heat.  But the ideal is still a good one.  And it’s something that we’ve mostly lost in our Type A culture.

That whole first reading we heard from Exodus is about setting aside time.  It’s the rules for keeping the Passover, the essential feast that reminds the Israelites of God’s action in freeing them from slavery.  The event is so central to who they are and who they understand God to be that they are commanded to remember it throughout the generations.  God is the one who frees and delivers them.  By eating the Passover lamb and retelling the story again, they reconnect with that central fact.  If they don’t set the time aside as a feast, they’ll begin to forget who they are and what God has done for them.  That’s how we humans are.

And that’s the point of Sabbath.  The intention is that we set time aside from the to-do list.  We set the time aside to focus on God and on each other, spending the time in prayer and in companionship with others rather than on our smartphones and career goals.  And we do it not just when everything else is done, when we have a few minutes left over – we structure the rest of our lives so that we can observe Sabbath, making it a priority instead of our own personal work and tasks and ways of filling our time.  We inconvenience ourselves so that we remember that God is the source of our being – not our job, not our friends, not tasks crossed off a list.

It’s the time of year when we need to remember that.  The fall is gearing up.  School has started, vacation is over, meetings and events are accumulating on the calendar.  September is too busy, so we put things off till October.  And then October fills up.  And then it’s November, and the holidays begin.  And before you know it, we’re in January and wondering what happened.  It’s a paradoxical time to remind ourselves to take Sabbath – it’s an easier sell in Lent, or in summertime, when time and intention combine to make things slow down just a little bit.  But it’s just when life feels busiest that we need to take Sabbath.  It’s now most of all that we need to set the time aside to worship God, to pray, to rest, to spend real time with others.  To remember what Jesus says in today’s gospel reading, that where two or three are gathered, there I am in the midst of them.  Here he is.  Settle into his presence.  It will ground you in everything else you do this week.

So I encourage you to make this Labor Day something different.  Think of it as not just the end of the summer, but the beginning of the fall.  Take a day off; take a Sabbath to set the tone for your fall.  Instead of focusing on all the things on your calendar, take time to sit and look at the view.  Pray.  Share a meal with people you love.  And use this as a template for doing things differently this fall, so that in all you do, you remember who you are – God’s children – and what God has done for you.

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.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 send her away.  She’s not one of them and she has nothing to do with them, and they don’t want her hanging around and shouting after them.  And Jesus, at first, seems to agree with them.  Without turning to her, he says, I’m here for the lost sheep of Israel.  I’m not here for you.  She kneels before him and pleads with him.  Still he seems to resist, saying, It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.  The children are the people of Israel – you Canaanites are dogs.  The woman won’t back down.  Even the dogs get the crumbs, she says.  And then suddenly Jesus relents, praising her for her great faith and healing her daughter instantly.

Well.  There’s a problem here, in case you didn’t notice.  We’re used to the idea of the disciples not understanding what Jesus is about, of them shoving people aside and rudely barring their way to the Savior.  They do this with children and families, they do this with the hungry thousands, they do this with people who are trying to act in Jesus’ name and anoint Jesus’ feet without joining their group.  But in every one of those cases Jesus rebukes the disciples and welcomes the ones trying to come to him.  In this story, he doesn’t.  He refuses to engage with the woman.  He calls her a dog.  Until finally she persuades him, and then he embraces her completely.  Does Jesus not realize himself who he’s come for?  Has he himself misunderstood his vocation up to this point?  Or does he do this all as show, a way of teaching the disciples around him that his mission extends beyond the people of Israel?

