We’re working our way through this theme of stewardship during Easter season. If you’ve heard me more than once, you should be getting the idea now. Everything we have is of God; we are stewards and caretakers of it, for the good of others. This idea shapes all we do as Christians. We care for creation; we care for each other’s physical well-being; we care for others through our daily work and conversations. Today I want to talk about how we care for ourselves – not in the usual sense of ‘taking time for me’ or eating healthy, but how we steward the specific gifts God has given each of us. Which means we have to think about what gifts we have, where they come from, and how we discern what to do with them.

There are a few different places in scripture, mostly in Paul’s letters, where spiritual gifts, or ‘charismata,’ are listed and named. They range from miraculous gifts like prophecy, healing, the gift of tongues – things we tend to see as obviously charismatic gifts, supernatural and not very common – to gifts like teaching, preaching, and generosity – things that have something to do with our character or our calling. People have tried to collate all the gifts into one list, numbering 25 or so spiritual gifts it is possible to have. But none of the lists in scripture are meant to be the sum total of all spiritual gifts – they just seem to be the ones Paul thinks of in the context of that particular letter. And the Holy Spirit being what it is, most accept that there are more gifts than are in that long list – talents, skills, aptitudes, all of them things that help build
[Read more ...]]]> RCL Year B, 6 Easter

We’re working our way through this theme of stewardship during Easter season. If you’ve heard me more than once, you should be getting the idea now. Everything we have is of God; we are stewards and caretakers of it, for the good of others. This idea shapes all we do as Christians. We care for creation; we care for each other’s physical well-being; we care for others through our daily work and conversations. Today I want to talk about how we care for ourselves – not in the usual sense of ‘taking time for me’ or eating healthy, but how we steward the specific gifts God has given each of us. Which means we have to think about what gifts we have, where they come from, and how we discern what to do with them.

There are a few different places in scripture, mostly in Paul’s letters, where spiritual gifts, or ‘charismata,’ are listed and named. They range from miraculous gifts like prophecy, healing, the gift of tongues – things we tend to see as obviously charismatic gifts, supernatural and not very common – to gifts like teaching, preaching, and generosity – things that have something to do with our character or our calling. People have tried to collate all the gifts into one list, numbering 25 or so spiritual gifts it is possible to have. But none of the lists in scripture are meant to be the sum total of all spiritual gifts – they just seem to be the ones Paul thinks of in the context of that particular letter. And the Holy Spirit being what it is, most accept that there are more gifts than are in that long list – talents, skills, aptitudes, all of them things that help build up the body of Christ.

The origin and purpose of the gifts are all the same: they are gifts given by the Holy Spirit, and they are for the benefit of others, not the one possessing them. We don’t control which ones we get; we don’t choose them. It’s the Holy Spirit who chooses how to dole them out, and we may not know the reasons why.

We get a reminder of the unpredictable plans of the Holy Spirit in the reading from Acts today. Peter the good Jew has just had a mind-blowing experience, visions and a calling to come visit the Gentile Roman centurion Cornelius and his household. The visions have been coming thick and fast to both Peter and Cornelius, and Peter is slowly realizing that maybe God has an interest in the Gentiles too. He preaches what one writer calls the most powerful sermon of all time, saying, ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality,’ and then going on to tell the Gentiles the whole Christian story. In the middle of this fine sermon, the Holy Spirit interrupts him and ‘falls upon’ everyone there, Jews and Gentiles alike. (How awesome to have God drop in and validate your sermon while you’re still preaching it!) And with that, any reason for division just evaporates. The Gentiles have the Holy Spirit too – may as well invite them in. And so they’re baptized.

Peter, it seemed, had the gift of preaching. The Holy Spirit gave it to him, but Peter had no idea what that gift would be used for. Turns out the Spirit had in mind the total upheaval of all of his assumptions, and all the weight of ethnic history behind them. And the Holy Spirit wanted to use Peter’s gift for the explosive growth of the church. And to share the gospel without barriers, available to all.

Preaching – or exhortation, as it’s sometimes called – is just one of the gifts. No one has all of them. Everyone has some of them, at least to some extent. So there are many different spiritual gifts inventories and questionnaires that help you determine which you seem to have more of – a little like the vocational aptitude tests I took in high school, where you filled in a lot of bubbles and then learned that you were destined to be an occupational therapist. (That was one on my list – it stood out because at the time I had no idea what that was, and now that I do know, I know I would probably not make a good occupational therapist.)

The problem with the questionnaires about spiritual gifts, like the vocational aptitude tests, is that they can be a little reductionist. We were having a discussion about spiritual gifts at our vestry meeting this week – we do talk about spiritual things there, believe it or not – and one member mentioned that a questionnaire revealed to her that her gift was administration, a gift she did not want to have because she did not want to be a secretary. Of course, as life unfolded, she did not become a secretary – but she did find herself in a profession and in ministry that uses her abilities and gifts for administration (the vestry is quite grateful she has this gift). In other words, realizing that you have one of these gifts does not give you a road map for what you do with it. Discernment of spiritual gifts tells you something about who you are – but it doesn’t tell you just where to go next.

So how do we know which gifts we have? The questionnaires and inventories can be a help, but the gist of the questions is really just whether you enjoy doing certain things or not. To know if you have the gift of hospitality, check out your experience: do you feel joy and peace when you invite people into your home? Or do you feel stressed, anxious, and upset? Elsewhere, in Galatians, Paul talks about the fruits of the spirit, things that are signs that the Spirit is present: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It’s the basics of discernment, of knowing what you’re good at because you try it out, of knowing how it feels when you do something, being aware enough to take stock and know whether this is of the Spirit or not.

And this is where your community can be a help as well. If you think you have the gift of listening, but people you ask about it complain that you always interrupt, then maybe you should rethink. Or others in the community might point out a gift you didn’t realize you had, like the gift of helping – you just took it for granted that everyone did this, not realizing that you go beyond what others do. It takes a hefty dose of honesty and humility, allowing people to be truthful with you about how they perceive you, what experience they have of you. Good Christian community can do this for each other.

Of course, just because a spiritual gift is used doesn’t mean that we’ll get to reap great rewards for ourselves. Peter had a life-changing experience preaching to the Gentiles, but he pays for this gift later: as soon as he returns to Jerusalem, he gets called on the carpet by all the Jewish believers for this radical behavior, and he has to answer to them all. The book of Acts says that Peter preaches another good sermon, and his opponents are silenced. History suggests this disagreement about including the Gentiles was a little longer and more contentious than that. Indeed, we’re still arguing about whether everyone, really everyone, is welcome in the church. The church has been struggling with inclusion of different groups right from the beginning, not at all easily. (And now it’s even turning up in our presidential campaign.)

So if we discern that we have a gift, the gift of music, say, or the gift of discernment, and our community affirms that, and if we recognize that this gift comes from the Holy Spirit and not from our own amazing self; if we allow that the gift may do good in the long run but be very difficult for us in the short run – how do we determine how to use the gift? We’re given the ultimate litmus test in today’s gospel. Jesus says, ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.’ Everything we do should be measured against this: does my use of this gift in this situation build up the body, or tear it down? Does it extend love in the world, or hatred? Is it what Jesus would do if he were me?

In other words, stewardship of our gifts requires a lot of listening. They come from God, from the Holy Spirit, and we have to listen well to know what they are, how to use them, when not to. It requires us to pray often – rather than being puffed up with pride about something we’re good at, we offer it back to God, asking what God wants to do with it. We might not foresee what that will look like – but if we allow God to use the gifts in us as they’re intended, we work for the greater good of God’s purposes in the world. May we live into the gifts we have, and share the love we are made for. Amen.

I’d like to gather a group of youth who are nearly 16 or over 16 to talk about basics of the faith and the Episcopal Church, with the option of electing for confirmation at the end. I invite all parents and youth to an informational meeting on Sunday, June 3 after the 11:00 service. We will share some refreshments and look at a possible schedule for the class, as well as an overview of topics to be covered. Talk to Kate Flexer if you can come, or if you have questions.

Adults can also be confirmed or received into the Episcopal Church, or reaffirm their baptismal vows. If you would like to prepare to be confirmed, received, or to reaffirm your baptism, please talk to Kate Flexer.

We’re still exploring the theme of stewardship in this season of Easter, looking at all the ways we care for and live out God’s gifts in our lives. On Earth Day we talked about care for creation; last week we talked about caring for brothers and sisters near and far away. Today it’s the stewardship of daily life: how we do our work, relate to our families, go about the tasks of every day as stewards of the gifts God gives us.

We have a great story to work with today, this one from the book of Acts about the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch. Acts is full of conversion stories, often of unexpected and unlikely people. This one we heard today is maybe the most surprising of them all. It’s about Philip, one of the seven men called as deacons, those who care for the needs of the widows and orphans in the community and who serve at the Lord’s table in the Eucharist. Stephen was one of those seven deacons as well, famous in Acts for preaching a long wonderful sermon and then being stoned to death. Philip fares better, preaching and proclaiming the gospel to people in Samaria, including Simon the magician. Then, called by the Spirit, he journeys to a road in the wilderness, where the eunuch comes riding along.

The eunuch is from Ethiopia, what would now be northern Sudan. He is a highly placed finance minister in the queen’s court, wealthy and influential. But in Jewish terms, he is an outcast, because as a eunuch he would not be able to participate in the Temple rituals – should he choose to convert to Judaism. He has not converted, but he clearly is interested, reading Isaiah as he rides along.
[Read more ...]]]> RCL Year B, 5 Easter

We’re still exploring the theme of stewardship in this season of Easter, looking at all the ways we care for and live out God’s gifts in our lives. On Earth Day we talked about care for creation; last week we talked about caring for brothers and sisters near and far away. Today it’s the stewardship of daily life: how we do our work, relate to our families, go about the tasks of every day as stewards of the gifts God gives us.

We have a great story to work with today, this one from the book of Acts about the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch. Acts is full of conversion stories, often of unexpected and unlikely people. This one we heard today is maybe the most surprising of them all. It’s about Philip, one of the seven men called as deacons, those who care for the needs of the widows and orphans in the community and who serve at the Lord’s table in the Eucharist. Stephen was one of those seven deacons as well, famous in Acts for preaching a long wonderful sermon and then being stoned to death. Philip fares better, preaching and proclaiming the gospel to people in Samaria, including Simon the magician. Then, called by the Spirit, he journeys to a road in the wilderness, where the eunuch comes riding along.

The eunuch is from Ethiopia, what would now be northern Sudan. He is a highly placed finance minister in the queen’s court, wealthy and influential. But in Jewish terms, he is an outcast, because as a eunuch he would not be able to participate in the Temple rituals – should he choose to convert to Judaism. He has not converted, but he clearly is interested, reading Isaiah as he rides along. The Spirit tells Philip to catch up with him, and he does, accosting the eunuch’s chariot. The eunuch invites him to sit up beside him and explain the scripture. Hearing the gospel from Philip, the eunuch is converted instantly, and passing a pool of water, they immediately stop the chariot in order to perform his baptism. As soon as that is accomplished, Philip up and disappears, heading off to preach and proclaim some more in Gentile regions.

For this encounter to happen and bear the fruit it did, both Philip and the eunuch have to do something extraordinary. The eunuch is a rich and powerful businessman, riding comfortably in his expensive car. But he invites Philip, on foot and out of breath, ragged from travel, to join him, so that he can hear what Philip might say. The eunuch longs to hear what the scripture is really about, and he will seek that understanding wherever it might be. Philip, for his part, listens to how God’s Spirit is calling him, first getting himself to this lonely road through the wilderness and then running up alongside this lavish chariot to holler out, ‘Do you understand what you’re reading?’ Even though the eunuch is an outcast and a Gentile, Philip hops up alongside and then, when the eunuch is ready, baptizes him. In this conversation, both sides reach out past their normal boundaries. And when they do, God works on their hearts, turning confusion into joy. A brief encounter between strangers from different worlds becomes holy; far more happens than you would ordinarily expect.

I came across an excerpt from a book by Matthew Fox called The Reinvention of Work. In it Fox talks about the difference between jobs and work. A job, he says, is a discrete task, often joyless, something that has to get done. Work, on the other hand, comes from our deepest self, an expression of creativity that serves others and therefore has real meaning in the world. I think he’s about right – when someone describes their work by saying, ‘Well, it’s a job,’ then you know that they’re not finding a lot of joy and meaning from what they do. The question Fox poses then is how we can turn a job into work. Given that everyday life is full of jobs – whether it’s the place we go to work every day that feels like a job, or just the list of to-dos and tasks that occupy our time, none of us can escape doing jobs. But by placing them within a wider context – understanding the end being served by this task or job, seeing how it connects to other people or even our own deeper selves – we can make a job more meaningful. Filing papers or pruning trees or fixing the photocopier becomes more important when we see the good it does the larger work in question.

That’s what Brother Lawrence, the 17^th century monk who wrote The Practice of the Presence of God, was getting at when he talked about sweeping the floor to the glory of God. Lawrence was a lay brother who spent most of his life in the kitchen, doing menial tasks rather than getting to do the more glorious work of the priests and others who ran the monastery. But his character and his deep spiritual peace drew many to him for his counsel and wisdom. Lawrence’s life bore fruit because he did something extraordinary: he lived out the ordinary in a way that allowed the Spirit of God to act through him. The job he did was part of the larger work of God. Regular menial tasks, jobs, become holy when God becomes a part of them. Far more happens than you would ordinarily expect.

Today’s passage from the gospel of John gives us a basis for understanding all of this. Jesus says, ‘Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit…apart from me you can do nothing.’ ‘Abiding’ is a word John uses, and it can be hard to pin down just what that means and how we do it. But one writer makes the point that ‘abide’ means just about the same as ‘believe’ in John – which is, again, not about what we think with our heads, but how we act in our lives. To abide in God means we root ourselves in God, trust God in our everyday life. We look through a different lens, trusting that things have larger meaning than we might see, that all things work for good, that simple ordinary everyday stuff can be holy. And the more we do this, the more we are able to bear fruit: the fruit of deep relationships, the fruit of meaningful work that gives life to others. All that language about Jesus as the vine and us as the branches is a symbolic way of saying the same thing: when we live with the knowledge and awareness of God in our life, our daily ordinary everyday life, we live more abundantly.

Again, it comes back to the same perspective on stewardship: when we live as though all we have comes from God, then what we do daily matters. It matters that we listen to what the Spirit might be prompting us to do, in our prayers, in our hearts, in the words of others. It matters that we are attentive to encounters with other people, whether they’re a one-time conversation or a partnership of 50 years. It matters that we look for how to serve God and others in our tasks and our work, however menial it might seem. Any job, any encounter, can be suffused with the holy if we allow God to act through us in what we do.

But paradoxically, what we do doesn’t matter in some other ways. It doesn’t matter that we be successful in the world’s eyes, rising up the ladder in our workplace and career. It doesn’t matter that we be friends with the ‘right’ people, the ones who will get us noticed. It doesn’t matter that we make a lot of money or gather a lot of material possessions. We might be sweeping floors; we might be walking along a deserted road; we might be riding comfortably in a luxury car. Whatever we’re doing, however, the fruit that we bear is not ours, but God’s – God’s to use however God wants to, to bring another person to light and peace, to heal what is broken, to bring about God’s purposes in the world.

It’s partly about a difference in perspective, in what we understand the meaning of our lives to be. But it’s also about how we live, in simple ways. In our prayers, instead of only bringing what seem like big important concerns, we can bring all the little stuff of our everyday life, talk it over, lift it up for God to bless and do something with. When we are with other people, instead of judging them for what they look like or how they act, we can listen to them more attentively, hearing the needs and hopes that lie beneath their behavior and chatter. When we go to work, or tick our way down the to-do list for the day, instead of losing ourselves in boredom or stress, we can stop to give thanks for every blessing we see – even if it’s just the gift of being alive to see another day. Being faithful doesn’t require us to do great things that we don’t know how to do. It simply requires doing what we already do with gratitude, and the awareness of God, and prayer for what comes next in our day. That’s what stewardship of our daily lives is about.

In this springtime season, this week, I invite you to look at your everyday life differently. My prayer for us all is this: may we live out God’s extraordinary love, in the ordinary ways of our lives. Amen.

It’s the season of Easter, a season of resurrection, a time of abundance of life and gratitude. We’re talking about stewardship, about how we live faithfully as stewards, caretakers, of all that God gives us to watch over. We have so many gifts: our own skills and resources, our work, our communities, the creation we live in. We’re tempted to think of them all as our own – but the theology of stewardship reminds us that we do not create or control any of these things. All things come from God, and we are given the task of caring for them. We come from and return to dust – while God’s gifts remain. So our job is in the time we are here to care for things well.

Each Sunday we’re looking at this idea from different angles. Last Sunday on Earth Day we talked about our stewardship of creation. Today our readings point us toward considering how we care for the needs of others in our world – stewardship of God’s love, stewardship of our brothers and sisters, to use the words of 1 John. How can we care for others in both spiritual and practical ways?

It is a basic Christian idea that we should do so, of course. But maybe it’s worth asking why. After all, we are born thinking of ourselves alone; in certain extreme situations of survival, most people go back to that state. We tend naturally to surround ourselves with people who are like us, related to us in the case of our family, or similar to us in their outlooks and opinions in the case of our friends and community. It could easily be argued that this is just a natural outgrowth of our early selfishness, a larger
[Read more ...]]]> RCL Year B, 4 Easter

It’s the season of Easter, a season of resurrection, a time of abundance of life and gratitude. We’re talking about stewardship, about how we live faithfully as stewards, caretakers, of all that God gives us to watch over. We have so many gifts: our own skills and resources, our work, our communities, the creation we live in. We’re tempted to think of them all as our own – but the theology of stewardship reminds us that we do not create or control any of these things. All things come from God, and we are given the task of caring for them. We come from and return to dust – while God’s gifts remain. So our job is in the time we are here to care for things well.

Each Sunday we’re looking at this idea from different angles. Last Sunday on Earth Day we talked about our stewardship of creation. Today our readings point us toward considering how we care for the needs of others in our world – stewardship of God’s love, stewardship of our brothers and sisters, to use the words of 1 John. How can we care for others in both spiritual and practical ways?

It is a basic Christian idea that we should do so, of course. But maybe it’s worth asking why. After all, we are born thinking of ourselves alone; in certain extreme situations of survival, most people go back to that state. We tend naturally to surround ourselves with people who are like us, related to us in the case of our family, or similar to us in their outlooks and opinions in the case of our friends and community. It could easily be argued that this is just a natural outgrowth of our early selfishness, a larger sphere that is more or less connected to our own self. Sometimes in nature creatures show a surprising kind of altruism, care for others that does not benefit themselves – but the scientific literature is divided as to whether it is truly altruism or some further development of genetic survival. It’s not clear that naturally we do think of others besides ourselves, really.