I think that how you interpret this has to do with what you believe about Jesus.  If you see more of his human side, it makes sense that he too would have to learn what he’s here for, that he might have his mind changed by this woman.  Born into the culture of a 1^st century Palestinian Jew, he might not have realized that Gentiles could be part of God’s dream as well.  On the other hand, if you believe Jesus is completely in touch with his divinity from the very start, that explanation is problematic – he must already be intending to welcome this woman, and this exchange with her is simply a teaching tool for his listeners.  We don’t really know.  There’s a long narrative in scripture about who is and who is not part of God’s people – through the prophets and the later writings you can see the idea emerging that all people are part of God’s world, not just the Hebrews.  That idea gets more clearly defined with the coming of Jesus, and especially with the spreading of the gospel after Jesus’ resurrection.  Wherever this gospel story falls in the progression of that idea, what stands out is what comes at the end of it:  Jesus responds to this woman with amazement and healing.  She’s the only one in the gospel whose faith is described as ‘great’ – and she is an outsider, not part of Jesus’ people, not part of the group.  Not, that is, until the group realizes that their boundaries have become too narrow, that God’s mercy extends to all, not simply to them.  The welcome is greater than they realized.

I wonder what this means for us.  The church throughout history has had a mixed track record with welcome.  Like the disciples, we’ve long had difficulty really welcoming children and families.  We’ve turned away people who are hungry and needy.  We’ve gotten annoyed with people who presume to claim Jesus but who don’t come to church, or don’t come to the right kind of church.  And we have barred the way for people whose need for healing overflows into the cry, ‘Lord, have mercy.’  Many times.

But we haven’t usually done it maliciously.  We’re needy too – needy for God’s love, needy for time with friends and community, needy for quiet and just one hour of no one asking us to do anything.  We don’t set out to be unwelcoming or to bar the way.  But it happens.  People don’t always feel welcome in church.  Maybe because they have kids with them and they’re worried about the noise they make.  Maybe because they can’t figure out which book they’re supposed to use of the 4-5 different options in front of them in the pew.  Maybe because they couldn’t find the front door when they first approached this odd-shaped building.  Maybe because they weren’t sure they could receive communion if they hadn’t been baptized in this church.  Maybe because they haven’t been to any church for a while, and they wonder if God isn’t really kind of annoyed with them because of it.  Maybe because they’ve been coming to this church for a long time, but they’ve never quite felt like they fit in with others here.

And so I want to turn this question around.  Instead of miring ourselves in a guilt-fest about what we aren’t doing right and how we could do better, I want us each to think about our own experience.  What is it like for you to come to church?  You might feel very welcome here.  You might have found here something that breaks open for you God’s love and community.  Then again, you might not.  You might be new, you might be a long-timer, but either way you might be having the same feelings, of something that is getting in the way of your truly feeling welcome.  Welcome in this church building, welcome in this community, welcome to God’s table, welcome to Jesus’ arms.  I want to know what it is that’s making that so.

So in church today I had people answer this question:  What makes you feel welcome here?  What makes you feel unwelcome?  When it came time for passing the plates for the offertory, I had folks put their responses in the plates.  If you’re reading this now, you can email me instead – send it to kflexer@eca-sj.org.   Let’s see where we are, on this particular day in August, with God’s welcome.

Because one thing is clear from the witness of all of scripture, and from the ministry of Jesus in particular:  God bids us welcome.  No matter who we are, no matter what we’ve done or where we’ve come from or where we’re going, God welcomes us.  People can sometimes get in the way of that, by setting up barriers to belonging or by telling us that God really doesn’t welcome us.  But God does not.  When we cry, Lord, have mercy, God hears us.  God’s mercy is big enough.  May we in the church find our mercy to be big enough as well.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 faith, and starts to drown.  Jesus says, how come you have such little faith?  And so the moral is, have more faith.  And if you don’t, or if you have problems mustering that feeling of confidence, then…try harder, and have more faith.  And so off we go, feeling like a failure again.  The good news of the gospel.

But, the commentary pointed out, that’s not the only way to interpret this story.  Jesus doesn’t stand there on the waves watching Peter drown, saying, you should have had more faith.  He reaches out and catches Peter.  Jesus does for Peter what Peter can’t do for himself.  It’s a very different way of reading the message.  Instead of being about us, just maybe this gospel is about God.

The Christian faith believes that Jesus is the full revelation of God to humanity.  What is true about Jesus is also true about God.  And so stories about Jesus are stories about God.  And there’s actually something pretty wonderful being said about God’s nature with us in this story.  Jesus has just fed the crowds with the five loaves and two fish – the story we heard last week, and a story that itself seems pretty key to who Jesus is and what he is revealing about God.  The message there is, God feeds us, and there is always more than enough.  That crowd, you might recall, came and found Jesus at a time when he was trying to be alone.  He had just heard the news of John the Baptist’s death, and had gone away to a deserted place – to grieve, maybe, to deal with his own fears for what fate he might meet, maybe – but everyone had followed him and crowded around him anyway.  Instead of sending them away, Jesus had taught them and fed them.  And now he’s gone off by himself again, sending the disciples off in a boat and going to pray alone.  The disciples have met with some trouble, however, with a storm rising and waves battering the boat, so Jesus comes to them – to be with them in their trouble, perhaps, to save them from the storm, perhaps.  The disciples are scared when they see him on the water, so Jesus immediately tells them, don’t be afraid, it’s me.  His first response is to calm them and comfort them, even while doing something completely freaky right in front of them.  And Peter’s question to Jesus shows that Peter knows something about him already:  If it is you, command me to walk on the water too.  If you’re really Jesus, you’ll ask me to do something totally risky and audacious and impossible.  And Jesus does so:  Come.  Peter has enough faith in Jesus to step out of the boat, but then when he falters, Jesus catches him.  He does gently chide Peter for his fear, but I think his question to Peter about doubt is really rhetorical:  he knows well that Peter, that all human beings, have a hard time with faith.  But that’s no hindrance to his rescuing Peter, and into the boat they go, and the storm is calmed.

Jesus is revealing a God with a whole range of attributes here.  He’s revealing a God who is completely ‘other,’ alien from us, completely freaky and amazing and beyond our understanding – he can walk on water, and calm the storm. And Jesus is also revealing a God who cares for us, who comes to us in distress and calls out to calm our fears – don’t be afraid, it’s me.  And Jesus is revealing a God who calls us out of our comfort zone, into things that are big and risky and scary – step out onto the water, in the storm, and walk.  And Jesus is revealing a God who reaches out for us, who does for us what we can’t do for ourselves and saves us when we can’t trust like we should.  And all of these things are true about God.

I think we have a hard time holding all of these things together.  Each of us has some image of God in our head, conscious or unconscious.  I wonder, what does yours look like?  If you were to describe God to someone now, what would you say?  Is your picture of God comforting, nurturing, a strong arm around you when you are sad and alone?  Is your picture of God stern, demanding things of you that are hard to do?  Is your God totally beyond understanding and image, more of a force than any kind of personality you can relate to?  Is God a mighty rescuer, saving you from your own worst self?

God is all of that.  We make those things out to be contradictory.  We develop schools of theology that lean one way or another into who we think God is.  And related to who we say God is, we draw up ideas for what we’re supposed to do and be.  We’ve argued over this a lot in human history.  We’ve even fought some wars.  There’s a children’s book called Old Turtle, where all the different creatures of the world weigh in on who they think God is – and each of them thinks God is a little like them.  The rocks think God is strong and silent, the birds think God sings, the dolphins think God is all fluid movement, and so on.  And then they start arguing with each other over which one of them is right, until Old Turtle, the wise creature, calls them to stop.  Old Turtle tells them that God is all of those things and more, and all the other creatures gradually realize she’s right.  And then their job is to tell the human people of what they know, so they’ll stop fighting over it too.

In the world of theology it’s called the doctrine of God.  But it’s not as abstract as it sounds.  Who we think God is matters.  It’s not at all irrelevant to our ordinary life.  Our image of God comes out of our own experience and need, what we have seen of goodness in the world around us.  It shifts and changes depending on what is going on in our lives at a deep level.  My sense of God as a parent became much stronger once I became a parent, for example – before, God for me had more to do with mountains and wind, where I went in my time alone.  And our image of God shapes how we make decisions and how we relate to others.   If God is judgmental, we’re more inclined to judge others also; if God is forgiving, we give others more slack.  And so on.