Our scriptures try to counteract this tendency – as do morals in other belief systems as well – by commanding us to love and care for others. Sometimes those others are simply those within our own community, of course. Much of what is written in the gospel of John and the letters from John about love, for example, really is about loving others in your own group. These writings are a product of what scholars think might have been a rather isolated and beleaguered community of the early church.  This would seem to line up with what morality is partly about: smoothing social relations for the good of society. If people are caring for each other rather than killing each other, then more time and energy can be allotted to growing food, building cities, defending yourselves against enemies, etc. Caring for the others in your group is a useful thing to do.

But sometimes the others we are commanded to care for in scripture are not in our group. Think of Jesus’ response to the lawyer’s question in the gospel of Luke, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself? Who is my neighbor?’ Jesus tells him the story of the Good Samaritan, a parable of love shown by and for the enemy and the outcast. Your neighbor, the one you are to care for, is not in your group at all – he could even be your enemy. The story is a reminder of similar commandments in the Hebrew Scriptures about caring for the alien living among you, leaving remnants of the harvest for the poor to gather, forgiving debts every seven years. Jesus says explicitly in Matthew’s gospel that we should love our enemy and pray for those who persecute us. It’s not always our kin group that we’re meant to love: it’s everyone, friend or foe. This is more than morality acting as social glue. This is loving as God loves us.

That’s what John, the writer of our epistle today, is saying: ‘We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.’ Loving in this way requires knowing first the love God has for us. God’s love is the gift; we are stewards of that love by showing love to others. On our own, we can’t generate this kind of love – at least, it doesn’t look that way from what the studies on altruism say. Loving this way takes getting caught up in the stream of love from God, God as the real source of great love. It means welcoming the gift of God’s sacrifice for us, receiving it and then passing it along to others.

Before we get all woo-woo and fuzzy about this, it’s important to consider just what we mean by love. We can get caught up with love as a feeling, but ‘love’ in scripture has to do with tangible things. As John goes on to write, ‘How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and yet sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?’ It’s not so much about what we feel about our brother or sister – it’s what we choose to do with and for them that shows love. In fact, it makes little difference if we feel warm and loving toward someone when we don’t show it in our actions and deeds. As one writer puts it, ‘Any disciple of Jesus, with the means to sustain life, is called to share that where it is lacking.’ If there is suffering around us, if people are in need, we are the ones to do something about it. Our hands are Christ’s hands in the world – we don’t get to pass this off to someone else. Not if we still pretend to be Christian.

So what’s so hard about this? Well, besides it going against our natural tendency toward selfishness, even if we’re convinced that caring for others is our job, it’s hard to know where to start. There’s a lot of need out there. We live in a pretty sheltered place in Almaden Valley, but even here it’s not too hard to see suffering – poverty and broken families are present here as they are everywhere. And it takes only a few seconds of watching or reading the news before we see suffering in other parts of the world. How can we solve all of that? It can be overwhelming. That’s when it helps to remember that we are not the source of this love and compassion – God is. God the good shepherd has many ways of caring for his sheep – we are one of the ways, but we are not the only way. The love we are stewards of is love for those right before us, the ones who weigh heavy on our heart. That might mean people halfway around the world; that might mean people in our own backyard. Jesus healed only some of the suffering and needy in Palestine in the 1^st century – he didn’t heal them all. We can only do what it is in our capacity to do – and God gives us amazing capacity sometimes.

A few weeks ago Jim and I met some people who are showing amazing practical love for people they’ve never met before. It’s a group of people who live in an intentional Christian community in New Haven, loving one another and supporting one another in spiritual and tangible ways. That sounds pretty great – but they knew that wasn’t enough. So they began to look around for whom else God would have them care for in the world. By asking around and then by listening to what they heard in their prayers and hearts, they began to learn about and then to discern a call to work on behalf of children in Southeast Asia, children who have been sold into terrible slavery. Over time they formed a non-profit called Love146 that now runs safe houses and rehabilitation programs for children who have been rescued from brothels – children they wouldn’t otherwise have known, and yet who now claim a place in their hearts and their time and energy. There’s no reason for them to care for these children of another place and culture, but they do. There are a lot of other causes they could have picked up, but this was what they were called to. And now they make a difference, a tangible difference, in the lives of dozens of children.

That’s God’s love in action. This little group of people could have stayed in their comfort zone and cared for one another in their own community and left it there. They could have given up on the rest of the needs of the world as too overwhelming to tackle. But instead they dared to ask the question, in their prayers and with other people, of what more God wanted them to do – and they found their answer, and the means and ability to do something for God’s little ones. I think they know that they will only stay truly effective – energized, not burned out and overwhelmed – as long as they ground themselves in God’s love, the love God has for them and for the whole world.

This is what it looks like to be stewards of God’s love for the world. It means praying, ‘God, break my heart for what breaks yours’ – and then allowing God to direct us towards the need that our gifts can meet. Being a steward in this way means being a servant – not the owner, not the director, but the one who does as the master requires with what belongs to the master. Our brothers and sisters in the world – those we know in our own communities and those we don’t know all around the globe – belong to God, as do we. The love God has for each one of us is something that each one of us is called to show – with our hands and with our hearts, May we listen and hear whom God would have us love, giving life to those who need it. Amen.

May 6 Everyone loves to be a “chef” and with our guest teacher, Phyllis Chai, our Cooking Learning Center will offer a tasty treat for all to sample.

May 13 Mother’s Day will be a special Art Center Day with our our Christian Ed Director, Susie Ferguson, who will bring something very creative and fun to capture the interest of our children around our Sunday School unit.

May 20 Our Games Learning Center with our guest teacher, Kelly Yamanishi, will bring a conclusion to our Easter People unit for our children, as the following Sunday will be a sharing opportunity at our joint Pentecost Service.

Visiting children aged 4 through 5th grade are more than welcome to join us at 10:10 AM for all the fun. Children may come as early as 10AM to explore many areas in our classroom. Everyone is always invited to bring a friend. Middle School and High School youth who would like to be here during our Sunday School hour (10-11 AM) are invited to be classroom helpers. Contact Susie Ferguson, christianed@jointventurechurches.org, if you have any questions or need further information.

RCL Year B, 3 Easter

We’re in the great 50 days of Easter, a whole season where Sunday after Sunday we hear story after story of Jesus resurrected, Jesus alive and appearing to his amazed disciples. Every one of the stories is just about the same as every other one: there the disciples are, doing their own thing, preoccupied, and suddenly, boom, there’s Jesus, who’s just walked through a locked door or otherwise shown up where he shouldn’t be. And the disciples are scared, and Jesus tells them not to be, and then he does something to prove he is who they think he is, truly there in the flesh. And then he tells them to spread the word, and then he goes away.

Easter is one long season of Jesus coming and going, until the ascension 40 days later when Jesus at last leaves his bodily form behind for good. Over and over again he keeps checking in, making sure his followers have gotten the point and gotten the news, and every time telling them to go and tell it to others – and then, his time up, he leaves, and his followers are left behind. And this time, unlike they did when they were with Jesus before his death, the disciples really do seem to get the point. And they do what he tells them to – they spread the word, they themselves preach and teach and heal just like he did, the Holy Spirit comes upon them, and the community of faith begins to grow like wildfire.

Jesus offers them the gift: resurrection. Life instead of death. And then he says, here’s what I want you to do with it: make sure everybody knows about it. Give my life to everyone.

We’re going to be
[Read more ...]]]> Earth Day

RCL Year B, 3 Easter

We’re in the great 50 days of Easter, a whole season where Sunday after Sunday we hear story after story of Jesus resurrected, Jesus alive and appearing to his amazed disciples. Every one of the stories is just about the same as every other one: there the disciples are, doing their own thing, preoccupied, and suddenly, boom, there’s Jesus, who’s just walked through a locked door or otherwise shown up where he shouldn’t be. And the disciples are scared, and Jesus tells them not to be, and then he does something to prove he is who they think he is, truly there in the flesh. And then he tells them to spread the word, and then he goes away.

Easter is one long season of Jesus coming and going, until the ascension 40 days later when Jesus at last leaves his bodily form behind for good. Over and over again he keeps checking in, making sure his followers have gotten the point and gotten the news, and every time telling them to go and tell it to others – and then, his time up, he leaves, and his followers are left behind. And this time, unlike they did when they were with Jesus before his death, the disciples really do seem to get the point. And they do what he tells them to – they spread the word, they themselves preach and teach and heal just like he did, the Holy Spirit comes upon them, and the community of faith begins to grow like wildfire.

Jesus offers them the gift: resurrection. Life instead of death. And then he says, here’s what I want you to do with it: make sure everybody knows about it. Give my life to everyone.

We’re going to be exploring the Christian idea of stewardship in this season of comings and goings. Stewardship is a churchy word that sometimes just means ‘pledge.’ But I’m using it in the fuller sense of the word: being stewards, being caretakers and servants, of all that God gives us. As one writer puts it, ‘Stewardship is… ALL that we do, with ALL that we have, ALL the time. Stewardship is discipleship; it is a complete reorientation of our lives toward God, who calls us through Jesus Christ.  Stewardship is… everything I do after I say, “I believe.”’ That’s a pretty broad understanding of stewardship. But it acknowledges first and foremost that all that we have is not really ours. It’s God’s. Our selves, our souls and bodies, our resources, our world, all belong to God first. We are simply to take care of them – and let the great goodness and love of God shine out through all of them.

It’s an Easter idea. The disciples after the resurrection were given astoundingly good news. When everything went wrong for them, suddenly, and repeatedly, they were shown that everything was better than they could even imagine – where they expected death, there was life. It was a gift that Jesus wanted them to share with others. They were stewards of the resurrection, of life abundant – a pretty sacred charge. In the Acts reading today, Peter and John, two of Jesus’ dearest disciples, heal a man lame from birth, in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. The man walks and everyone stares, and Peter teaches all who will listen that the God of life has done this. And thousands of them believe. Peter and John are good stewards of the resurrection life they have been given; when they share the gift, God can heal and open hearts.

We’re beginning our Easter theme of stewardship today with Earth Day, a day when we are encouraged to stop and consider our use of and care for the earth and the environment. 40-some years ago a US senator named Gaylord Nelson organized a national teach-in on April 22 about what was happening to the environment, and it brought together lots of different causes and concerns into what became the environmental movement. Right away religious people realized that this was something we needed to be part of. For Christians and Jews especially, the story of creation, of God giving humanity the care of everything that God had made, contrasted sharply with the pollution of water and air they saw everywhere around them. So they got involved, some more politically than others, and every year congregations of different faiths and styles have observed Earth Day.

It seems like a good place for us to start as we talk about our stewardship of God’s gifts – because of course, the first of all those gifts is this creation we are a part of. It’s the beginning of the Bible story that God created all things and called them good – and that God made us to be stewards of all of it. Throughout the scriptures, there are commandments about how to care for the land well, to make it fruitful but not to overtax it, to take what we need from it but not to take too much. God gives us the message over and over again in various forms that we are to care for this land that God loves so much.

We have not done so well as stewards, of course. Here’s where I could insert a long list of statistics about species extinction and climate warming and air quality in cities and mountaintop removal mining and dustbowls and all the things we have created in our headlong rush to take too much – but I think you probably know those statistics. We have had the care of life abundant, a planet teeming with so many different kinds of life that we have yet to discover them all. Life abundant and beautiful, with mountains of rock and oceans of water and green plants over everything and creatures throughout. Creation is strong and resilient in some ways, and it has survived some of our excesses remarkably well. But it is fragile and vulnerable in many other ways – and if the predictions of further global warming are true, we may be looking at a more total level of destruction in the coming decades. Instead of stewards we have thought ourselves owners, short-sighted owners whose main instinct is the satisfaction of today’s desires, not concern for the generations to come – or even the generations elsewhere in the world today. And in so doing we have caused a grievous amount of harm, to earth and its creatures and to our fellow human beings.

I think that’s our main problem with stewardship of all kinds: we’re tempted not to get it. We’re tempted to think that what we have is ours to dispose of as we please – and we often don’t make terrific choices about what we do with it. We tend more toward adolescence than we do toward maturity with whatever the gift we’re given – even when that gift is life itself. The disciples are often examples of that in the gospels, trying to get Jesus to do what they want, not understanding what Jesus is about or where the path they’re on is going. That changes after the resurrection. But imagine if the disciples had fallen short yet again – imagine if they had heard the news, seen Jesus alive there before them, and then failed. They could have had a party among themselves and then left it there, a great memory for their little group to enjoy forever. Or imagine if they had gone out and sold tickets, seeing the resurrection of their former friend as a prime moneymaking opportunity, the chance to quit fishing once and for all. Or imagine if they had simply refused to see, ignored the life before them, stayed in the bitterness of their grief. None of that would have been good stewardship. None of that would have been accepting the gift of Jesus’ resurrection, witnessing to it, sharing it with others as Jesus told them to.

We do each of us have the chance to be better stewards of the creation we’ve been given charge of. We are given so many opportunities each and every day, choices and decisions to make where we can care gratefully for the good earth. Small choices add up; individual decisions magnify when many people do them. We may be beyond the point where all of our little decisions will add up enough to turn things around for climate change, but we may not be – either way, we may also need to be stewards by taking more action, wading into the political fray and educating ourselves and others about policies and decisions of our country and others.  But we’re certainly past any point – if there ever was one – when we can just leave it to ‘the environmentalists’ or the fringy people or the government to think about these things. Creation is something given to each and every one of us – to care for, to use well, to nurture and share for the good of all. Every one of us is part of this.

Life is a gift, and a precious one. The resurrection is the best news we’ve ever had. Understanding ourselves as stewards of those gives us language and reasons and tools for choosing well, choosing and caring on behalf of a God of life, in concern for and love for our neighbors all around the world. God does the healing and life-giving; God may well have more to do with this creation that we have so mistreated. But only as we care for it, and for each other, can God’s love really be made manifest to everyone. May we realize the great gift we have, and be blessings to this earth, our fragile island home. Amen.

April 28th: General upkeep around the building and the veg box area, gopher trapping, mulch the rose beds, volley ball court renovation.

May 12th: General upkeep around the building and the veg box area, gopher trapping, finish the volley ball court (if not done), gravel parking renovation.

June 2nd: General upkeep around the building, the veg box area & the volley ball area; Gopher trapping; Finish the gravel parking renovation (if not done); Weed the back fence planter and mulch (between the sheds and the creek); Selective pruning of all the shrubs around the building; garden fertilizing (all shrubs and roses).

June 16th: General upkeep around the building, the veg box area, the volley ball area & the gravel parking area; Gopher trapping; Selective pruning.

June 30th: General upkeep all areas; selective pruning; estimated FINAL DAY of scrupulous gopher trapping.

July 14th: General upkeep all areas, gopher inspections, and trap as necessary.

July 28th: General upkeep all areas, gopher inspections, and trap as necessary.

Of course, the fluidity of grounds maintenance means things can rapidly change as the priorities change. Please note that the word ‘work’ will no longer be used in this committee under any circumstances.

If you know you can make these events, or if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact me at hertzer@sbcglobal.net. Thank you, Michael Hertzer

Parents play a vital role in supporting their kids, promoting upstander rather than bystander behavior, and teaching and modeling empathy in the home.

Meet at church for lunch at 1:00, and we will drive to the Pruneyard to see the 2:20 show. Parents and other interested adults are welcome to join us. And youth, bring a friend! Thank you, Inge

So off went the women with this marvelous message: Jesus is risen from the dead, he’s going ahead of you, you will see him! And they told no one, for they were afraid. And that’s the end of Mark’s gospel, the shortest, possibly the oldest, of the four gospels. There’s the empty tomb, but there’s no Jesus. And nothing further is said to explain what happens next.

It’s such an odd ending that people later tried to add different endings to it, to clean it up and make it sound better. You’ll find them if you look in your Bible, two different endings tacked on to the end of the gospel of Mark. The endings try to finish the story a little better – to bring Jesus in for a resurrection appearance, for one thing. And also to get the disciples back on board to go out and preach the good news, giving them another shot at being friends and disciples after completely deserting Jesus at the cross. But that’s not how the original reads. The gospel of Mark begins 16 chapters earlier with the line: ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ And then it ends 16 chapters later with, ‘they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.’

Well, of course, someone must have said something. Someone heard it from someone and wrote it down and that’s why we have it to read aloud today. Something like resurrection doesn’t stay secret very well. But even so, Mark the gospel writer leaves the ending open in his story. He does it on purpose: his gospel, the 16 chapter-long book, is the beginning of the good news about Jesus. But everyone in that beginning part fails to share
[Read more ...]]]> RCL Year B, Easter Day

So off went the women with this marvelous message: Jesus is risen from the dead, he’s going ahead of you, you will see him! And they told no one, for they were afraid. And that’s the end of Mark’s gospel, the shortest, possibly the oldest, of the four gospels. There’s the empty tomb, but there’s no Jesus. And nothing further is said to explain what happens next.

It’s such an odd ending that people later tried to add different endings to it, to clean it up and make it sound better. You’ll find them if you look in your Bible, two different endings tacked on to the end of the gospel of Mark. The endings try to finish the story a little better – to bring Jesus in for a resurrection appearance, for one thing. And also to get the disciples back on board to go out and preach the good news, giving them another shot at being friends and disciples after completely deserting Jesus at the cross. But that’s not how the original reads. The gospel of Mark begins 16 chapters earlier with the line: ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ And then it ends 16 chapters later with, ‘they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.’

Well, of course, someone must have said something.  Someone heard it from someone and wrote it down and that’s why we have it to read aloud today. Something like resurrection doesn’t stay secret very well. But even so, Mark the gospel writer leaves the ending open in his story. He does it on purpose: his gospel, the 16 chapter-long book, is the beginning of the good news about Jesus. But everyone in that beginning part fails to share the good news. So now it’s up to us in chapter 17, those who read or hear the gospel, to do something ourselves. The story goes on.

That’s not how we usually approach scripture texts, of course. There’s an old hymn that goes, ‘I love to tell the story…the old, old story of Jesus and his love.’ It’s a lovely old hymn with a wonderful old sentiment. And Easter and all of the events that lead up to it are an old, old story, from 2000-plus years ago, a different culture and a different place. We peer back through the mists of time, we read these ancient documents, and there’s this story of once upon a time, this gospel about someone named Jesus. Between him and us there are all these years of tradition and ritual and hymnody, not to mention a sea change in culture and technology and worldview. When we hear the story, it’s easy to see it as past: that was then, this is now. The story was written, the story ended, and now we can decide from a safe distance whether we believe it or not, and what difference it makes to us anyway.

But if the story isn’t really finished yet – if there’s still something to be done, some imperative to be followed – well, then, that makes it quite different for us who sit here listening. Then the old, old story isn’t old at all – we’re in it.

In my last parish in New York, we had a lively Sunday School teacher named Roz Keller, who was always finding inventive ways to engage her kids with the Bible stories. The fruits of her class’ labor were often posted in the hallways of the Parish House for all to see – letters written to Mary on the birth of Jesus, newspaper front-page headlines about Jesus’ miracles. One year she had the kids make posters about the resurrection. One of them caught everyone’s eye, posted there above the drinking fountain. It was by 4^th grader Emma Thompson. ‘Goodbye Jesus,’ it read in large capital letters. There was a drawing of a coffin beneath that. But then at the bottom of the poster, written in multicolored markers, were these words: ‘Oh, wait! There He is across the street!’