So in a way, the story of today’s gospel does come around again to us and our faith.  But rather than chiding us for the amount or quality of our faith, the story offers an invitation to expand it.  It’s an offer to blow up some of the constricting ideas about God that might be keeping us from deeper relationship with God – the ideas that say, God must act in this way, since God is like this – God would never do that.  Maybe our need for God to be always comforting is limiting how God can challenge us into something new.  Or our image of God as completely mysterious is keeping us from knowing Jesus, God with skin on and things to say.  Or – and this is sometimes my temptation – our sense of God’s expectation of us – and our failure to live up to that expectation – keep us from realizing how deeply God loves us for who we are.

The images of God in scripture are many and various, just as they are in our own experience.  If our desire is for real relationship with the real God, not just the one in our head, then here’s our chance to go deeper.  It’s a call into what might feel like uncharted waters for us – or to use the story’s image, it’s a call onto those waters.  There is so much to know about God.

Here’s how this becomes practical.  If you find yourself thinking, I can’t pray about that, I can’t talk to God about that because it’s not that important and God is above that – try challenging it.  Talk to God about the little and the ordinary.  Or if you think, I can’t really know anything about God because God is so vast, I’m just a tech guy, I don’t know anything about theology – try challenging that.  Ask God for help in getting to know him, read about God in the Bible, tell someone what you think about God.  Or if you think, God’s got nothing to do with what I buy or how I vote, God’s just for church – try challenging that.  Read the lives of the saints and what they did to follow Jesus, ask God what God wants of you and listen to the answer.  God is always more than the current picture we’re operating with, always drawing us on into deeper truth.  Don’t settle into a plateau:  let the real God call your name.  Step out and see – if you falter, God will catch you.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 – in some churches these are brought forward from the congregation as an offering, but here we simply set the table with what we have.  Then the priest offers the Eucharistic prayer, which is a prayer of thanksgiving, called the Great Thanksgiving in fact (the word Eucharist simply means thanksgiving).  In the prayer we thank God for all God does for us and we ask God’s blessing on the bread and wine and on us.  Then the priest breaks the bread, remembering Christ’s body broken on the cross.  And then we all share the food.

Here I need to talk a little bit about sacraments.  The official church definition of sacrament is an outward and physical sign of an inward and spiritual grace.  As such, the physical experience is basically a pointer toward the spiritual experience.  And for many reasons, much of what we do physically has been scaled down a lot in church practice:  the most obvious example is that most churches don’t baptize with full immersion into water, but with a little sprinkle of water on the head – even though it began with stepping into the River Jordan, it’s become just a few drops of water.  For logistical and practical reasons, as well as the comfort level of many people, things have changed from the way the early church did them.  But the fact remains that we are incarnate people, here in our physical bodies.  What we do physically does have connection to what we experience spiritually.  And some of the ways church practice has lessened the physical experience have also lessened the spiritual experience.  Eucharist is one of those places where sometimes the ritual part gets in the way.  It’s a ritual meal – but sometimes it can get so ritual that we fail to make any connection between it and an actual meal.  Wafers don’t seem much like bread, and a tiny taste of wine from a dipped wafer isn’t much like enjoying a glass.  We can get a little magical thinking about the whole experience, as if the little wafer has mystical powers beyond its small size and cardboard taste.  And yes, sometimes it does have such power – sometimes despite how small our physical experience is, we can have an overwhelming spiritual experience.  But sometimes it takes extra effort to get there.

In my last congregation we experimented with some services where we actually ate a meal as part of the worship, what some scholars think the early church services were really like.  In the church we like to eat together, hence all the fellowship dinners and coffee hours – and it’s powerful to eat together and worship all at the same time, and make that connection of what we’re doing clearer.  We might try that here at ECA on occasion as well, to make that connection for ourselves.  But there are simpler ways to up the physical experience side of it: we’ve had some conversation about using real bread rather than wafers for communion (and we’ve done that in our JV services this year).  We’re trying out wafers with a little more heft in the meantime.  People at ECA have already weighed in to me on their preferences in communion wine.  How you take the wine is a personal choice, but I think that drinking from the cup rather than intincting gives you a little more taste of actual wine, another way to make the symbols more real for yourself.

So our way of experiencing the physical part of sacraments matters.  And the words we say around it matter.  Sometimes our prayers and words can make it all so ritual that we lose the meaning for ourselves.  I talked last week about an experience I had of worship in Taize – it was all the essentials of a worship service, but stripped down and slowed down, instead of filled up with words.  Sometimes the prayers of our Prayer Book tradition are like perfect river stones, worn smooth with use over the years and fitting our needs exactly, with much more meaning than anything we could make up ourselves.  And sometimes they can be barriers, because the language is foreign to us – maybe it’s too old-fashioned, or too formal – or it feels like it doesn’t include us and our experience – maybe it uses only male terms for God and humanity, or includes references to a creation that looks nothing like the environment we live in.  Or the prayers can be barriers simply because we’ve heard them too many times before, and we’ve long since ceased to really listen to them.  There’s a wealth of resources in the Episcopal Church and in the larger Anglican church of prayer texts to use, some of it very well written and meaningful and some of it less so.  We’ll keep using some of those from time to time – remember that what speaks to you may not speak to the person next to you, just as what you find a barrier may be an invitation to the person next to you.  That can shift and change in each of us as well over time, depending on what’s happening in our heart and prayer lives.

Ultimately why I think we return again and again to the Eucharist, in whatever form and with whatever words, is that its meaning is so central to our faith.  God feeds us.  God gives God’s very self to nourish us.  God showed us how to live in Jesus, who broke bread with his friends just as we do with one another.  Take, bless, break, give.  It’s what we do when we share a meal.  It’s what God did in Jesus.  And it’s also what is meant to be done with our lives:  we offer them to God, who takes them, blesses them, breaks them apart (maybe in ways that we don’t like), and shares them with others, all to nourish us and others.  In other words, what we do in worship every week is a mirror, or is meant to be a mirror, of what we do in our lives.  It is itself sacramental, all of it – physical actions and words spoken that express and nourish our experience of God.  So as we experience it today, let it sink into you a bit more – hear the words, taste the wafer and the wine, open yourself again to God’s love for you.

Why do we worship?

Elements of our service:

That’s the basics.  Everything else is frosting and tradition.

But one good principle of worship is that if we don’t know why we’re doing
[Read more ...]]]> 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 – 1^st 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 3^rd 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 what we’re doing, then we shouldn’t do it.   So here we go, learning.  And as we learn, we‘ll find that there are a few things we do need to let go of.  As well as things we should embrace!

Worship should energize and inspire us.  To do this, there are a number of things to hold in balance:

• It should be familiar enough that we aren’t constantly wondering what’s coming next, and different and fresh enough that we come away with new understandings of God in the world, and so we don’t settle into a meaningless rut.  So we have a set liturgical form, but it changes by season, with different prayers and words, different music, to reflect the theme of the liturgical season:  penitential for Lent, joyful for Eastertide, growing and learning in the season after Pentecost, waiting and preparing in Advent, and joyful again in Christmas.
• There should be time for quiet and contemplation balanced with joyful praise and song.  It’s public worship, yes, but that means also being quiet together.  Some of the most astounding worship I’ve experienced happened at Taizé in France:  a church with 5000 people sitting on the floor, sitting in silence for 10 minutes together before breaking into chant and song.  It made me realize how wordy our worship usually is, and how powerful it is with few words.  We need to recapture some of that quiet together in our worship – one way I’d suggest is that we refrain from chatting during the time before the service begins, or during the offertory music. We also might incorporate periods of actual silence from time to time.  And we’re hoping that with our new music director, our music, and particularly our singing as a congregation, can start getting a little more joyful and robust.
• Learning should be balanced with worshiping.  We’ve started using the word formation in the church instead of education, realizing that everything we do in church is forming us as Christians.  Not just classes and Bible study, but worship and song and fellowship and service, all form us and shape us, shape our faith and how we show our faith to others.  We all have things to learn – we listen to scriptures we might not be familiar with every week, and the sermon should help us understand them better – as well as how we can live out those ideas in our lives.  But if it’s all teaching, it can get a little heady – partly why I’m spreading this instruction out over two weeks.  And that’s also why we keep those posture changes going – it’s not like sitting in a lecture hall, it’s moving and changing our bodies in response to what we’re doing with our minds and hearts.  That’s also why some folks choose to make the sign of the cross or bow at certain points during the service – they’re ways to bring home physically (and we are incarnate people) what we’re hearing and thinking.
• We’re balancing worship that suits and reflects the community here, while also welcoming the newcomer.  When we’ve been part of a church for a while, we can forget how strange worship looks to someone who’s not in a church.  Rituals are less familiar in our culture today – I’ve become very aware of that in working with people to plan their weddings over the years, certainly.  People don’t know what makes good ritual or why to do it.  But even if we do ritual regularly, we can lack understanding about what it means – which is why we’re doing this instruction.  My liturgy professor in seminary taught us by way of stories and anecdotes.  One story he told was on himself, that as he took from the chalice of wine, he held it up in front of him in what felt to him like a reverent way.  Finally one of his parishioners told him, “When you do that, it looks like you’re saying, ‘Cheers!’”  His point in doing it was not getting across.  Sometimes what we do lacks a point, and is completely opaque to a newcomer.  When that is the case, we have to make changes.  That’s why we’re removing the gospel procession, because it doesn’t really make any sense in this space.  Likewise, maybe our worship bulletins made sense to us before, but they weren’t very clear to newcomers.  That’s why we’ve been trying to change them and fool around with the format. We still have a ways to go.