I have a copy of this poster up in my office by my desk, because it reminds me of the real truth of the story: Jesus is alive and running around right now, right across the street. The good news is as fresh and vibrant as that. It’s not just something curious that was reported many years ago in a culture far, far away. It’s true now. Resurrection happens, Jesus lives, right here and right now. Our job is to point to it and tell about it.

So where do we see it? Well, if we’re going to talk about resurrection, then we have to be honest about death. None of us yet have experienced physical death, but we all experience death in other forms throughout our lives. You know what it feels like to be at a dead end. Different things land us there: Unemployment that goes on for far longer than it should. Best friends who die, maybe several of them in a row. Family members who get very very sick. You yourself getting very very sick. Children who grow up and won’t speak to their parents. Things at school going badly, in classes and with friends. Whatever the circumstances, they are dead ends that seem to have no exit, problems that seem to have no solution. You try to look on the bright side and find there really doesn’t seem to be a bright side.

It is in the midst of this kind of darkness that the good news of the resurrection comes lancing in. Sometimes you can feel it. Right in the very midst of the darkness, you turn some corner and suddenly find light and life. Blessings that shouldn’t have been there. Maybe you find an answer to your problem, a tangible improvement in circumstances – a sudden job offer, a new teacher, new medical cures. Or maybe instead what you find is God with you, peace that passes all understanding, unexpected calm and hopefulness instead of surrender to the darkness. Nothing is changed around you, but everything is changed within you.

That’s Jesus, right across the street. That’s resurrection. Good news, to hold onto and celebrate and be joyful about.

But then there are other times when you can’t feel it, when the darkness just seems to go on without end. That’s when the rest of us have to do our job. We have to speak the truth about life in the midst of death, truth that we know from our own lives, truth that we see in the lives of others. When you can’t see it, then the community around you has to hold the story, to remind you that the tomb is empty, and you aren’t in it; that he is risen, that God is right here with the brokenhearted because that is where God always is, coaxing you into life.

The women who came to the tomb on Easter morning weren’t expecting to find anything new. They were only coming to anoint Jesus’ body, a body they were certain was there dead despite all the times Jesus had told them he would rise again. Nothing he’d said had made sense to them; only following the traditions and doing the right thing made sense, so there they came. And then their world turned upside down, they saw the empty tomb and this young man telling them excitedly that Jesus is risen, that life was there instead of the death they expected to find. But they couldn’t take this in either – all they could feel was afraid. And so they missed the signs, missed the chance to rejoice and weep and dance with delight that Jesus their friend was alive. It’s just about the worst news of all in the gospel, that those who longed the most for the good news were too afraid to take it when it was offered to them. It is heartbreaking to think of those two women hurrying away, blind to the joy in front of them.

We all can be foolish like that. We can all of us stay in our fear – afraid to hope for what can’t be true, afraid to hurt, afraid to change. Afraid to believe others who tell us otherwise. Easter, the good news we’re here in church for today, demands boldness. It means risking, sticking our necks out and having the guts to live as if, even when we’re afraid it’s not. The light and the life is there, but we have to claim it – when we see it and know it and feel it, we have to tell it. When we can’t get to it ourselves, we have to hear others tell it. Do not be afraid! Stop being afraid! That’s how the story goes on – that’s the real ending to what Mark the gospel writer was trying to do. Christ is risen – not just some old story in some garden a long time ago, but now. Death is not the end of the story – life is the end of the story. Go out and live it in all the glory you were meant for.

May the God of life meet you along your path today – and may you go and tell the good news to all you meet. Christ is risen!

Perhaps, on the one hand, it is entirely fitting that this is so. Every year on Good Friday in church we read John’s story of the Passion, a story with a lot of crowd activity and involvement. To stage this story, you need a lot of extras: you need Roman officials and Jewish high priests conferring and deciding Jesus’ fate; the crowd yelling for another prisoner to be released instead of Jesus; all kinds of people going out to watch the spectacle of the crucifixion outside of the city, and soldiers gambling for Jesus’ clothing; Jesus’ mother and various disciples and followers standing by the cross as Jesus dies; and soldiers and some of the more secret of his followers coming to deal with Jesus’ body after he is dead. A lot of characters troop through the scene, in
[Read more ...]]]> Here we are, gathered together into church in the middle of the day on a Friday. Here today because each of us somehow believe that this day matters, that it is important enough to spend time in church in the very middle of this day.  And yet it always strikes me:  there is a whole world outside of this church that is not spending the day this way. Schools aren’t necessarily out, offices don’t close, people still go about their normal routines. Many people do not see it as important or important enough, at least, to go to church on such a day; many people don’t particularly think this day matters in the least.  Every now and then because of a movie or a book or an archeological find people get interested in the story of Jesus and the crucifixion and all of that; but for the most part, Good Friday doesn’t make a great deal of difference to most people.

Perhaps, on the one hand, it is entirely fitting that this is so.  Every year on Good Friday in church we read John’s story of the Passion, a story with a lot of crowd activity and involvement.  To stage this story, you need a lot of extras:  you need Roman officials and Jewish high priests conferring and deciding Jesus’ fate; the crowd yelling for another prisoner to be released instead of Jesus; all kinds of people going out to watch the spectacle of the crucifixion outside of the city, and soldiers gambling for Jesus’ clothing; Jesus’ mother and various disciples and followers standing by the cross as Jesus dies; and soldiers and some of the more secret of his followers coming to deal with Jesus’ body after he is dead.  A lot of characters troop through the scene, in other words, weighing judgment, watching idly, finding entertainment.  But ultimately, the only people who stay around in any kind of lasting way on Good Friday are a few disciples and those faithful ones who take his body to the tomb when he is dead.  The rest of the characters have moved on to other work, other spectacles, other places to get away from what has happened.

But for those who stay, and for us who are here, there is something that holds them and us here at the cross, at the scene of suffering.  Why do we choose to be here today?  Why does it matter?

It matters, for one thing, because on Good Friday we sit with our own experience of suffering and death, experiences we normally and naturally choose to avoid.  We don’t usually seek out the opportunity to dwell in a place of suffering; our body’s natural reaction to pain is to wince and pull away. Yet suffering and pain are always a part of our human lot, each one of us.  It is more honest and more real to acknowledge that and to sit with it, however unpleasant a place it may be, and our culture gives us few times and places to do so.  Our culture and probably our own inclination tells us to keep busy, to keep active and purposeful, to be optimistic and move on to the next thing quickly, to solve the problem and have a happy ending.  But the reality is that we cannot always move on quickly, our problems do not always have a ready solution, and many of us continue on for long periods of time in pain or suffering.  Mary the mother of Jesus and the other small collection of disciples stood there at the cross because the one they loved was dying and they needed to keep vigil with him until the end.  They needed to weep and to mourn and to suffer.  To slow down and sit long enough to acknowledge our own pain and suffering is precious, and this service, this time set aside today, serves to hold us in that contemplation.  It offers us a time to experience afresh all the endings of our lives, things in us that need to die and to be buried, or things that have already died and need to be let go; loved ones we have lost and continue to grieve for.  Letting go of what is dead and allowing that suffering to happen is a task in itself.  Good Friday provides time and space for this task.

And this day also matters because it also provides a chance to ponder own helplessness – again, something we would rather not do.  Mary and the others could do nothing to save Jesus; Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus who came later to deal with his body could only do that one small act of burying him; none of them could do anything to help themselves out of this place of grief.  And we, too, can do nothing but sit here in our need.  We know, when we slow down enough to acknowledge it, that our lives are not right; we know that we do not live in the full and holy way God desires for us.  We know that we fall far short of what we could be, and of what God wants of us. We can’t make it better by ourselves; we can’t get out of the messes we make by ourselves.  Our broken relationships remain broken; our heedless words can’t be unsaid.  When we slow down long enough, we realize the thing we would rather not admit:  we know we need someone to help, to do it for us.  To save us and rescue us.  Jesus on the cross does this for us – as John tells it, Jesus willingly and even calmly goes through the suffering and dying for us. He gives us the ultimate sign of God’s forgiveness, of God making things right. All the promises God has made through the prophets and scriptures are finally shown and fulfilled, that even though we can’t fix ourselves, God steps in and makes all things well.

So ultimately, what this day offers us is a chance to encounter once again the depth of God’s love for us.  A love that offers itself up completely for our sake, greater than, deeper than, broader than, more than anything we can imagine; a love that seeks us out fiercely even though we may try to wall ourselves off from it.  No one has greater love than this, says Jesus on the night before he dies, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  No greater love can we possibly know than the love that is manifest on this day – the same love that held Jesus’ mother and friends there, gazing on at the cross in agony and wonder.  We are loved so profoundly that our lover willingly chose suffering and death for us – the God of all the universe chose to include and comprehend and take on the pain and limitations of our fragile human lives.  Through all the fallible and limited experiences of love we have in this world, God pours through with a perfect love beyond our knowing.  And how deeply, how desperately each of us longs to be so loved.

So this day matters to us because it offers us the time and the space to encounter all of this.  But what of all those who are not here today, who see no reason to be here? what of all those who washed their hands like Pilate or wandered off like the crowds and went on to other things?

For these, too, this day matters, and for all the same reasons.  Every human being experiences suffering and pain, and comes to some point or points in her life where that reality is inescapable.  Every human being finds it impossible to live a perfect life, free of vulnerability and loss, always and everywhere able to do what is good and right for the good and right reasons.  And every human being from its first breath of air craves and needs love.  The need for all of these things is the same, whether we stop to notice it or not.  And a God whose very essence it is to lay down his life in love for us; who has taken on and so deeply comprehends our human lot; who has offered us a way to fullness of life that doesn’t depend on our getting it right; this is a God who matters to all the world.  This God matters because this sacrifice, this self-emptying, is truth at the deepest heart of our existence.  Whatever our culture or creed, the redemptive power of self-giving love is offered to us because of what happened on Good Friday, redemption offered for our taking. Like those who went about their business on the day of the crucifixion, much of the world may not understand this to be true.  And many of those in the church may misunderstand how this is true, believing there to be some requirement of creed or confession, a particular way of claiming the name of Jesus, of announcing oneself as a follower of Jesus.  But the power of the crucifixion – and of the resurrection we are coming to – is far greater than our meager attempts to comprehend and enclose it.  Whatever the faith language we speak, however we name God, the way of Jesus, the turning inside out of our human experience of suffering and loss, the transformation of suffering freely chosen for us, all of that holds true.  It is redemption at the heart of the universe, a way of being that we can respond to and lay hold of wherever we are, and whatever we might believe.  Whether we are Pilate or Wall Street, whether we are those who clamor for Barabbas or cheer at a campaign rally, whether we are the few who remain at the cross or sit in church on this day, Good Friday matters.

So here we sit, in church in the middle of a Friday.  Trying to come to grips with this day and what it means for us.  A day of suffering and death; a day of helplessness and need; a day of power and transformation.  It is finished, Jesus said – salvation is complete – it is all done.  May God help us all to know it.  Amen.

It is always pretty redundant to preach a sermon after the Passion story is read like that. What more is there to say that has not already been said? And yet even with this story we can forget to hear it, really hear it – it can roll right over us yet again without us taking it in. Sometimes we still need something, a way out of the harsh suffering of the story, and a way to make sense of it for ourselves. So, a little bit of a homily.

The Gospel of Mark pulls no punches in the Passion narrative. It is maybe the harshest of all the versions of the Passion. Jesus’ suffering is utterly without relief in this story. Every time anyone speaks, it is to accuse Jesus, to betray him, to mock him, to turn away from him. Every single character in the story does this, from all the mobs of priests and bystanders to Jesus’ dear friends Judas and Peter to the indifferent bureaucrat Pilate. Every one of them uses words to him and about him that inflict and further Jesus’ suffering: He’s horrible and deserves to die. I’ll betray him to you in return for money. He’s worse than a criminal. I don’t know him.

And so when he finally comes to those six hours on the cross, Jesus’ abandonment is total. No one of his friends and followers has stayed by his side, no one in power has come to his aid, and he is forsaken. Flogging hurt intensely, crucifixion is a horrible way to die, but the gospel writer doesn’t dwell on that. Instead, what he tells us and shows us relentlessly is how horrible it is to suffer and die alone. And Jesus is utterly alone.

The Congregational Church of Almaden & the Episcopal Church in Almaden

(the Joint Venture Churches) 408-268-0243 6581 Camden Ave. San Jose, CA 95120

Registration Form: click here

June 11-15, 2012, 9 AM to 12 Noon*

Children 4 years old through 5th grade (completed)

*Extended Care Available

All season long, we’ve been talking about covenant. Our scriptures tell us of our relationship with God, seen through the long history of covenants between God and us. God created us good in the beginning, but we went the other way instead. God despaired of our improving ourselves, so God promised through Noah to love us anyway. Then God started a people with Abraham, a people to be a blessing to all humanity and a reminder of how to live. God made the terms clearer through Moses, giving a law that showed this people how to live. But the people rebelled against this way, and hurt each other. And things got much, much worse.

So today, God gives up. This covenant is broken, says the prophet Jeremiah in today’s first reading. The people have never been able to keep their side of the agreement. In a human relationship, this would be the part where one person walks away from the other, saying, you’re never going to change. I can’t do this any more.

But that’s not what God says. God says, you’re never going to change. So I’ll do it for you. Never mind about all that that happened. We’ll start over again now.

In the Lenten adult ed series we spent a session talking about forgiveness and reconciliation. I brought in some ideas from a secular book on forgiveness, one by Fred Luskin of Stanford called Forgive for Good. The book makes the point that forgiveness is something we can choose to do or not, but that when we do forgive, we’re able to let go of the hurt and victim status and be happier again. To explain further, Luskin clarifies what forgiveness is not: It is not condoning hurtful actions and saying that
[Read more ...]]]> RCL Year B, 5 Lent

All season long, we’ve been talking about covenant. Our scriptures tell us of our relationship with God, seen through the long history of covenants between God and us. God created us good in the beginning, but we went the other way instead. God despaired of our improving ourselves, so God promised through Noah to love us anyway. Then God started a people with Abraham, a people to be a blessing to all humanity and a reminder of how to live. God made the terms clearer through Moses, giving a law that showed this people how to live. But the people rebelled against this way, and hurt each other. And things got much, much worse.

So today, God gives up. This covenant is broken, says the prophet Jeremiah in today’s first reading.  The people have never been able to keep their side of the agreement. In a human relationship, this would be the part where one person walks away from the other, saying, you’re never going to change. I can’t do this any more.

But that’s not what God says. God says, you’re never going to change. So I’ll do it for you. Never mind about all that that happened. We’ll start over again now.

In the Lenten adult ed series we spent a session talking about forgiveness and reconciliation. I brought in some ideas from a secular book on forgiveness, one by Fred Luskin of Stanford called Forgive for Good. The book makes the point that forgiveness is something we can choose to do or not, but that when we do forgive, we’re able to let go of the hurt and victim status and be happier again. To explain further, Luskin clarifies what forgiveness is not: It is not condoning hurtful actions and saying that they’re ok. It is not about repairing relationship with the offender. It does not set aside seeking justice for the harm done. And it does not mean that we forget what happened. This takes away a lot of the baggage we have around forgiveness. Maybe we think we should forgive right away but we just can’t? well, Luskin points out, forgiveness is a process and it takes time. Or perhaps we don’t want to forgive because that will tell the person who hurt us that it’s ok to do that. Well, as Luskin says, we may never reconcile with the person or talk to them at all – forgiveness is just about what we do in our own hearts. Maybe we don’t want to forgive because we don’t want this to happen to us again – we don’t want to forget. But Luskin says, forgiveness is not the same as forgetting. Every wound leaves a scar, after all, even once it’s healed. Forgiveness is good for us to do for us – whether we ever communicate it to the other person, whether the relationship is reconciled and healed, is a different matter altogether from our own choosing to forgive and release the pain in our own selves.

It’s a very sane book, and I think it does help us human beings along a great deal in our attempts at forgiveness. But that carefully limited sphere Luskin defines as forgiveness is quite different from what Jeremiah tells us God has done for us. ‘I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts…they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.’ My people can’t keep the covenant I keep trying to have with them. So I’ll do their part for them, because I forgive them and I’ve forgotten all of that. In this marriage, even though one partner is utterly unable to keep the marriage vows and respond with any kind of care and consideration for the other, the other partner will do the whole work of the marriage, and will forgive and forget everything the unfaithful spouse does to them. Never mind, this spouse will say. I love you anyway. What you did doesn’t matter – I’ve already forgotten it. Nothing further will come of it, and our relationship is healed again. Let’s move on.

Last week I pointed out that sometimes our understanding of God’s deal with us is so skewed that it looks like an abusive marriage: God loves us, and when we fail to love God back, God punishes us. Today’s reading makes it clear that the power imbalance actually goes completely the other way: God loves us, and every time we fail to love God back, God forgives us and forgets it. Far from forcing us to do things his way – God chooses to be the doormat.

That, of course, is just what Jesus is alluding to in the gospel reading today. It’s a prelude to his passion, what we’ll be focusing on next Sunday and throughout Holy Week. Like a grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying, Jesus will give up his life. God’s not going to save him from this hour – God is not going to come storming in and rearrange us all so that we start behaving properly. Instead, God will be glorified, Jesus will be glorified, in dying and letting go. In that dying, Jesus’ life will bear the fruit it is meant to bear: the ultimate sign of our forgiveness and of God’s love toward us.

I think that we have yet to embrace this idea, even after 2000 years of Christian faith. God suffering our abuse willingly? God responding to our sin and unfaithfulness with weakness and vulnerability? I think, frankly, most of us are more comfortable with the image of God as mighty and powerful, just about ready to zap us with a lightning bolt if we don’t behave. We might not like or love that God, but when God has all the power, the responsibility for what happens in the world stays safely out of our hands. It’s God’s fault if things aren’t going well around us, not ours. We can fear that God, we can beg that God for help, we can get angry and reject that God for not helping…but we don’t have to accept this terrible thing of being forgiven.

The thing is, it’s very very hard to accept being forgiven. I mean, really being forgiven, when we know we’ve messed up. If we think we can justify how we’ve behaved, then we don’t really need to be forgiven. We already feel ok about what happened, and if the other person forgives us, then we know that they just agree with our account of things.  But when we know that we have been a real jerk, said something or done something that really hurt somebody else, it’s hard to really allow that person to forgive us. We know we don’t deserve it, really. And ultimately, we can’t really forgive ourselves, no matter what the other person might do. We should have done better, and we know that, and it is very hard to let it go.

So when God wants us to hear that we are forgiven – that what we did is forgotten – that God is willing to do anything and everything to show us it’s all over…no, we’re not willing to accept that. We’re too wedded to our guilt; we’re too used to our understanding of sin and its consequences. Crime gets punished – that’s what ‘justice’ means in our vocabulary. This total wiping out of sin without any penance on our part – it’s just not fair. What kind of a weak God would do something like that?