All of this is like what Jesus said in the gospel reading today – “Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”  To keep telling the story of God means we are constantly bringing together elements from what is old to meet what is new – bringing our tradition and our history to meet the new ways God is speaking in our world today, and the new voices we hear God in.  We don’t discard what is old altogether, for there is so much wisdom in our traditions.  But we also don’t blindly hold to them when their use and meaning has become lost.  Our mission always with our worship is to energize us, strengthen us, equip us to live our lives as Christians in the world, as people who live centered in God and who seek always to love others.  And so we shift and adapt and learn together, and God willing, we grow.

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
[Read more ...]]]> 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 the wheat and the tares is that those who are not part of the Jesus movement are bad seeds, bad from the very beginning.  Bad seeds can’t turn into good ones and weeds can’t turn into wheat.  So there’s nothing we can do about it until God comes and sorts it all out.  You can see where John Calvin got some of his ideas about predestination – the idea that God has chosen only some of humankind for salvation by pure grace.  (It’s not an idea that was only Calvin’s, but he’s the biggest name behind it all.)

The problems with that bit of doctrine, and that interpretation of this parable, are sort of hard to miss.  There are two obvious temptations:  one is to say that well, if evil is simply bad seed sowed by the devil, then there’s not much we can do about it, and we might as well live with it.  No reason to bother making the world a better place or work on making ourselves better people.  That’s all God’s work, not ours, and nothing we do can make anything different.  When this life is all over, I’ll fly away, and then things will be better.

The other temptation is a little nastier.  There are children of the kingdom and there are children of the evil one, and we’re pretty sure we know which is which.  The bad seed people are obvious.  They’re the ones we disagree with, of course.  They’re the ones who cause the problems and commit the crimes.  They’re the ones who don’t pull their weight in society or in our community.  They’re the ones who took my parking place.  Whoever they are, we’re pretty sure we can spot them.  Because of course, we must be the good seeds, not them.  So them, we can go ahead and judge ourselves, because they’re so clearly not us.

Here’s a little explanation of Jesus’ image, things that would have been clear to his listeners but that have gotten lost for us in the translation.  The weeds in the parable are actually a specific plant, what is called darnel, or false wheat.  It’s a plant that looks very much like wheat, and if it were sown among real wheat, the roots underground would be all tangled up together with the wheat.  It would be hard to distinguish it from the wheat, and harder still to pull it up without disturbing the wheat.  At the harvest, however, darnel looks different than real wheat – real wheat’s head grows heavy and droops, while darnel keeps standing upright.  So if you wait till the harvest, it’s more obvious to separate it out, especially when you’re cutting all the wheat anyway.  It’s also important to notice that these weeds don’t seem to do any harm to the wheat – they’re just growing there alongside.