And so we loudly proclaim just the opposite, that our God is an awesome God, that the lightning bolt will strike us if we say or do the wrong thing (as if God were Zeus), that Jesus was really a Mel Gibson action figure, on and on and on, this God made up in our own image of what power should look and act like. A doormat! Heresy! God will strike you dead for that.

They will all know me, for I will forgive and forget, says God. Over and over and over, I will forgive and forget. For as long as it takes, to show us that yes, I really love you that much. God will forgive us to show us that yes, God really does desire us, even us, for his own; that yes, it really is all ok, no matter what we’ve done. Maybe we humans can’t forgive like this, not yet. But God can. The last chapter of our covenant with God, the long relationship of trying and failing and trying again, is this: all is forgiven. We get a new start, again. Because from the beginning, and through it all, and all the way to the end, God loves us. And that’s really ultimately all there is to say.

Things in the world of covenant relationship have gotten a little darker with today’s reading. You could say Genesis is a long love story between God and God’s people – not all of it rosy, of course, but overall it’s about God’s desire and love for us: our creation, the rainbow promise of Noah, the long friendship with Abraham and his descendants, the blessing-out-of-suffering that is the theme of the Joseph stories. Exodus continues this story of love, with God freeing his people from the slavery in Egypt. But if all of that’s the love story and the happy honeymoon, then the book of Numbers is the account of the marital troubles. It’s one long wandering in the desert from start to finish, and everyone behaves pretty badly with each other all along the way. All is not well in the relationship between God and God’s people. So now we get more of a picture of what happens when things go wrong with the covenant relationship.

Today’s story begins with the Israelites grumbling. The king of Edom has prohibited them from going through his land on their way into Canaan, so they must go the long way around. They’re so close to the Promised Land, and yet still so far. They’ve survived for 40 years on manna and a few quail, but now the prospect of better, more succulent food in Canaan makes them sick of what they’ve got. They’ve had numerous rebellions against God already, including one over water (but Moses struck the rock and it gushed out), one about clericalism (the ones arguing against having priests were destroyed – keep that in mind, all of you), one about who the real God is (remember the golden calf story?) and one over whether they
[Read more ...]]]> RCL Year B, 4 Lent

Things in the world of covenant relationship have gotten a little darker with today’s reading. You could say Genesis is a long love story between God and God’s people – not all of it rosy, of course, but overall it’s about God’s desire and love for us: our creation, the rainbow promise of Noah, the long friendship with Abraham and his descendants, the blessing-out-of-suffering that is the theme of the Joseph stories. Exodus continues this story of love, with God freeing his people from the slavery in Egypt. But if all of that’s the love story and the happy honeymoon, then the book of Numbers is the account of the marital troubles. It’s one long wandering in the desert from start to finish, and everyone behaves pretty badly with each other all along the way. All is not well in the relationship between God and God’s people. So now we get more of a picture of what happens when things go wrong with the covenant relationship.

Today’s story begins with the Israelites grumbling.  The king of Edom has prohibited them from going through his land on their way into Canaan, so they must go the long way around. They’re so close to the Promised Land, and yet still so far. They’ve survived for 40 years on manna and a few quail, but now the prospect of better, more succulent food in Canaan makes them sick of what they’ve got. They’ve had numerous rebellions against God already, including one over water (but Moses struck the rock and it gushed out), one about clericalism (the ones arguing against having priests were destroyed – keep that in mind, all of you), one about who the real God is (remember the golden calf story?) and one over whether they would ever enter the Promised Land at all. Moses has to keep God from wiping them all out over that one – but not before God swears that none of the generation who came out of Egypt will make it into the Promised Land, only those born along the way in the wilderness. If that’s true, some of those who started in Egypt and are still on the trip must be nearing their time, since the journey to Canaan seems to be coming to an end.

And indeed, this time God responds to the people’s complaints and lack of trust by sending poisonous snakes to bite them all. Those bitten by the snakes die. The people immediately repent of their lack of trust, of God and of Moses, and beg Moses for help. When Moses prays and intercedes for the people, God gives the cure – look at the image of the serpent and live. And they do. But God doesn’t take away the snakes.

So we haven’t really talked yet about this side of God. God did something like this in the days of Noah, but then with the rainbow he promised never to destroy the earth again. Up until Moses going up Mount Sinai and bringing back the Law, God has been quite merciful, except with Israel’s enemies. But the difference is that now God’s people are themselves bound by the covenant. The first covenants with Noah and with Abraham were really one-way promises, God promising to forebear with humanity’s foibles and to multiply the people of Israel. But the covenant made with Israel through Moses demands a response from Israel, that they would follow the commandments, love and trust and honor God, and care for each other in peace. Every time they rise up and revolt, refusing to believe God’s promise of freedom and abundance in the land to come, refusing to trust God and Moses’ leadership, God responds with anger. God’s anger comes out in an explosion of some kind, there’s repentance on the part of the people and relenting on the part of God, and they move on again. But the relationship is never entirely healed – Moses and Aaron and all the people who came out of Egypt with them don’t get to see the Promised Land, and all that history of anger and punishment becomes a part of the story, a scar that doesn’t go away.

The biggest scar of all, however, is on our theology. The story of God and Israel through their long history together is told as one of cause and effect. God gives commands, Israel breaks them, God punishes Israel, and they start over again. It’s a repeating cycle through the whole first five books of the Bible and on through the prophets. The moral is, there are rules to follow, and when we break them, then God cracks down on us. The two-way love relationship of us and God turns out to have a pretty hefty imbalance of power, understood this way – either we love God in return, or God smacks us. If this is a marriage, it’s an abusive one.

So when Jesus comes along, the same narrative pattern is applied. Look at what we hear from Jesus in John’s gospel today: ‘Those who believe in [the Son of God] are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.’ How do you hear this? My guess is you probably hear, Believe in God through Jesus and God will save you; if you don’t believe, then God will condemn you. Cause and effect. God loves you and wants to marry you, but if you say no, God will destroy you.

How exactly do we keep talking about free grace and unconditional love when this is our subtext?

So – this will not surprise you – I don’t think this is how it really works with us and God. Cause and effect, yes, but who is responsible for what is different than what we’ve traditionally understood. Consider again the Ten Commandments we talked about last week. When we don’t obey those commandments, what happens? Think of the commandment against idolatry: when we set other things as gods in our lives instead of God, our lives get out of balance. We put too much emphasis on our success at work, and when we fail, all is lost. We trust everything to someone we love, and when they leave us, we’re devastated. We value health above all else, and when we get sick, we don’t know what to think. Is that God’s punishment on us?

Or think of the commandments about how we treat other people: when we don’t honor and care for our aging parents, we get a society that puts its old people into institutions and tries to extend adolescence into our 50s. Is that God’s punishment on us? When we commit adultery, we destroy our marriage and other people, and deal for years with our own guilt and confusion. God’s doing? When we covet our neighbor’s possessions and envy them for what they have, we can’t really be friends with them, we despise our own lot in life, and we turn bitter and sour. Has God made that happen?

Or is all of that just the consequences of our own living?

The book of Numbers and other texts from scripture are written according to a particular understanding of the world, one that attributed a lot of things to divine agency rather than natural causes. We would probably interpret the situations differently today: I don’t think many of us, if bitten by a rattlesnake on our next day hike, would call it God’s doing. But the understanding that when we turn against God and one another, we suffer – that is as true now as it was then. It is cause and effect – but now we mostly understand the responsibility for what happens to be ours. Although it is still handy to blame God when things don’t go the way we want them to.

In the gospel, Jesus goes on to say, ‘And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.’ This is the judgment – people right now choosing the ways of darkness instead of the ways of light. The judgment isn’t a result later of what God will do to us because of what we did – the judgment is now, in how we live. When we live in darkness – when we dishonor and mistreat other people, when we put ourselves as primary instead of love of God and neighbor, when we react in fear rather than trusting God to do all things for good – then darkness is the consequence. The world is darker, our hearts are darker, we suffer and we make other people suffer. When we choose the light, it is all different – right here and right now, in our own hearts and in the way the world is, it is all different.

The covenant agreement between Israel and God is our covenant as well. It is an agreement about what the world looks like when it is in balance. It’s mutual relationship, mutual responsibility between us as people and between us and God. Together we make the world we live in – trusting in God to work all things for good, living the way of Jesus, treating others as beloved fellow children of God, makes this world one of light. The grace of God’s love for us is that throughout our missteps and outright revolts against the good way we have been shown to live, God continues to desire us, to woo us, to help us to pick ourselves up and try better next time. God’s light still shines no matter how dark we may make it. Thank God for that.

I started off my Lenten preaching two weeks ago talking about covenant, and the relationship we have with God and with each other. Our Old Testament texts through Lent all deal with covenant, from Noah to Abraham, Moses and on from there. It’s a great opportunity for talking about relationship, a chance for us in this season to explore together what it means to be in relationship with God.

So far we’ve heard God’s side of the relationship. With the promise made to Noah after the flood, God pledged to love us no matter what, to be faithful to us even despite our unfaithfulness back. It’s an awesome gift of truly unconditional love, love that sees us clearly and truthfully and yet embraces us all the same. It’s hard for many of us to take that kind of love in. Last week the reading was about God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah, that they would be the ancestors of a great nation and that God would be the God of all those people, the people Israel. It is again an unconditional covenant, not requiring anything in return from the people.

Today, however, we hear a further refining of the covenant, if you will. Now the covenant is being made with Israel through Moses, and our response is required. The Exodus reading today is about what is expected of us in this covenant relationship, in the Ten Commandments. We have all of us heard these commandments before, in church and out of it – there are those who want to post them in state capitols, and consider them to be so universal that all people should understand the laws they give. They do give the essence of the Law, the Torah, but the commandments are
[Read more ...]]]> RCL Year B, 3 Lent

I started off my Lenten preaching two weeks ago talking about covenant, and the relationship we have with God and with each other. Our Old Testament texts through Lent all deal with covenant, from Noah to Abraham, Moses and on from there. It’s a great opportunity for talking about relationship, a chance for us in this season to explore together what it means to be in relationship with God.

So far we’ve heard God’s side of the relationship. With the promise made to Noah after the flood, God pledged to love us no matter what, to be faithful to us even despite our unfaithfulness back. It’s an awesome gift of truly unconditional love, love that sees us clearly and truthfully and yet embraces us all the same. It’s hard for many of us to take that kind of love in. Last week the reading was about God’s promise to Abraham and Sarah, that they would be the ancestors of a great nation and that God would be the God of all those people, the people Israel. It is again an unconditional covenant, not requiring anything in return from the people.

Today, however, we hear a further refining of the covenant, if you will. Now the covenant is being made with Israel through Moses, and our response is required. The Exodus reading today is about what is expected of us in this covenant relationship, in the Ten Commandments. We have all of us heard these commandments before, in church and out of it – there are those who want to post them in state capitols, and consider them to be so universal that all people should understand the laws they give. They do give the essence of the Law, the Torah, but the commandments are not in themselves a legal code or a set of rules. Instead, they set forth the terms of the relationship between God and God’s people, beginning with and focusing on our understanding of who God is, and ending with the basic requirements for functioning human society.

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia: how many of you memorized the Ten Commandments? How many of you could recite them right now? It might be a little tricky – and not just because your memory is failing. It’s like trying to name the 12 apostles – it’s hard to do, because the names of the apostles vary in the different gospels that list them. The Ten Commandments are named in a section of 20 verses of Exodus – but pinpointing exactly how those 20 verses break down into 10 commandments is a little vague. Jews see it one way, Catholics & Lutherans see it another way, the rest of us see it still a third way. The first commandment might be, ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.’ Or it might be that plus ‘you shall have no other gods before me.’ The second commandment might be, ‘You shall not make for yourself an idol.’ Or that might be part of the first commandment. The last commandment might be, ‘You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.’ Or that might be two commandments, the first, ‘You shall not covet your neighbor’s house’; and the second, ‘or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.’ So this set of commandments that Jews & Christians see as common to all of us, well, they’re not quite as universally agreed upon as we thought. It’s amazing that any ecumenical dialogue ever happens, when you think about it. There are so many things large and small to disagree over.

I don’t know if there’s much point to be made out of that, but it does perhaps gesture toward how we have a tendency to take scripture and turn it into our personal set of rules. You could in a very broad way read the Ten Commandments as rules to live by, mostly in reference to what not to do. Thou shalt…thou shalt not. But when you look at them more closely, that interpretation breaks down. The Jewish tradition has the first commandment as simply, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery. That’s not a commandment at all: it’s a statement from God of his identity and history with his people. There’s nothing for us to do – it’s simply about who God is. And on from there, the majority of the scripture passage has to do with God’s identity, God as the protector and savior of his people. God has authority because God has saved and cared for us: God is the one who brought Israel out of slavery, freeing people from bondage. God is the one who created everything that is. Having established that, our response should be obvious: why on earth would we worship any other god, or use God’s name for our own deceitful purposes, or fail to honor God with our rest and attention on the Sabbath day?

The second set of commandments all relate to how we treat each other. God chooses to make this covenant with the whole community of Israel, all of God’s people, not with a single individual. So it matters that the community stays healthy and intact – which is why the remainder of the commandments have to do with the basics of maintaining a stable and safe society, where people are not killing or cheating or stealing from one another, not threatening one another with their desire for what others have. Again, it should be obvious: Why would we want to mistreat other people, when we live in community with one another?

In other words, the commandments lay out our end of the bargain, the terms by which we live in the covenant relationship with God. But it lies elsewhere to lay out the details of the commandments and laws, and the consequences of disobeying them. Instead, the Ten Commandments give us the basic meaning of all of them, the description of what it looks like to live in relationship with God – and by extension, with one another.

Ok. So what does this have to say to us today? Think for a moment of the gospel scene we heard today, of Jesus’ righteous anger in the Temple. It’s a common Christian misconception that the Hebrew scriptures only deal with rules and legalities. Consciously or not, we can lump all of the Old Testament into one big erroneous document, corrected by Jesus’ coming and the writing of the New Testament.  But Jesus wasn’t arguing against all of Hebrew tradition when he lashed out at the scribes and Pharisees and threw the moneychangers out of the temple and told parables about loving your enemy. He was trying to realign people’s relationship with God toward actual relationship as it had been from the beginning, back to the covenants God had made with Israel and all of humanity.  After all, legally the moneychangers could be in the Temple. But the result of their work there was to extort money from the poor and to set up barriers to the worship of God, and that was what made Jesus angry. Jesus was trying to bring us back from focusing on the wrong things, the rules and the moralities and the do’s and don’ts that allow us to pass judgment on one another. He was leading us – is always leading us – away from too much tolerance of things that destroy relationship, things that allow the oppression and exploitation of other people and that prevent us from knowing God’s love. It wasn’t a new message: it was one meant to restore us to the relationship we were created for from the very beginning.

So do the Ten Commandments describe your relationship with God and other people? It’s interesting to note that though this covenant is between God and God’s people as a community, the commandments are addressed to the singular individual. Each one of us is supposed to be living this way in order for all of us as a community to be in relationship with God. So, do we? Take a moment to evaluate. Does your relationship with God look like a faithful, monogamous relationship characterized by love and respect, and intentional time set aside just to be with God? Does your relationship with other people – all other people – uphold and strengthen the good of all in the community? In other words, the Ten Commandments are not a lowest common denominator set of rules to follow – I haven’t murdered anyone today, so I’m doing ok – but instead a holistic picture of what right relationship looks like for us with God and our neighbor. Jesus nods his approval at the summary of the law that the lawyer gives him – love God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength, and your neighbor as yourself – because that really does sum it up.  Love, because God first loved you.

So perhaps our meditations for this week should be on the negatives, if you will: on what blocks and hinders our love for and from God, and for and from each other. If our relationships don’t look whole, then why don’t they? Have we forgotten or ignored God’s love and care for us in the past? Have we rushed past prayer time and other space that allows us to spend time with God? Have we let other things take God’s place of importance in our lives? And have we allowed envy and hatred, or lack of forgiveness, or selfishness with our time and money, to prevent us from loving and caring for all the rest of God’s children here on earth? It might be a good time to get clear of all of that stuff, to write it in a big old list and burn it, or put it in a mental basket and pray over it, or confess it to a trusted person and be absolved of it, and so to offer it up to God and let go of it. And to let ourselves be wooed back into love and relationship with the God who desires us and longs for us, always. May we all of us remember and live into that love beyond all loves, now and throughout our lives. Amen.

Well, Lent has begun. It is a season of renewal and penitence, a season when we are encouraged to look more closely at our lives, to readdress our balance of time and energy, to focus more intently on our relationship to God and to each other. Often we use Lent as a time for each of us individually to work on our connection with God, but historically it is meant as a season for the whole community of the church. In the ‘invitation to Lent’ in the Ash Wednesday service we hear that in this season those preparing for baptism, for initiation into the community, intensified their readiness for baptism at Easter. And in this season those who had been ‘separated from the community because of notorious sins’ – whose actions had hurt the community, and thus they had been excommunicated for a time – were welcomed back into the body of Christ. In other words, Lent is a time for welcoming and welcoming back, growing and deepening our bonds with one another and with God.

On Ash Wednesday I encouraged you to look at this season as a time to work on relationship. Whatever disciplines you’re taking on or things you’re giving up, my suggestion is that you let the focus be on clearing the space and time to be in real loving relationship with other people – those in your own home and those you don’t know – and with God. Too often we can focus on weight loss or Bible reading or limiting our time on Facebook as if those are ends in themselves, Lent just another chance for self-improvement and self-focus. Instead, I encourage you to clear away what truly gets in the way of relationship and love, to focus your
[Read more ...]]]> RCL Year B, 1 Lent

Well, Lent has begun. It is a season of renewal and penitence, a season when we are encouraged to look more closely at our lives, to readdress our balance of time and energy, to focus more intently on our relationship to God and to each other. Often we use Lent as a time for each of us individually to work on our connection with God, but historically it is meant as a season for the whole community of the church. In the ‘invitation to Lent’ in the Ash Wednesday service we hear that in this season those preparing for baptism, for initiation into the community, intensified their readiness for baptism at Easter. And in this season those who had been ‘separated from the community because of notorious sins’ – whose actions had hurt the community, and thus they had been excommunicated for a time – were welcomed back into the body of Christ. In other words, Lent is a time for welcoming and welcoming back, growing and deepening our bonds with one another and with God.

On Ash Wednesday I encouraged you to look at this season as a time to work on relationship. Whatever disciplines you’re taking on or things you’re giving up, my suggestion is that you let the focus be on clearing the space and time to be in real loving relationship with other people – those in your own home and those you don’t know – and with God. Too often we can focus on weight loss or Bible reading or limiting our time on Facebook as if those are ends in themselves, Lent just another chance for self-improvement and self-focus. Instead, I encourage you to clear away what truly gets in the way of relationship and love, to focus your intention on doing what builds and grows love.

And luckily, one way of getting that message is to be attentive to the Bible readings we’re hearing in church. In our readings throughout this season we get to hear a lot about God’s love for us, especially in the form of covenants God makes with God’s people. A covenant is an agreement – like a contract but more than a contract. It is an establishing of relationship and the terms of that relationship. It’s a word and a concept used pretty heavily in scripture, particularly in the Hebrew scriptures: the people of Israel are people of the covenant, in a binding relationship with God based on commitment one to the other. God commits to be Israel’s god, and Israel commits to be God’s people. As Christians we understand the grace of Jesus’ death and resurrection as the new covenant with humanity: the relationship is now founded on different terms than it was before. But each form the covenant takes throughout scripture attests to God’s love for us.

Today we heard in the reading from Genesis about the first covenant, God’s promise made to Noah after the flood. The flood story is one that we tell so often in Sunday School that we can forget its deeper, darker import. It’s not just a story about an ark and some animals and a rainbow. It’s a story of God deciding on a new way of relating to us messed-up human beings. For the flood happens because God is grieved at the evil and wickedness of the people he has made – God suffers and sorrows over what has become of his beautiful creation, and so God determines to make a new start. God wipes out all but a remnant of that creation and starts again, and sets the rainbow as a promise that things will be different this time. It’s a frightening story, the idea that God could become so disgusted with us that God would simply want to wipe us out. But that’s not the whole story either. God doesn’t completely start over, make a whole new earth and creation – God preserves a part of the old to start with again, the same old spoiled creation the earth had before. And with the rainbow, God promises to limit Godself, never again to destroy the whole earth. Instead, God promises to live with the compromised and sinful and yet still beautiful mess that his perfect creation has evolved into. The rainbow is there not as a sign to us of this, but as a reminder to God – when God sees it, God will remember the covenant.

It’s also notable that the promise God makes, the covenant with Noah, is actually a covenant with all of creation, the whole earth. It’s not just with people. All of creation has been compromised by human sin – all of creation is out of whack.  The whole earth is ‘corrupt in God’s sight and filled with violence,’ as the flood story begins – a long ways from the original creation, when God calls everything good. And God is sorry he made human beings, because the whole earth is corrupted because of us. The Noah story reminds us that God is in relationship not just with us humans, but with all of creation – and that our behavior and actions toward creation matter to God. In the litany of forgiveness we say on Ash Wednesday, we confess our waste and pollution of creation. Our bad stewardship of the planet is not just sad for the generations to come – it is a sin against God.

But despite all of this, it’s as if with this covenant promise to Noah, God chooses to love us unconditionally from this time forward. After the flood, God promises that never again will he destroy it all, ‘for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth.’ It’s like God realizes that we can’t help ourselves. Nothing has changed in humanity or creation from before the flood to after. Humanity doesn’t get better; Noah doesn’t make any promises to God about what his descendants will do differently. Instead, it is God who decides to act differently. God says, I’m going to quit trying to change you – I’m going to love you the way you are. God chooses to continue to suffer and grieve our hardness of heart rather than to force us to be who he wants us to be. God allows even further the risk that we will turn away, and thereby allows us the freedom to love in return

It is a hard teaching to allow in to our hearts: God loves us no matter what. God does not love us in ignorance of how bad we really are; God knows all too well the depths to which human beings can sink. God does not promise to love us as long as we shape up and improve; God’s promise to limit God’s power of destruction is because God knows we can’t improve. Instead, God re-engages with us on newer, deeper terms – the way a marriage broken by infidelity can restart again with deeper love than before. God sees just how bad we can get, and God chooses to love us and stick with us anyway. What a message for us as we begin our Lent.

Because, get this: You might be hearing this thinking, yeah yeah, God loves you, the same old story we always hear, but what does it really mean to me? Well, you are not the exception to this. God doesn’t love everyone else except for you. Whatever stuff you’re carrying around with you, whatever darkness or bad memories or pettiness you have hidden away, none of that is an obstacle to God’s love for you. We make obstacles to relationship; God doesn’t. We might have all kinds of problems letting that be so; we might barely if ever make time for God in our lives; we might feel guilty that we don’t do more. Well, here’s yet another chance. The love God has for us doesn’t depend on our attention or right living or good theology. The foundation to our relationship with God is that God loves us, in full knowledge and acceptance of who we really are.

So let that be your discipline this week: instead of trying to be a better person or control your impulses or do good things so that God will be happier with you, start instead with the knowledge that God already loves you. God already loves you. Sit with that a little. See how much you can take that in. Try it for a minute today, as you wait to come to receive communion. Build up a little more each day – tomorrow try it for a minute and a half. God loves you. Now let that love redeem you. Amen.

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 ore and
[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
[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 says
[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.

Jesus did a lot of his teaching in parables, stories that had a point. Most of them are a little tricky to interpret, not straightforward – you have to kind of push on them to figure out what he is saying about the ways of God in the world. Not so with the one we just heard, the Parable of the Sower – in fact, Matthew even gives us the interpretation right off the bat. It’s not hard to see what Jesus is getting at with the story: the question he means to leave us is a challenge. What kind of soil are you? It’s not hard to understand – but the challenge is there all the same.

The theme we were working with at camp this week was the metaphor of the tree, talking about what makes our trees grow. We talked about deep roots, strong trunks, branches reaching up to the sun, and good soil. The deep roots are what we get from our families and friends, from places that are sacred to us, and deepest of all, from God’s
[Read more ...]]]> I just came back from a week at Family Camp, an intergenerational camp up at the Bishop’s Ranch in Healdsburg.  It was our family’s first time there, and it turned out to be a remarkable experience of Christian community, with people of all ages together in a beautiful place, worshiping and eating and laughing and singing for a week.  We spanned the ages from 10 weeks to 70-something.  It’s everything I want church to be, joyful and deeply connected to each other and God.  And it was right there in the middle of the vineyards of the Russian River Valley, the land around us rich with growing.  Good place to be thinking about the agricultural metaphors of scripture.

Jesus did a lot of his teaching in parables, stories that had a point.  Most of them are a little tricky to interpret, not straightforward – you have to kind of push on them to figure out what he is saying about the ways of God in the world.  Not so with the one we just heard, the Parable of the Sower – in fact, Matthew even gives us the interpretation right off the bat.  It’s not hard to see what Jesus is getting at with the story:  the question he means to leave us is a challenge.  What kind of soil are you?  It’s not hard to understand – but the challenge is there all the same.

The theme we were working with at camp this week was the metaphor of the tree, talking about what makes our trees grow.  We talked about deep roots, strong trunks, branches reaching up to the sun, and good soil.  The deep roots are what we get from our families and friends, from places that are sacred to us, and deepest of all, from God’s love.  Our trunks are strong when we are growing, adding year after year to our rings with nourishment, always stretching with new experiences.  Our branches reaching to the sun are our hopes and dreams, the desires that God uses to bring about God’s dream in the world.  And our soil – well, there are a lot of things that make up good soil.  Composting, breaking down old things into their nutrients, makes the soil rich for growing.

Anyone here have a compost bin or pile in your garden?  I just bought a compost bin for the rectory.  In New York we didn’t have a garbage disposal and no yard for putting in a compost bin, and so much of our garbage was full of food scraps going stinky in the heat.  Here I was determined to do it differently, to have our trash output be minimal.  (It will be more minimal when we can stop with the disposable diapers, but we’re still a ways off from that.)  So I went to the county offices and talked to one of their master composters – yes, there are people with such titles.  And I bought a compost bin called the Earth Machine, and now our eggshells and coffee grounds and apple cores and carrot tops are all going in there, to sit and be stirred around and cook up into soil.  It will take a while, but it will compost, and the soil it makes will be good, rich dirt, ready for new growth.

There are different kinds of soil to be, as Jesus points out in the parable.  There’s the hardpacked dirt of the path, so beaten down and hardened that nothing can possibly take root there and grow.  Maybe you’ve met people like that, people whose surfaces are so hard it’s like they’re shellacked.  Something has hurt them so badly, or scared them, that they’ve put up enormous walls between them and the rest of the world.  Or the work they do or the people they’ve been with have shown them that they do better when they’re always on their guard, looking for the weakness in others.  It’s sort of the reality-TV way of living.  It’s hard for God to find any way into hearts as hard as that.

Then there’s the rocky soil, where there’s just enough room for new shoots to sprout, but no room for roots to go down.  Something exciting like a week of camp or a Cursillo weekend comes along, and people get all thrilled and ecstatic with the experience – and then they go back home and nothing has really changed.  There are so many rocks in their soil, so many hard places they’re not willing to look at or change, that they’re nearly as impervious as the hard path.  Nothing can take root in them until they break up some of those rocks, allow God to come in and melt away some of their ice and heal their hard parts.  Until they allow that, no new growth can really happen.

And then there’s the thorny ground, the people so full of distractions that they instantly allow them to choke out anything real.  No time to spend on God’s love and on caring for others, because they’re busy with their career, with their social activities, with their wealth.  They might hear and desire some of what the gospel is saying, but very quickly other things move back in and take their attention.  You have to clear out space in your heart and mind and schedule to allow God in to work.  You can’t have it all, your selfish cares and God too.

So obviously we’re supposed to be the good soil, people in whom God can come and dwell and make a difference in the world.  And I’m throwing in the extra metaphor of compost into Jesus’ parable:  allowing our own composting to happen is how we become the good soil.  All of us have bits and pieces of our past that we wonder, what was the point of that? – places we lived for a while but then decided not to stay; education we pursued for a time and then didn’t complete; jobs we worked and then left; marriages or friendships that lasted for a while and then ended.  And we all have times of suffering too, illnesses or bad decisions or terrible losses that seem utterly pointless and without meaning.  At the time that we’re in that suffering we often resist hearing that any use might be made of it – it seems to us hard and pointless and nothing more.  But the truth is, none of that get wasted.  No wrong turns or painful or joyful times just disappear – they all go into making up who we are.  They can get broken down and stirred up, all of that making new growth possible for us.  We can let hard things make us bitter and hardened and unable to receive any of God’s love.  We can leave them unhealed and unexamined, big hard rocks in the way of growth.  We can try to distract ourselves with other things in the hopes that we’ll forget them.  But there’s a way to use them, all of our experiences. Instead of lingering in our hearts and hardening them, our lives can be composted, and turned into blessing.   How?  By offering them to God.  Here, God – here’s all of me, and all of my story.  Take it and use it.  Show me what use can be made of it.  Stir me up and make me good soil.  I want to grow.

It takes time, of course.  My compost bin manual tells me it will take 6 months or so for our food scraps to become compost.  It takes even longer than that for our life experiences to be composted – sometimes it takes years and years.  And sometimes it can feel for a very long time like nothing is happening.  But it doesn’t mean that nothing is.  Much of what happens in growth and in soil happens without our seeing it.  That’s why those time-elapsed films on the nature channel are so interesting – in real time, we can’t see the change or the growth happening.

But the thing is, nothing gets wasted.  You’ve heard the expression, God doesn’t make junk.  And you could add onto that, God doesn’t send anything to landfill, either.  God takes and uses what we are and where we’ve been, maybe in ways we never know, to make us good soil.  To make us people who bear fruit, thirty, sixty, a hundredfold – not simply returning what was put into us, but making more, fruit and nourishment for us and others of God’s children.  It’s good ecology.  It’s way better than what we’d design.

That’s why we say in the church, wherever you are on your journey, you are welcome here.  Because it’s true.  Wherever we are, God meets us.  Ready to work with us.  Ready to take our whole selves, good, bad, and ugly, and remake us, to compost us into good soil.  We don’t have to hold parts of ourselves away, thinking that they’re somehow not worthy of God.  We don’t have to pretend things didn’t happen, seal off bad memories from ourselves.  All of us is acceptable – all of us is good for making new things grow.  May we allow our master composter to do his work, and bring forth the harvest.  Amen.

Doesn’t some part of you just go ‘ahhhh’ when you hear those words? I know I do. I’m always longing for rest, I’m always wishing I could sleep in or take a nap or just lie around. It’s never possible with small children, of course, something I didn’t fully understand before I became a parent. There’s lots of ways they trick you into it. But I suspect it’s not just me that longs for rest of one kind or another, even on this long holiday weekend in summer. Which one of us couldn’t use more rest, wouldn’t rather lay down some burden or another that we have been carrying? Burdens of all kinds, in our relationships, in our to-do lists, in our hearts. Not to mention in our daily schedules.

We all know how it is. All of the great labor-saving devices of the last century, heralded as the technology that would bring us all leisure time, somehow only made us busier. The dishwasher was supposed to change our lives – remember the advertisements with the smiling happy housewife? Why do we still fall for this with the latest gadget from Apple? Instead of ending up with more open time, our life has only gotten more fast-paced – we’ve filled in the gaps. We may spend less time shuffling paper and writing longhand, but we spend even more time in emails and online. Even our children have too much scheduling in their lives now, busy going from lessons to practice to lessons again, rarely getting the chance to just play outdoors. ‘Family time’ or ‘date night’ becomes something we have to schedule on the calendar in advance, or it doesn’t happen
[Read more ...]]]> ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.’

Doesn’t some part of you just go ‘ahhhh’ when you hear those words?  I know I do.  I’m always longing for rest, I’m always wishing I could sleep in or take a nap or just lie around.  It’s never possible with small children, of course, something I didn’t fully understand before I became a parent.  There’s lots of ways they trick you into it.  But I suspect it’s not just me that longs for rest of one kind or another, even on this long holiday weekend in summer.   Which one of us couldn’t use more rest, wouldn’t rather lay down some burden or another that we have been carrying?  Burdens of all kinds, in our relationships, in our to-do lists, in our hearts.  Not to mention in our daily schedules.

We all know how it is.  All of the great labor-saving devices of the last century, heralded as the technology that would bring us all leisure time, somehow only made us busier.  The dishwasher was supposed to change our lives – remember the advertisements with the smiling happy housewife? Why do we still fall for this with the latest gadget from Apple?  Instead of ending up with more open time, our life has only gotten more fast-paced – we’ve filled in the gaps.  We may spend less time shuffling paper and writing longhand, but we spend even more time in emails and online.  Even our children have too much scheduling in their lives now, busy going from lessons to practice to lessons again, rarely getting the chance to just play outdoors.  ‘Family time’ or ‘date night’ becomes something we have to schedule on the calendar in advance, or it doesn’t happen at all.  Coming to church on a Sunday becomes one more morning we have to get up early – unless a sports tournament or other commitments call us elsewhere, of course.  Prayer becomes something we mutter quickly on our way out the door, if at all.  We are all overscheduled, overhurried, too busy to get to know our neighbors, just too busy all around.  We need rest.

And yet there are reasons for all of this busyness.  We’re trying to do a good job at the work we do, and so we spend long hours at it.  We’re trying to stay involved in the life of our communities – and church – and that means meetings and volunteer hours on the calendar.  We’re trying to give our kids good educations, forming them as well-rounded people, and that means lots of activities on their calendars as well. Somehow all of these good intentions result in us feeling fatigued and stretched too thin.  What should have been a good idea just is not good for us in the end.

This experience of good intentions going awry is one the apostle Paul was familiar with – the reading from Romans today expresses his frustration with himself.  He writes, ‘I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.’  Trying to live a life of devotion to God, following the law as a good Jew, Paul finds nevertheless that his whole effort gets warped.  The authentic relationship he seeks with God gets perverted into something else, and right where he sought to find life and energy, he finds only fatigue and death.  We all know what it’s like to try to do what is right when the temptation to do otherwise is so alluring.  But Paul goes beyond even that, saying that the power of sin is so great that it can take our best intentions, our greatest efforts to find life and truth, and turn them against us.  Sin for Paul is a power unto itself, leading us away from God, and it uses any means possible to do so.  I’m reminded of an image from the Harry Potter books, the moving staircases at Hogwarts School:  even as you climb up them towards one place, they move and redirect you towards another.  And there you suddenly are in the place you didn’t want to get to at all.   Paul is talking about something like that:  You wanted to find rest, and instead you are more exhausted than ever.  You made resolutions to be a better person and wound up too busy to see your friends or be there for your kids.  You aren’t where you meant to be.  Your picture of how things should be somehow doesn’t match up with what’s really there.

Jesus laments this tendency of ours as well – he talks about John the Baptist’s ministry and his own ministry, and how neither of them were welcomed by the people they came to serve.  People didn’t want someone reminding them of repentance, they wanted to celebrate, so they didn’t like John the Baptist.  People didn’t want someone full of freedom and joy, they wanted rules to follow, and so they didn’t like Jesus.  It wasn’t that we are out-and-out trying to reject God.  It’s just that our picture of the right way to be keeps us from accepting God’s way to be.  We are so full of our own intentions, and so sure of the rightness of our intentions, that we can’t accept what we’re being offered.  Even when it’s just what we need.  Paul cries, ‘Wretched man that I am!  Who will rescue me from this??’

And that cry of desperation is often what we have to get to before anything can happen.  Wise and intelligent as we are, we hide the truth from ourselves, thinking that if we just try hard enough we can get there on our own.  If we just take control of our schedule, if we just focus a little harder, our lives will be how we want them to be.  And what Paul writes, and what Jesus says in Matthew’s gospel, is forget it.  It is Christ Jesus who sets us free, it is God who does what we cannot do, it is the Spirit who gives life.  Let go of your picture of how it has to be.  God has a better idea.

Jesus says that the good news is revealed to infants and not the wise – infants, after all, do not need to be persuaded of their need; they are dependent and don’t imagine themselves to be otherwise.  They don’t carry the burden of ‘how it has to be.’  All through the gospels Jesus makes it clear – the wise, the rich, the intelligent, the educated, they all have the hardest time hearing his message.  It’s the poor and outcast who receive it gladly.  Those who believe themselves to be well, he says, have no need of a physician – those who know themselves to be sick know they need the doctor’s help.  And we have a very hard time admitting we are sick.  One writer commented that one of the hardest phrases for Americans to utter is ‘I can’t.’  We want to think we can do everything, we’re trained to think we can, even when we see over and over again that it doesn’t work.  Admitting need is a wretched thing, even though in every part of our lives we keep coming up short.  From the hectic work schedule to the abandoned prayer life, the basic spiritual problem pervades all.  We don’t just need help when the crisis comes – we need it all the time.

Jesus says, ‘Come…and learn from me.’  Learn from me as teacher, learn Me as the subject.  Get reeducated. Learn gentleness and humility of heart; learn to live according to the Spirit and have life and peace.  The way of Jesus is a reshaping of every part of ourselves, everything we do in life. It’s not something we can schedule into an hour a week on our calendars; it’s not something we can make happen on our own at all.  It is a lifelong learning that leads to a whole change of mind-set, setting our minds on what gives life, accepting God’s free gift of grace.  It is a gift freely offered, a rescuing already accomplished – but it does require us to take it in our hands, cooperate with the rescue, follow the one who leads.  The yoke is easy and the burden is light.  You know that sounds good.