So part of the point of Jesus’s parable seems to be that evil isn’t always recognizable as evil.  It might even look just like the good, in fact.  It takes a great deal of wisdom and discernment to name something as evil, especially when it’s masquerading as the good.  And, Jesus is saying, it takes more wisdom and knowledge than we have to do the same with people – none of us can know the heart of another person, really, and so none of us can know what motivates someone to do what they do.  We can make laws and name consequences for certain behaviors, because we need to structure society somehow.  We should not tolerate actions that harm other people.  But we cannot ultimately say whether a person is good at heart or not.  It’s a problem that drives some people crazy – I remember vividly the face of my theology professor in seminary, when someone suggested that maybe God’s forgiveness could extend even to someone like Hitler.  My professor was Dutch and had lost family members in Hitler’s camps, and he was absolutely enraged that anyone could imagine such a thing.  If we get to heaven and Hitler is there, he said, I’m leaving.  There wasn’t any room to think otherwise for him.

From how I understand Calvin’s ideas of predestination – which, by the way, is only tangentially a doctrine of the Anglican church – I think it was actually intended to be a comfort.  Some of us might feel quite certain that we are the good seed, the children of the kingdom.  Most of us might not be so sure all of the time.  But instead of worrying over our salvation and worth, the doctrine puts it all in God’s hands – it’s not up to us to perfect ourselves, and it’s not up to us to judge others’ perfection – it’s all up to God.  And there is a certain comfort to that part of Jesus’ parable:  leave it, relax, God has it in hand.  Even if right now it seems like evil is getting away with it all, God will put things right in the end.  It’s not up to us to fix the world.

Certainly when you look at the rest of scripture, that theme seems to be echoed.  There are a number of psalms where the writer is crying out to God for justice, and wondering how long before evildoers are brought to account – yet nearly every one of those psalms ends with a statement of faith that God will save, even if it seems to take a long time.  And just about every person God seems to call on in scripture to accomplish a great task doesn’t look much like they’re worthy of it in their own right.  Often they argue with God about that very fact, before God reassures them that it will be God’s power and goodness acting in them that makes their mission possible.  Throughout the summer we’ll be hearing some of the Old Testament stories of people like this – today we heard some of the story of Jacob, one of the patriarchs of Israel.  Besides being a patriarch, Jacob is a trickster and a thief, who in the story we heard last week stole his brother Esau’s birthright.  Yet in today’s story, even this scoundrel on the run has an experience of God and God’s angels in the middle of the wilderness, and hears God telling him that all the people of the earth will be blessed in him and his descendants.  Jacob’s not who we would have picked, but God saw something we would not have.

I think in the end that’s what the message of the parable is about.  It’s a reminder that we don’t know enough to see what God sees.  We don’t know the whole story, we don’t know the inner workings of other people, and we can’t claim to have the authoritative last word on what God is doing in the world and whom God is doing it with.  It’s a strong invitation to humility, to step down from our proud places of certainty and acknowledge that the universe is more complicated than we can understand.  But I don’t think therefore that the parable is an invitation to complacency and laziness.  We do have a charge laid before us:  we’re supposed to live out what it means to be children of the kingdom, and we’re supposed to be making disciples of other people to be children of the kingdom as well.  Which means we need to love other people as God does, always looking in them for what is good – not calculating on and expecting the bad.  It’s not a naïve love:  it understands that the enemy is also at work, everything that is set against God.  But it also allows for people to change, redemption to happen, God’s work to be carried out even when we don’t expect it to.

What this means for us is that we’re not allowed to write people off.  We’re not allowed to roll our eyes and say, well, he’ll never change.  We’re not allowed to be the ultimate judge of the life of another person – a pretty serious argument against capital punishment, among other things.  And we’re not allowed to write ourselves off either, to sit in the place of despair where we think that we’re worthless and unlovable.  Only God knows what is at work in each of our hearts.  ‘Be patient,’ the saying goes, ‘God isn’t finished with me yet.’  If someone has come to mind as you’ve been listening to this – someone in your personal life, or a public figure you have a hard time with, or your own self – then your challenge this week is to love that one.  To pray for them, for God’s work to be done in them and in you.  To trust God’s timing.  And to love.