So how do we put this into practice?  You might start with your calendar.  Take a typical week and mark it with different colored pens.  Here’s what I do that gives me and others life, makes our hearts sing and lifts us up.  Here’s what I have to do to keep food on the table and take care of my loved ones.  Here’s the time where I zone out in front of the TV.  Here’s the time I spend bickering with my spouse, or complaining with my neighbors about things I don’t like, or in fruitless quests at the mall for the right object that won’t please me at all in the end.  All of that you might call death-dealing – it’s certainly not life-giving.  How’s the balance between these things?  What would happen if you let go of some of those death-dealing things – and maybe instead spent that time calling your brother on the phone, the one you haven’t talked to in months?  Or doing some repairs for the lady down the street, or taking food to the Santa Maria mission?  Or how about sitting in stillness under a tree, listening to how the wind blows through it?  There’s any number of ways to trade in your heavy burden for the light yoke.  It probably needs to start with giving something up – letting go of a burden.  But it’s not simply that:  it’s also about allowing God to direct you with what you do instead.  Letting go of the need to control it all, and allowing the light yoke to rest on your shoulders instead.  Letting God have a better idea.

So my prayer for us on this Independence Day weekend is paradoxical, I suppose.  It’s that we might embrace our dependence.  That we might stop and listen to God’s voice, spoken in scripture, in our community, in the quiet of our own hearts.  And that we might let go of how things ‘have to be’ – and find rest in how God would have us be instead.  Amen.

Genuine hospitality builds relationships and friendships and smoothes social connections. But it can also be a spiritual discipline. During Lent I offered a series of adult forums on spiritual disciplines, and we talked about hospitality as one of them. I asked those in the group to share examples of giving or receiving hospitality. People had wonderful stories of traveling in foreign countries or cities and being welcomed by strangers, of large Thanksgiving dinners with everyone invited, of visiting churches and being greeted with genuine welcome. Opening our home or our dinner table to another is a way of allowing others into our lives. Come in, we say – make yourself at home here. And the idea of hospitality can extend beyond our homes: opening our hearts and souls to God is hospitality too, allowing
[Read more ...]]]> With the summer solstice this last week, I think we can officially say that summer has begun. Happy summer!  Among other things, summer is a time of both traveling and welcoming travelers to our homes, time when the guest room gets used more often.  As many of you know, I’ve just been traveling, staying in three different homes (and one tent) over the last two weeks.  There is nothing quite like the gift of arriving late after long travel to a home where you are offered a glass of cool water or a cup of tea, a meal, a comfortable bed, a front door key and the freedom to come and go.  Hospitality done well is good for the body, giving us the rest and the nourishment we need, but it is even more so good for the soul – allaying our anxieties about being in a strange place, about imposing on others, about doing the right thing.  It is a wonderful thing when practiced well.

Genuine hospitality builds relationships and friendships and smoothes social connections.  But it can also be a spiritual discipline.  During Lent I offered a series of adult forums on spiritual disciplines, and we talked about hospitality as one of them.  I asked those in the group to share examples of giving or receiving hospitality.  People had wonderful stories of traveling in foreign countries or cities and being welcomed by strangers, of large Thanksgiving dinners with everyone invited, of visiting churches and being greeted with genuine welcome.  Opening our home or our dinner table to another is a way of allowing others into our lives.  Come in, we say – make yourself at home here.  And the idea of hospitality can extend beyond our homes:  opening our hearts and souls to God is hospitality too, allowing God to come in and make himself at home.   And we can receive that hospitality from God as well, making our home in God, trusting the welcome that is there.  There’s a vulnerability in all of this, a willingness to give and to receive without worrying about the balance sheet.  It’s not a bargaining move – I’ll trade you this for that – but simply a gift.

Which is perhaps why it is so hard to do sometimes. You have to go out of your way to be hospitable.  You have to drop what you’re doing and your plans for things and provide for the other.  And you have to do the same as a guest, allowing the rules of the house you stay in to be the rules you live by.  In order to practice genuine hospitality, you have to let go a little.  And when that hospitality extends to God, you sometimes have to let go a lot.

Jesus talks about hospitality in that bit of the gospel we heard, telling us to welcome others in his name.  His was a culture where hospitality mattered a great deal – social life revolved around giving and receiving hospitality, a remnant from the desert days when hospitality meant survival in a harsh, tribal land.  But hospitality wasn’t simply an exchange between individuals.  When you welcomed someone into your home, you welcomed the group they belonged to as well.  You welcomed them in the name of that larger family or tribe they were a part of, honoring that whole group by honoring the one. And your welcoming symbolized the welcoming given by your whole tribe.  And likewise, the way your guests received your hospitality symbolized their tribe’s graciousness to yours.   So Jesus was saying, whoever welcomes these little ones – his followers and disciples, perhaps especially those new to the faith – in the name of Jesus, were honoring Jesus himself.  And to the little ones – the followers of Jesus, which includes us, those new to the faith and those more seasoned – Jesus is saying, be good guests – receive what you are given.   It is given in my name.

Now hold onto that thought for a moment, because now we have to talk about that Genesis reading.  The story of Abraham and Isaac, the sacrifice of Isaac, isn’t a story we can just let float by.  I always shudder a little inside when someone tells me excitedly that they’ve started reading the Bible, and they’re starting from the beginning in Genesis.  Because in the midst of all the great stories in Genesis, it’s not long before you run into troubling passages – and this is one of the hardest.  This story is told in chilling detail, the tension mounting by the line, and even when everything works out ok in the end, we’re not relieved.  Because what does it say about God, this story of the horrific command to Abraham to sacrifice his only child?  Especially knowing that this the same son who was so long-awaited to Sarah and Abraham in their old age.  Is this God cruel, or just capricious?  And almost as chilling is how silently Abraham obeys the command, getting all the tools together and leading his son up the mountain to sacrifice.

There are scripture passages that are simply bewildering.  And I think it does not serve us well to gloss over them or try to lump them into our picture of a gentle loving God.  Maybe, in fact, this story is just what counsels against that.  Isaac is not just Abraham’s only and beloved son – he is also the symbol of the promise God gave to Abraham, that he would be the ancestor of many and a blessing to the world.  Without Isaac, there’s no way for this to happen.  Or at least, from Abraham’s perspective, there’s no way.  I wonder what he thinks as he trudges up the mountain.  But you notice, the one answer Abraham gives to Isaac as they make their way to the sacrifice is that God will provide – and when Isaac is spared and a ram is sacrificed in his place, Abraham names the site ‘God will provide.’  Somehow, despite his own understanding of God’s promise and how it should work out, Abraham is able to trust God even when it seems that he is being asked to let go of the promise itself.  And his trust is rewarded.  God knows that Abraham has ultimate faith and trust; now Abraham himself knows that he has ultimate faith and trust; and God does provide, and Isaac lives, and the promise is fulfilled.  It’s a hardball way of going about showing this to Abraham – but, well, I’d be lying if I said God never plays hardball.  God is more than the gentle and loving picture we make him out to be.  But that’s a whole ‘nother sermon in itself.

I don’t think these two scripture passages are necessarily intended to go together, but something does emerge from the two of them that strikes me.  Abraham has to let go of the symbol of God’s promise – has to let go of his own son and his love for him – in order to realize how fully he trusts God, to see how true it is that God will provide.  He has to drop what he is holding onto in order to open himself completely to God’s desires for him, God’s fierce and uncompromising love.  To be hospitable to God, Abraham has to turn himself and Isaac over to God’s care, completely – to trust completely in God’s hospitality, God’s providing for them.  Maybe it’s only then that God’s promise is really fully able to come true.

We have to let go of things in order to truly welcome another, whether that other is God or human being.  It’s not genuine hospitality to expect the guest to do things exactly our way, to conform to our spoken and unspoken codes of conduct.   Nor is it being a good guest to expect the household to shape itself around you.  As one writer put it, hospitality ‘means welcoming in a way that is true to the integrity and character and goals of the one being welcomed.’  We seek the good of another person, in other words – not acting with the hope of reward or return, but simply because to do so is to welcome God.  And to welcome God is itself our reward – the reward of full and complete love, the trust that God will provide, the allaying of our anxieties over all the things we worry about.

Abraham’s lesson is a harsh one.  But intermingled with the terror, there is that theme of God’s providence, of the assurance that each one of is given that God truly can be trusted, no matter how bleak the situation.  With that kind of trust, we can let go – truly let go, receive another person as who they are, allow ourselves to be received for who we are.  It is the best kind of hospitality we can offer – to those who come our way in these weeks of summer, to those we reach out to at ECA, to those we know and those who are strangers.  May we each be given the power to let go, and to receive.  Amen.

Today we celebrate the feast of the Martyrs of Sudan whose icon is before us. You are closely connected with these martyrs because most of the children which you sponsor through the Sudanese Youth Opportunity fund are the children and grandchildren of the martyrs. In the first letter of Peter we hear, The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner…once your were not a people, but now you are God’s people; (I Peter 2) In many ways this phrase describes the reality of the Church of Sudan. When European missionaries came to Sudan in the mid-1800s they came as appendages to imperial economic interests, primarily of Italy and England. In 1899 Egypt formed a condominium with Great Brittan in order to jointly rule this vast territory. The Arab-Egyptian interest of course was driven by Muslims imperialism whose mission since the 7th century had been Islamization of all of Africa.

The Kingdom of Nubia, located in what is now Sudan, had become Christian in the 4th century, had eighteen dioceses, and survived waves of attacks by Arab Muslims begun in 642. Their Christian kingdom finally collapsed in the 15th century.

The Christian missionaries, including our own Anglican missionaries from Scotland, carried all of the European prejudices against people of color. In their eyes the native population of south Sudan was inferior, culturally, not possessing the intellectual capacity to be educated beyond being servants and field hands. Certainly they were not capable of self-governance. The “White man’s burden” was in full play. These imperial representatives looked to the politically connected Arabs of Northern Sudan as having the intellectual capacity and sophistication to benefit from formal learning and the developmental skills of self- governance.

Consequently, in the nearly
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Icon of the Martyrs painted by Awer Bul

Today we celebrate the feast of the Martyrs of Sudan whose icon is before us. You are closely connected with these martyrs because most of the children which you sponsor through the Sudanese Youth Opportunity fund are the children and grandchildren of the martyrs. In the first letter of Peter we hear, The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner…once your were not a people, but now you are God’s people; (I Peter 2) In many ways this phrase describes the reality of the Church of Sudan. When European missionaries came to Sudan in the mid-1800s they came as appendages to imperial economic interests, primarily of Italy and England. In 1899 Egypt formed a condominium with Great Brittan in order to jointly rule this vast territory. The Arab-Egyptian interest of course was driven by Muslims imperialism whose mission since the 7th century had been Islamization of all of Africa.

The Kingdom of Nubia, located in what is now Sudan, had become Christian in the 4^th century, had eighteen dioceses, and survived waves of attacks by Arab Muslims begun in 642.  Their Christian kingdom finally collapsed in the 15^th century.

The Christian missionaries, including our own Anglican missionaries from Scotland, carried all of the European prejudices against people of color.  In their eyes the native population of south Sudan was inferior, culturally, not possessing the intellectual capacity to be educated beyond being servants and field hands.  Certainly they were not capable of self-governance.  The “White man’s burden” was in full play.  These imperial representatives looked to the politically connected Arabs of Northern Sudan as having the intellectual capacity and sophistication to benefit from formal learning and the developmental skills of self- governance.

Consequently, in the nearly sixty years of Anglo-Egyptian rule the North saw the flourishing of schools and universities, of medical institutes and the establishment of western forms of government and commerce.  The South was marked by neglect.  A handful of schools could be found by the 1940s with only one high school for a region larger than Texas…all the schools were for boys.  There were several regional hospitals but virtually no roads – only river travel on the White and Blue Niles and their tributaries.  Hundreds of villages, scattered for hundreds of miles, did not benefit from most of these resources. The inheritors of Anglo-Egyptian rule, the Government of Sudan in Khartoum, continued this prejudice.  Virtually no schools were built in the majority of areas after 1956 when Sudan won its independence.  Where schools did exist only Muslim could attend.

In the context of Sudan, the stone that was rejected were the southern tribes. The rejecters were the Muslim Arab and Christian European.   Remember what I said about the imperial perceptions that these people were not capable of self-governance?  Last February 98.5% of all registered voters in South Sudan and over a half million living in the Diaspora, or in exiled – including in the US – voted in the Referendum with 99% overwhelmingly choosing to create a new nation.  Our own highly “sophisticate” country has never gotten close to that record of turning out to vote.

A rejected people is the context in which the Church of Sudan was born in 1906.  Today, against great odds, it is among the fastest growing parts of the Anglican Communion.  At the heart of their faith is the knowledge that they, the stone which the Arab and European builders rejected, has, in fact become the very head of the cornerstone:  the pivotal element of a new building – a new society and a new Church.

The words of First Letter of Peter resonate within them:  Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people.

In 2006 I was invited by the Church of Sudan to join in the celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of the Episcopal Church among the tribes of the Upper Nile.   Through a series of failed communications no one from the Church of England, no one from our own Episcopal Church headquarters or any other Anglican Church Province knew that this was occurring.  I and the director of a Sudanese ministry in Denver were the only non-Sudanese among 10,000 who marked this event at a place called Malek.   We were in this ruined and abandoned village because Sudanese clergy reached out to us and said that we needed to be there.  There was something shameful that, after a century of struggle, the rest of the Church still treated Sudan as a rejected stone.  The officials did not even appear…even though the Church of Sudan has 4 million members – twice as many as in our own Episcopal Church and none of the clergy are paid.

Earlier in First Peter we heard “Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight…let yourselves be built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood.

Let me tell you about Malek which is only a few miles from the village of Anyety where most of the children that you sponsor were born.  In 1906 three missionaries from the Episcopal Church of Scotland came to this bend in the White Nile.   For three years they labored to learn the Dinka language and to preach the Gospel.  None of the Dinka were interested in a new religion.   They had resisted foreign missionaries for twelve centuries, first holding off the incursion of Muslims and then the English.  They held the line to prevent penetration further south from the Sahara desert.

After four years two of the missionaries abandoned their post, sick and dissolutioned.  The third, a priest by the name of Archibald Shaw refused to leave.  You might say he went native.  The Dinka are legendary cattle raisers.  Like the Lakota’s relationship to the buffalo, the cow, which refers to both male and female cattle, is the carrier of the soul of the people.  Each one has its own name, and at the birth of a child or in the rites of passage the child or youth is given the name of a cow that they will carry the rest of their lives.  Shaw bought cows, multiplied his herd and then gave them away to the widows and the poor.  When he was in the cattle camps he went naked like all the other men.  He set up a school and clinic at Malek.  He dug a small lagoon with an iron fence that would let in the waters from the Nile for the children and women to bath in without the fear of being attached by crocodiles.  He was patient but continued to care for the needs of the people.  After 16 years he baptized his first person, an orphan boy who had been cast out by everyone in the village.  From that point on, however, there was only a tickle of people converted from animism.  Even though other Episcopal and Roman Catholic missionaries eventually came, by 1932 only 38 baptisms had taken place in the Upper Nile, a region larger than California, Nevada and Arizona.

So 10,000 people, fellow Episcopalians gathered at Malek in February 2006.  What happened?  Some had walked with very little food or water for six to ten days  in 100 + degree weather.   When we arrived in a military convoy with dignitaries of the Church of Sudan and the Government we were greeted with waves of dancing choirs lead by ancient priests and grandmothers dressed in white with red sashes carrying hand crosses.  The joy was palpable.

At night as I lay on my mat on the ground under a mosquito net I listened to the on-going songs of choirs disbursed through out the forest.   They sang some of the six thousand hymns that have been written since the second civil war began in 1983.  These hymns embodied the spirit, the knowledge of what is written in First Peter:  Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight…let yourselves be built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood.

I fell asleep literally surrounded by a holy priesthood of ten thousand.

So what happened?  38 baptized Christians in 1932, now nine to ten million.   Slowly the work of Shaw and others had begun to make a mark.  By 1983 only 5% of the population was Christian when the second civil war began in 1983.   Sharia Law was imposed by the Khartoum Government on threat of death for all who did not convert to Isalm.  An intentional policy of genocide against all males was implemented.   Village after village would be attacked, burned to the ground and all males, including infants in their mother’s arms were slaughtered if captured.  Unimaginable violations of the women and girls took place with many of the girls taken as slaves to be sold throughout the Arab world.

So immense was the reality of evil that descended upon the people that the old animist religious systems collapsed.  The beliefs and practices could not bring comfort or reassurance to the people in their devastation.  Foreign missionaries had been expelled from Sudan by Khartoum in the 1970s.  The people discovered another force among them.  There was another religious way that was being lived out by fellow Sudanese who where suffering as they were suffering, who were being attacked as they were being attacked, who were starving as they were starving and yet proclaimed a message of hope and love in the midst of all this destruction.

It was the bishops and lay evangelists, the men and women priests, the youth leaders and members of the Mother’s Union (their Episcopal Church Women) that carried the same message we have heard this morning:  You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. (I Peter 2:10) So profound was this message from within the people that by 2006 nearly 85% of the people were either Roman Catholic or Episcopalian, nearly ten million faithful.

But why the celebration at Malek?  This ruined village is like their Mt. Sinai, their Jerusalem, their Canterbury, their Washington DC.  It is the place where the faith was founded, where their leaders for generations were educated and where hope was kept alive…that is until the fourth week of Advent. 1987.  The Arabs knowing the sacredness of this place launched an all out assault on Malek, its church of St. Andrews, its hospital and schools and the surrounding village.  When it was over the ground for miles was covered in bodies.  On December 24 a Norwegian journalist who had survived the massacre could not believe his eyes.  People were forming lines and beginning to sing what he came to find out were Christmas Carols.  They processed to the ruins of the church stepping over the bodies of their dead or wounded family members and friends.  He asked someone, “What are you doing?”  He said, “We can do no other.  Today is the eve of our Lord’s birth.  We are his and we must give thanks for his life.”  After their prayers and hymns they went back to care for the wounded, bury the dead and then disburse into the wilderness to hide.  A tangible sign of the martyrs is with us. In this bowl is dirk from the ruined church of St. Andrew’s where the blood of several thousand martyrs was shed.

Nineteen years later, in 2006 they had returned to Malek for the first time.  The church was demolished; the forest was growing through the ruins of the hospital and schools.  But they had come back to Jerusalem, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.  They came to celebrate being one people, to give thanks for the martyrs who gave them life and the deep faith that was planted by their blood.

We, too are members of this royal priest, this holy nation, because through baptism we are God’s own people.  Come then, and let us celebrate the feast of our martyred brothers and sisters of Sudan.

Alleluia, we are risen with the martyrs of Sudan in Christ.  Alleluia!

The Rev. Jerry Drino, Executive Director of  Hope With Sudan www.hopewithsudan.org

There’s this long prayer towards the end of John’s gospel, the last words from Jesus before his arrest and crucifixion. John means for us to hear in this prayer a kind of summing-up of Jesus, everything he was here to show and say spoken aloud in prayer for his followers. What we just heard in the gospel reading was part of that, and Jesus prays specifically for his followers – his disciples, and all those who would be his followers in time to come, which includes us – that God might protect them, us, so that we may be one, as God and Jesus are one. It’s a prayer we still need.

This line from scripture has spawned all kinds of activity in the church throughout the ages. Elizabeth I brought an end to the bloody fighting between Catholics and Protestants in England by insisting on unity in worship and tolerance in other areas – people can believe what they like, she said, that is none of my business – I do not wish to have a window onto their souls – but we will worship
[Read more ...]]]> You might have heard of a series of novels called the Left Behind series, dealing with what happens in the world after the rapture takes the few away, leaving the rest behind.  You could say that the Sunday after the Ascension, the day in the church year we’re on now, is the Left Behind Sunday – Jesus has been taken up into heaven, the Holy Spirit won’t be here till Pentecost, and in the meantime, we’re left behind.  No, that’s not really true of where we are – but it seems to play out that way in the story, at least.  So it seems like the logical question in the story is, what now?

There’s this long prayer towards the end of John’s gospel, the last words from Jesus before his arrest and crucifixion.  John means for us to hear in this prayer a kind of summing-up of Jesus, everything he was here to show and say spoken aloud in prayer for his followers.  What we just heard in the gospel reading was part of that, and Jesus prays specifically for his followers – his disciples, and all those who would be his followers in time to come, which includes us – that God might protect them, us, so that we may be one, as God and Jesus are one.  It’s a prayer we still need.

This line from scripture has spawned all kinds of activity in the church throughout the ages.  Elizabeth I brought an end to the bloody fighting between Catholics and Protestants in England by insisting on unity in worship and tolerance in other areas – people can believe what they like, she said, that is none of my business – I do not wish to have a window onto their souls – but we will worship according to one rite, and so be in unity.  Richard Hooker, a theologian of the early English church, continued the theme by arguing that there were things essential and things inessential to the faith, and that tolerance of differences in things inessential – like church structure and minor doctrinal matters – would preserve unity in the important things.  The ecumenical movement in modern times, especially the last half-century or so, sought to find the ways that different Christian denominations could agree and unite, setting aside historical arguments over differences.  And the plea for unity has been a lively part of the debate in the Anglican Communion over the last decade, as those worried over the increasing conflicts of culture have begged that no churches make any moves that will compromise our unity.

Of course, what all this activity is really about is the fact that despite Jesus’ fervent prayer for us, Christians have not done a terrifically good job of being one as God and Jesus are one.  Before the canonical scriptures were even finished, while John’s gospel itself was being written, Christians were already arguing with one another in councils and letters about who was a real follower of Jesus and what Jesus really meant.  And so it has gone, through the centuries.  I rather wonder that Jesus hasn’t given up on us yet.

When I was preparing for our conflict and reconciliation gathering this last week, I was looking at liturgies and rituals for forgiveness.  I came across a blog that described the Russian Orthodox practice that begins their season of Lent.  At the end of a penitential vespers service, with many prayers and scriptures stressing our own sinfulness and need for God’s forgiveness, the Orthodox do this amazing thing.  Everyone stands in a circle, and beginning with the priest, each person turns to another person there individually, and asks their forgiveness.  Each person in turn offers forgiveness to the other, and then the two embrace.  Each then turns to another person and repeats the process.  With a good-sized congregation, this can take an hour or more to do.  At the end of it, every person has both asked for and received forgiveness from every other person present, and every person has embraced every other person present.  (I thought of doing this on Wednesday night, but we all seemed a little tired and ready to go by the end of things, so I held off.  But next Lent, watch for it!)  The woman writing the blog, the wife of an Orthodox priest, commented that the devil must go mad at this, all these people forgiving and loving each other.  It’s the opposite of our usual practice in daily life.

Jesus prays to God to protect us, so that we can have this kind of love for each other.  In other words, he knows we’ll have a hard time doing it otherwise.  The letter from 1 Peter talks about the devil as our adversary, like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.  Devour is a good word for it – we talk about people being ‘eaten up’ by jealousy, or ‘consumed’ with hatred.  We all know what this feels like, I think, when something inside of us rises up, our anger with another person overwhelms us, and we are miles away from being able to love that person.  Whether we call it the devil or just our own worst nature, it’s there.  However you want to understand it, something tears at our relationships and makes it terribly hard for us to be truly loving.

I think one of the things that makes it most difficult is our need to be right.  Whether it’s Christians fighting with other Christians or different religions fighting or people of no religion at all, we stake a lot on our side of the issue.  We feel pretty certain that we have the right take on the situation, the grasp of the whole truth.  Sometimes when we’re not so certain we act all the more like we are.  In my family we always knew that the louder and more authoritative Dad got, the less he knew about the subject at hand.  And how many of us in marriage or other close relationships have found ourselves in the heat of an argument saying things that are just really absurd, having painted ourselves into a corner somehow but being too pigheaded to come back out of it?  No, I’ve never done that either.  But whether we think we’re winning or losing the fight, we tell ourselves that we’re really in the right, not the other person or group.  It’s pride, maybe, or a fear of being vulnerable – or maybe those are really the same thing.  Whatever it is, it’s in all of us.

The church’s various attempts at unity over the years have one thing in common:  in each of those situations, folks had some sense that relationship matters more than insisting on being right.   It’s not the language they used in the time of the English Reformation, but Elizabeth I certainly wanted an end to the fighting that was tearing apart her kingdom.  Creating an atmosphere of peace and tolerance was more important to her than proving which side was right and making everyone else go along with it.  The ecumenical movement’s goals have also been to prioritize relationship over differences, proposing that churches do nothing separately that they can do together.  And even in the fumbling, painful way that it has played out, Episcopalians and Anglicans in this last decade have been trying to keep relationships whole – though just how you do that has been a matter of debate itself.  We have had a hard time letting go of determining who is right in this conflict, I think – we haven’t done a good job of living out Elizabeth’s vision.

It’s hard to do.  Especially when we believe in our heart of hearts that my way, my idea, my set of beliefs is Right, it is very hard to step back and graciously allow those who think differently the room to coexist with us.  In our personal relationships and in our communities, we can get caught up in conflict, and let that damage our love for one another.  Sometimes the things that are inessential loom large; we forget that we do agree on the essentials.  Or we disagree about just what is and isn’t essential.  And so we lose ourselves in argument and bickering.

Jesus talks about giving us eternal life, the eternal life of knowing God. Eternal life, as the gospel of John uses the term, is about love.  We don’t have eternal life all by ourselves in some far off cloud.  Eternal life is something we live out now, in our relationship with God and with one another.  It is a state of being one, being one with God and being one with each other.  It means even in our misguided, misdirected human way, we’re supposed to try for unity.  And doing that requires humility, the sense that we perhaps don’t have all the answers, and the sense that we do need others after all.  Humility means knowing ourselves truthfully – knowing ourselves to be neither more nor less than we really are.  And what we are, each of us, are children of God, intended to be in relationship with all the rest of God’s children.  The more we are willing to open ourselves to others in love, the closer we are to eternal life.

So the next time you feel that consuming feeling rising up in you; the next time you hear yourself making disparaging comments about people you read about in the paper or the neighbor down the street; the next time you find yourself adamant about your stand on an issue, pause for a moment.  Pray for a moment.  Pray for God’s protection; pray for God’s help in loving others; pray Jesus’ prayer that you and others might be one, even as God and Jesus are one.  And see if being right is as important as you think it is.  My bet is, probably not.  The love of God, eternal life, seems like a better way to spend our energy.

It does seem to be that when someone gets to know another person, they’re less inclined to exclude them – that is, when people are against a category of people, like women priests or gays, and then they get to know a person in that category, they tend to change their mind. Not always, but usually. Because it’s
[Read more ...]]]> One of the first churches I worked in after I was ordained was a church in Berkeley, St Clement’s.  While I was in seminary in Berkeley, we had known of it as ‘that weird church that only uses the 1928 prayer book and doesn’t like women clergy.’  But we hadn’t quite had the full picture, and besides, things had shifted – so the rector hired me as the first woman priest for that congregation.  I was amazed that I had the chance to be ‘the first’ so long after women’s ordination became the norm.  And mostly the novelty went over with little comment from the congregation, which showed that they had been pretty ready for this change.  There were a few, however, who were still opposed to women’s ordination, and who let it be known that my coming did not change that.  If I presided at the Eucharist, they would not come up for communion; if my male rector presided, they would.  But I tried to consider them my parishioners like all the others, chatting with them at coffee hour and the like.  After I’d been there a few years, one day when I had celebrated the Eucharist, one of the men quietly slipped up to the communion rail and stretched out his hands.  I gave him the bread and moved on down the rail.  I didn’t mention it and neither did he, but from then on, he took communion from me.

It does seem to be that when someone gets to know another person, they’re less inclined to exclude them – that is, when people are against a category of people, like women priests or gays, and then they get to know a person in that category, they tend to change their mind.  Not always, but usually.  Because it’s different when you know somebody.  It’s harder to keep your prejudices.

Jesus told his friends, I will send you another Advocate, the Spirit of truth.  The world can’t receive the Spirit of truth, because it doesn’t see or know this Spirit.  But you, my friends, can, because you know me, and the Spirit of truth is already in you.  In other words, Jesus’ disciples had spent time with him.  They knew him.  They didn’t always understand him and what he was about, but they were in relationship with him.  And in that relationship, they could receive the truth of him – they could begin to hear what he was there to say, and know God in him, hearing God’s voice through him.  But without that kind of relationship, hearing is hard to do; it’s hard to trust what a stranger is up to.

Sometimes we forget that.  Our cultural climate now is pretty loaded against getting to know and listening to people we don’t agree with.  There was a time when people tended to live more or less where they were brought up, so that the kids you disliked in school were still around as adults that you had to interact with.  If you went to church, you just went to your neighborhood church, and consorted with whoever came.  You sent your kids to the neighborhood school, where they learned to be with different kinds of people that they would have to know all their lives.  You read the town’s newspaper, with articles and opinions on a range of topics, and so you heard about different things.  Of course, unless you lived in the urban centers, you usually lived in places surrounded by people of the same color and class, people who were likeminded in some way, and you didn’t let your Protestant daughter date a Catholic.  But there were ways built into society that you had to come up against people and ideas that were different than you, and you had to think about them and relate to them, like it or not.

We have the luxury of avoiding that more now.  We don’t have to get the newspaper for our news – we can go online and look at particular websites, or listen to particular radio stations, that accord with our political views.  We can go church-shopping for the place that suits us just right, and put our kids in exactly the right school with the right kind of people.   We can move around to different cities and suburbs in search of the perfect location for our lifestyles, where there are people like us.  We can avoid the irritation of those people and those things that annoy us, and so we can be happier.  And since the other folks around us also find those people and those things annoying, we can talk together and reaffirm each other in our beliefs and prejudices.

So ‘those people’ – whether they be fundamentalists or Catholics or liberals or gays or homophobes or etc. – ‘those people’ get more and more vilified in our thinking.  They’re idiots, they’re creepy, they’re just not like us.  We have the truth and the correct take on it all.  They sure don’t.

The world has a hard time receiving the Spirit of truth, Jesus says, because it doesn’t know the Spirit.  Relationship precedes understanding.  If we don’t have any relationship with God, then we can’t understand the truth of who God is.

Similarly, if we never spend time with ‘those people,’ then they aren’t really people to us.  They’re just ‘them. ‘ Just like how countries at war create propaganda that dehumanizes the enemy, we can dehumanize other people.  And if you’re not human, I don’t need to listen to you.  I have all the truth I need.  The thing is, the truth is always more nuanced and complex than we normally allow it to be.  There’s always more to it than any one of us can get on our own.

And once you get to know one of ‘them,’ they stop being one of ‘them.’  They become Patty, or Bill, or Andre.  They might even become your friend, or at least someone you’re friendly with.  Which messes up the categories.  And the thing is, ultimately each and every person is a child of God.  So if we start spending more time with God, we might have to accept that all of ‘them’ really are people, and God’s children.  Not just people like us, but all people.  The more time we spend with God, the more God abides in us, to use the words of John’s gospel – the more we see with God’s eyes and feel what God feels.  It opens us up to the world in a different way.  It breaks open our hearts of stone, and takes away the luxury of staying in our own fortresses of certainty.  All kinds of unexpected people can speak God’s truth, if we’re ready to hear it – not just the ones we agree with.

There was a television show for a while called ‘Joan of Arcadia,’ about a teenager with a special relationship with God.  God would show up and tell Joan to do things, ways to be more loving and further God’s intentions in the world around her.  But God wasn’t a voice out of heaven – in the show, God would be the pizza delivery guy, or the person biking by, or a neighbor.  She’d think it was just an ordinary person, and then she’d realize she was actually talking to God again, in a new form.  She never knew quite where God would turn up to speak to her next.  And neither do we.

It might be that we’re naturally tribal.  Maybe in our ancient warrior past we needed to be that way, to stay safe.  But whether it was necessary or not then, it’s not needed now, and it harms us to stay that way.  At best, we can get entrenched in our narrow-mindedness, and miss out on the wonder of the world around us.  At worst, we can continue to foment the kind of hatred and violence that our world suffers from so much.  We receive the Spirit of truth when we’re ready to open ourselves to that relationship with the Spirit – we receive the truth others have when we’re willing to listen to them, to acknowledge them as God’s children, and ones who might have pieces of the truth that we don’t have.

So this week, try it out.  If there’s someone you’ve tended to dismiss because of their politics or their background or whatever it is, try having a conversation with them.  Engage them, and listen – not listen so that you can rebut their ideas, not to look for the weaknesses in their logic, but listen.  Try to understand why they think the way they do.  Or if it’s God whose ways are difficult for you, then try having a conversation there too.  Ask what you want to know.  Be quiet and listen.  God might speak in all kinds of ways, through all kinds of people.  The Spirit of truth is still speaking.  Will we welcome the truth?  Unless we take the time to know and love God, to know and love our neighbor, we maybe never will.

I think we’ve had predictions like this before come and go, but this one got a lot of press and conversation, it seemed to me. Even Doonesbury took it on, with Zonker quoting scripture to his neighbor Chester as a rebuttal to the prophecy of doom: Matthew 24:36, ‘about that day and hour no one knows.’

I doubt that anyone here seriously entertained this possibility of the world ending – such prophecies and predictions are popular among a pretty small subset of the population. All the same, it seems to be just a more extreme way of expressing the anxiety that we all feel when faced with what we don’t know. And there’s a whole lot about God and God’s ways that we don’t know – theologians in the Eastern Orthodox church came up with what is called apophatic theology, the idea that really, we can know nothing at all about God. All we can know is what is not true about God: God is not finite, God is not mortal, God is not powerless, etc. But to go further and say what God is, is impossible. God is by nature ineffable and mysterious and more than we can understand or imagine. There is nothing we can do to put parameters on God.

But we
[Read more ...]]]> So we’re all still here, eh? I was with my family over the last few days, and there was a lot of wondering about whether it was 6am or 6pm that the Rapture was supposed to happen, and whether that was 6:00 Pacific time or rather a kind of rolling deadline as it turned 6:00 in time zones around the world, a rolling Rapture. I guess it was supposed to be that way. But, well, it didn’t happen. I had to write a sermon anyway.

I think we’ve had predictions like this before come and go, but this one got a lot of press and conversation, it seemed to me. Even Doonesbury took it on, with Zonker quoting scripture to his neighbor Chester as a rebuttal to the prophecy of doom: Matthew 24:36, ‘about that day and hour no one knows.’

I doubt that anyone here seriously entertained this possibility of the world ending – such prophecies and predictions are popular among a pretty small subset of the population. All the same, it seems to be just a more extreme way of expressing the anxiety that we all feel when faced with what we don’t know. And there’s a whole lot about God and God’s ways that we don’t know – theologians in the Eastern Orthodox church came up with what is called apophatic theology, the idea that really, we can know nothing at all about God. All we can know is what is not true about God: God is not finite, God is not mortal, God is not powerless, etc. But to go further and say what God is, is impossible. God is by nature ineffable and mysterious and more than we can understand or imagine. There is nothing we can do to put parameters on God.

But we long to, of course, because defining things helps us feel in control. Some of us are worse about control than others. My dad, for example, was going nuts with all the comings and goings and transportation logistics of our family gathering these last few days, even though we kept saying to him, don’t worry, we’ve got it figured out. He’s been used to being the one to figure that stuff out in the past, and he had a hard time believing that his children could get themselves together at a designated time without his help. But all of us have a hard time when the stakes are high enough, when we feel overwhelmed by things that are hard to deal with. When we find out about a new diagnosis of disease, for example, we bulwark our fear of the illness by reciting to each other the medical terms and statistics that we learn. As if discussing the blood cell counts can give us mastery over what is totally out of our control. When someone loses their job we offer statistics, the chances of them finding a new job, anecdotes of other people who have found work. When the earthquake in Japan happened we were suddenly besieged with facts and information about earthquake faults and nuclear reactors close to home, more than any of us had thought about before. When faced with the unknown, particularly the unknown that terrifies us, we try to control it, surround it with what we can know, ward it off.

I think that’s something of what happens in today’s gospel, in the exchange between Jesus and his friends Thomas and Philip. The line that stands out, and that gets quoted most often, of course, is, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ But Jesus starts off the passage saying, Don’t worry. Trust God, trust me too (the meaning of believe in God, believe in me). There’s lots of room in God’s house, and I’ll make sure there’s room for you. I’m taking care of you.

Wait, says Thomas. What are you talking about exactly? Are you talking about dying and what happens after we die? Where do we go? How do we get there?

Relax, says Jesus. I am the way to get there. You know me, so you know God too. You don’t have to worry.

Wait, says Phillip. I don’t like this mystery. Show me God, what God looks like, face to face. Introduce us. Then I’ll know what’s going on here.

What?? says Jesus. I just said, you know God because you know me. There’s nothing more that you have to know. Trust me.

But the disciples aren’t satisfied. And neither are we. Instead of finding what Jesus says in the passage reassuring, we’ve pulled out that one line, I am the way, and the truth, and the life, and made it out to be one of the scariest verses in the Bible. We’ve built up a lot of fear around this phrase. It’s an exclusive statement, and exclusivity makes us nervous. Jesus must be gatekeeping, saying who’s in and who’s out – so we worry that we aren’t going to get in, or that other people we know aren’t going to get in. What about good people who don’t believe in Jesus? What about other religions? And what are we supposed to do to get into heaven, to get in through the narrow way that is Jesus?

Trust me, Jesus tells us. Don’t worry. Don’t let your hearts be troubled. I’m taking care of it. That’s the context , remember, in which he says this statement about being the way, but we pull it out and worry about the mechanics of it, how it works, what it means for the lines and boundaries we want to draw. This must mean that you have to accept Jesus in your heart, in this particular way that we’ve been taught, and if you don’t, you’re not in. Or, this just mean that Jews and Muslims can be as nice as pie, but still, if they don’t believe Jesus is the Messiah, they’re not in, that’s the way it goes. Which is curious, because Jesus doesn’t actually say that – he leaves it pretty open what he means with this statement, I am the way and the truth and the life. Mostly he seems to be saying it as something that’s meant to be comforting. It’s us who make it menacing with our worry and anxiety.

Why is it so hard to trust? 1. Because we fear there isn’t a God. 2. Because we fear that if there is a God, he doesn’t particularly care for us; maybe God is capricious. 3. Because what we really want to have happen might not be what God makes happen. Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. If we’re at all on this ride of faith, we’ve decided at some level, even if just a shallow one, that there is a God – and that what we’ve heard about God is true: that God is loving, that God cares for us. But we’ve also probably already discovered that the third objection to trusting is the real one: what we want to have happen does not always happen. Any one of us can tell stories of that. Many of us are in the middle of such stories right now, where bad things are in process and are not getting fixed the way we want them to.

This is where the apophatic theology comes in. We can say that God is not cruel and capricious; we can say that God is not uninvolved in our lives. But we can’t say just what God will do or how; we can’t presume to understand the big picture that blows our little human pictures away. We don’t know how Jesus is the way and the life; we don’t know how God is healing us; we don’t know what will come of the sufferings we’re enduring. God and God’s ways are more than we can comprehend.

But on the other hand, God’s handiwork is not invisible. We can see it. Show you who God is? says Jesus – I am showing you. God is healing; see how I’ve been healing? God loves you; see how I love you? God is alive; see how I am alive and resurrected before you?

We do see signs and hints of God – maybe best of all in hindsight, when we look back at where we’ve been and how we got to where we are. But also in the present, if we look for them. Not the kind of signs and absolute proofs that allow us to calculate just when the world will end, exactly what God’s up to and how God is saving the world. And not the kind of signs that explain away the suffering we’re going through, as if we’re just not supposed to mind it all. But we can see the kind of signs and hints that give us hope, that give us a sense of God with us, that we are not alone. We can see the kind of signs that God is doing what we ask in Jesus’ name, even if the way that unfolds is utterly different than we’d wish it done ourselves.

Trust me, says Jesus. It’s terribly hard to do. On the other hand, it’s pretty simple. Why not trust? Why not train ourselves to look for the signs – in other language, to count our blessings, what there is to be thankful for. Not as a way of downplaying what is going wrong, but as a way of completing the story – looking at all of the truth. Why not live in hope, a larger, more abundant way to spend each day than when we scrunch up in fear and worry. Why not, in other words, lay hold of the fullness of the truth, the largeness of the life, the trusting walk along the way that Jesus promises? To indeed let Jesus be our way and our truth and our life. And to trust that more than we can ask or imagine is at work.

Today is Good Shepherd Sunday, and we heard in our gospel passage about Jesus as the good shepherd. It has long been noted that the metaphor of Jesus as the good shepherd and us as the sheep is hardly a flattering image for us. Friends of mine who have kept sheep confirm that they are indeed stupid animals, that they will eat what is not good for them and wander off into danger away from the flock, getting themselves into precarious, life-threatening situations. They need a lot of guidance to keep them safe and healthy. I suppose
[Read more ...]]]> As many of you know, I spent last weekend in Yosemite, one of my favorite places on God’s good earth. One of my heroes is John Muir, the famous conservationist and lover of wild places. When he came to California in 1868, the first place Muir went was Yosemite, and he loved it enough that he returned for an entire season to work as a shepherd, taking a large flock of sheep up into the mountains, seeking out good pasture as the snow melted higher and higher up. It was a chance to get into the high country for a whole summer, but Muir lamented being with the sheep, which he referred to as ‘hoofed locusts.’ Later he made a point of showing people what sheep could do to a pristine alpine meadow, which helped lead to the designation of Yosemite as a national park – where sheep, and all livestock, were not allowed. As for being a shepherd, although he thought that they fared pretty well in his native Scotland, he wrote that ‘the California shepherd, as far as I’ve seen or heard, is never quite sane for any considerable time.’ It was not a job he was eager to take again.

Today is Good Shepherd Sunday, and we heard in our gospel passage about Jesus as the good shepherd. It has long been noted that the metaphor of Jesus as the good shepherd and us as the sheep is hardly a flattering image for us. Friends of mine who have kept sheep confirm that they are indeed stupid animals, that they will eat what is not good for them and wander off into danger away from the flock, getting themselves into precarious, life-threatening situations. They need a lot of guidance to keep them safe and healthy. I suppose as an image for humans, I can see certain parallels. But I hope that Jesus thinks of us as more than hoofed locusts – though perhaps it’s true that our behavior does drive God nuts.

All the same, the image of the good shepherd is compelling, and has been so for centuries. The very earliest depictions of Jesus in the catacombs, in fact, are as the good shepherd – linking him to the shepherd king David and to earlier scriptures of God as shepherd of our souls (like in Psalm 23). There are churches named for the Good Shepherd, and thousands of stained-glass windows with that theme. It’s popular especially in pictures and books for children, and with good reason. For all the times that I feel lost or weary or uncertain, the idea that God will guide me, feed me, and hold me tight is deeply comforting. It is no wonder that Psalm 23 is many people’s favorite passage of scripture. When we are in need of reassurance, we can trust that God is in charge. We are safe no matter what comes. God will protect us from harm.

But here’s something interesting I just noticed this week about the familiar reading we just heard from John. This is actually the part that comes before the line where Jesus says, I am the good shepherd. In this passage, Jesus begins with the metaphor of the gate – I am the gate. The shepherd comes in through the gate and the sheep hear his voice and follow him out of the fold, following him because they know his voice. When they go out following the shepherd, they find pasture. Jesus is somehow both the gate and the shepherd in this image – probably best not to press it too hard for clarity. But the interesting thing I realized this week is that Jesus doesn’t say that the shepherd leads his sheep into the safe fold of the sheep pen. Nor does he say that he is the sheepfold – instead, he is the gate. He’s the way in and out, not the surrounding pen of safety. And he is the shepherd, who comes to the fold and leads the sheep out of the pen. In going out of the fold, following the shepherd, the sheep – us – have life abundant.

This is a little different slant than I’d previously taken from the shepherd image. It makes me think a lot of just what makes us feel safe. I think I’ve already talked here about how it seems to me that our society these days is pretty obsessed with safety. Even before the orange level of terrorist threat, we had begun to move into a culture of worrying about our safety. SUVs became popular because people driving them felt safer on the road. School bus routes got cut because people felt safer picking their children up from school themselves. Cell phones have become more common because everyone thinks they should carry one for safety, to check on their kids or have a way to call if the car breaks down. If you have a baby there are whole websites and catalogs devoted to selling you products to babyproof your home, making them safer. There’s good reason to wonder whether the world is really so much more dangerous than it used to be – and maybe all those SUVs on the road have actually made driving more dangerous – but once the ball starts rolling, it’s hard to avoid it. I think fondly of my childhood, when I was out all day with the neighbor kids and only expected back at dark – but I doubt I’ll be able to recreate that for my children. The neighbor kids will be carrying cell phones and expecting a scheduled playdate, even if my children aren’t.

I don’t have a perfect explanation for why this shift has happened in our culture, though I think television news and the stoking of our fears to sell products has something to do with it. But it does seem to correlate to a higher level of anxiety overall, with the economy less certain, gender roles still shifting, technology evolving faster than we can understand it, career paths changing more quickly than we’d like. And that’s not surprising. When we’re uncertain and scared, we have a tendency to pull in like turtles, to pull up the drawbridge and hunker down. We start wanting and craving security and certainty. Change makes us feel scared.

Over the last half-century or so, there has been a lot written about ‘systems theory,’ the idea that every family, every group of people large or small, functions as a single system. A group system is an organism unto itself – and an organism must keep changing in order to live. If our bodies stopped changing, if cells stopped replenishing themselves, if we stopped adapting to the surrounding environment with temperature and metabolism changes, we would die. But at the same time, a group system craves equilibrium – when something happens to upset the dynamics, the system does what it needs to do to regain its former state. Even if it means fighting back against the change that could save it. We’re funny that way. Circling the wagons, surrounding ourselves with a good strong sheepfold, or at least a gated community, feels better. Hence the appeal of Psalm 23 – God has us safe in the green pasture (with fence all around), and God’s rod and staff are there to ward off danger. Nothing to worry about if we stay in the sheepfold.

But the thing is, staying in the fold isn’t so great. There’s not much to eat in the sheepfold. Actually, there’s nothing to eat – there’s nothing to truly nourish us and give us life. We might feel safe, but in that safety we stop living so well. We start picking at each other, because there’s not enough to go around. We get bored and restless. We get hooked on things that don’t really matter very much. Think of the pictures you’ve seen of chickens in factory farms – safe in their cages, but it’s a horrible life.

But Jesus says he is the gate, the way in and out. Jesus is the shepherd who comes to lead us out. Not to keep us here, but to take us out there. It means going out of our comfort zones. It means stepping out of our well-worn routines, the way we’ve always done things. It means letting go of our assumptions about the way things have to be. It’s risky. We might tread unfamiliar ground, stretch ourselves, lose bits and pieces along the way that we thought we needed.

It’s risky for God, too. It means God lets us choose – if we were kept safe in the pen, we’d have no choice to go elsewhere. Once we’re out, we get to choose whether to follow Jesus’ voice or not. God risks losing us to the wolves and the cliffs and the attractive alternatives, because God knows we have to keep growing. It’s the rule of biology, and it’s the rule of human souls – we have to keep changing and growing and adapting, or we stagnate, shrivel up, curl in on ourselves, die. Organisms that do not change cannot live. There’s no real life, or real love, without risk.

There’s sure a lot more to see outside the sheepfold. It’s way more interesting than staying put. It’s scarier, yes. And maybe there’s the chance that we’ll mistake Jesus’ voice, that we’ll listen to the wrong ones and go blindly off in the wrong directions. But as Jesus points out, the sheep know the shepherd’s voice. The shepherd calls his sheep by name and leads them out, going ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They won’t follow a stranger. The sheep, even the stupid sheep, recognize the voice of the one who cares for them and has their welfare at heart – they’ve spent time with that shepherd, they remember that he has given them good pasture before, that they have been safe with him.

Maybe we need to give that trusting a try ourselves, looking back at where God has led us, looking at where God has led our community; reminding each other of the stories of nourishing love and care; listening hard to what God sounded like in the past so that we can recognize that voice now. God wants us fed. Jesus wants for us life abundant. It’s bigger than what we can imagine. How about we risk it – listen for God’s voice, try following, step out of the pen and follow.

The Thomas story is I think included in John for us, for all the countless generations who have come along after the events of Jesus’ life took place and so have no tangible connection to them themselves. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet who believe, Jesus says – pretty much all of the church throughout the ages, in other words. But even if we just take it as a story of Thomas himself, it’s helpful to know that someone right there had a hard time coming to terms with the resurrection, that it wasn’t a slam dunk life-changing experience, but one that needed processing and figuring out even for those who were eye witnesses. The disciples often provide that reality check in the gospel stories – right there with Jesus throughout it all, often they don’t seem to get it any better than we do. But Thomas does get it – he just takes some time getting there, and needs Jesus to help him do so. And that I think is the real model for us.

Much of the gospel of John centers on the
[Read more ...]]]> I have always found it reassuring that the gospel reading on the first Sunday after Easter is about doubt. Other readings move around the calendar from year to year, but on the Sunday after Easter, we always hear the story from the gospel of John of Thomas, the disciple who needed more proof. There’s such an air of pragmatism about this, as if to say, yes, we’re celebrating this remarkable story of resurrection for 50 days, but being human beings, we know the questions are lurking there – so let’s get them out in the open. Did it really happen? And what are we supposed to do with it, anyway?

The Thomas story is I think included in John for us, for all the countless generations who have come along after the events of Jesus’ life took place and so have no tangible connection to them themselves. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet who believe, Jesus says – pretty much all of the church throughout the ages, in other words. But even if we just take it as a story of Thomas himself, it’s helpful to know that someone right there had a hard time coming to terms with the resurrection, that it wasn’t a slam dunk life-changing experience, but one that needed processing and figuring out even for those who were eye witnesses. The disciples often provide that reality check in the gospel stories – right there with Jesus throughout it all, often they don’t seem to get it any better than we do. But Thomas does get it – he just takes some time getting there, and needs Jesus to help him do so. And that I think is the real model for us.

Much of the gospel of John centers on the idea of belief – as the last line of today’s passage reads, ‘these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.’ As with many loaded theological terms in Scripture, belief is not a word with only one meaning. The Greek word is pisteo, and can be translated in a wide range of ways – from belief the way we usually think of it, as in intellectual assent to an empirical fact, to trusting or entrusting ourselves to something. Put another way, it can mean anything from the head down to the heart down to the whole of our lives. But unfortunately, we usually stop with the head part of belief – ‘Agree that this is true, and you will be saved,’ kind of a transactional understanding of salvation. Or the reverse, ‘I can’t quite believe this happened literally, so I have to throw out the whole faith.’ Understanding belief in this sense becomes either an easy way to buy salvation – all I have to do is believe, and whatever else I do, I’m still saved – or a stumbling block to relationship with God. On the other hand, fully entrusting ourselves and our whole lives to God is hard to do, and hard to maintain even if we can do it sometimes. It’s no wonder we look for an easier way to be in or out of the club. But the model given us by Thomas is different – at first he refuses to believe intellectually that what the other disciples tell him is true. But when faced with the proof of the resurrected Jesus in front of him, he doesn’t stop with ‘head’ belief – he moves fully into trusting, saying, My Lord and my God! – something nobody else in the gospel had said before him.

All of us here have doubts – even we the faithful remnant here the Sunday after Easter. We doubt because the world teaches us to, or because things don’t turn out in our lives the way we hope they will, or because we’re too preoccupied and busy with other things. Doubt takes many different forms, just as belief does. I’m reading a book by Rob Bell right now, called Love Wins. Bell is a pastor of a large evangelical church in Grand Rapids, MI, and he’s been coming further into the forefront of the evangelical church over the last several years. But not without controversy – he takes a lot of the ways evangelicals have traditionally understood Jesus and salvation and turns them upside down, digging into the scriptures and shaking it around and coming out with things that don’t sit that well with the established leaders of the movement. In this most recent book, he raises all the hard questions, all the questions that people ask who don’t come to church, or who once came to church and got turned off. They’re very good questions. Questions like: is Gandhi going to hell, because he wasn’t Christian? Is it true that the kind of person you are doesn’t ultimately matter, as long as you’ve said or prayed or believed the right things? If the message of Jesus is that God is offering the free gift of eternal life through him, and all we have to do is accept and confess and believe, then doesn’t that meant hat going to heaven is dependent on something I do, not on grace? And so on and so on. But Bell doesn’t stop with the questions – they’re just in the first chapter. In the rest of the book, he sets about trying to answer some those questions, and offers some great ideas. I recommend it to anyone.

We pride ourselves in the Episcopal Church for our openness to the questions – but sometimes we forget to do anything with the questions. We can stall out with the questions, lost in the cloud of unknowing. Because, of course, we all have doubts. Take a moment and think about what yours are right now. What is keeping you from belief, in the head sense or in the deeper sense? What are your doubts? Is it that you just can’t believe some of the stories in scripture, they just don’t make rational sense? Is it that the way you understand God, the theological system you work with, doesn’t really hold water when something bad happens? Are you simply too busy with everyday stuff to spend much time delving into the mystery of it all? Or are you protecting yourself, unwilling to trust one more thing or person that might let you down? Or maybe it’s all of these together, or something else entirely.

Doubts are part and parcel of the spiritual journey – but you’re not meant to settle in with them for years. Thomas goes down in history as Doubting Thomas. But he’s more than that. Thomas is clear about what he needs to move forward in faith and relationship with his friend Jesus, and he asks for it – and God gives it to him, returning in Jesus to allow Thomas to touch him. We need to do our part of the work, in other words. The work is different for each of us, and different at different times for each of us as well. But it’s there for us to do. Take those doubts I just had you think about: If right now your doubts are about the parts of the gospel stories that you just can’t buy, then maybe you need to dig down with those – see where the questions take you. No, bodily resurrection doesn’t make sense – but neither does particle physics in a Newtonian universe. You can only understand it if you let go of your assumptions about the way the world works. Maybe there are assumptions you need to let go of about who God is and how God works. Or, if you’re too wrapped up in other things to spend much time thinking about God, then here’s your wake-up call: this is important, this is more important than all of those other things you’re spending your time on. You need to clear away space and sit with God, even if all you can manage is 10 minutes a day. If you’re too hurt to try trusting, then that is what you need to pray about, telling that to God directly, being honest about your pain and betrayal to one who knows what it is to be betrayed – remember the story of Good Friday? In other words, each of us needs to work on our belief, on entrusting ourselves to God.

Salvation isn’t about some kind of reward that we get later for good behavior. Salvation is something we live into now – we are saved when we trust God because we live our lives differently, and we live them better. When we seek out relationship with God, when we spend time in that relationship, we are transformed – not all at once, not enough to make us perfect people, sadly – but gradually, we become people who live more lightly to the stuff of this world, people who act out their love for God by loving others as well, people who become more transparent and expressive of God and less caught by our own darkness and issues. When we seek God we find bread that satisfies us, instead of trying to feed ourselves with addictions and comfort and all of the lesser things that never fill us up. When we seek God we are no longer as vulnerable to the pain and betrayal other people can cause us – instead we become more open to the joy and delight possible in this world. When we seek out God, we can start letting go of worrying over ourselves, because we start trusting God to worry over things for us. It is just plain better to live in God.

I wish we knew exactly what happened to Thomas after this story, where he went and how he lived every day. Being human, I will bet that he had days where he doubted it all over again, where with Jesus gone and things going wrong he couldn’t see the possibility and hope of resurrection. But I hope that he kept at it, kept trying, kept seeking after his Lord and his God – kept working on his end of the relationship so that he really could entrust himself to God completely, allowing the love of God to wash over and through him, to bear him up through all things, to shine through him to others. It’s time for us too. Address God with your doubts, seek and search and ask and find out. Live the abundant life – and do it now.

All around the world people are greeting each other with these words – particularly our Orthodox brothers and sisters, who this year are celebrating Easter on the same day as we are. Khristos anesti! Alithos anesti! It replaces Hello, how are you? for a few days in some countries. A great way to remind ourselves in everyday ordinary moments that things have changed – that something has happened. Because we need reminding.

We just heard the story of two women, Mary Magdalene and ‘the other Mary.’ They were the some of the same women who stayed at the cross when Jesus was crucified. And now they’ve come to the tomb. They were at the cross; the disciples, you remember, weren’t there at the cross – they had fled in fear. And now the disciples aren’t there at the tomb. They’re somewhere else, disillusioned and afraid. But here come the women, at dawn.

And there’s an earthquake and the stone rolls away and an angel appears, and the guards at the tomb faint. But not the women. They listen to the angel, who says to them, Don’t be afraid! Jesus is risen. Come and see the tomb. And then go and tell his disciples to get to Galilee, where he’s meeting them. The guards are still lying there unconscious and comatose, but the women run to do as the angel tells them. And on their way, they meet Jesus, risen just like the angel said. And he tells them the same thing, Don’t be afraid – go tell my brothers to meet me in Galilee. And off they go.

Here’s one thing that’s amazing about Easter in church. Even though most of the year when we read stories from the gospels we hear about
[Read more ...]]]> Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

All around the world people are greeting each other with these words – particularly our Orthodox brothers and sisters, who this year are celebrating Easter on the same day as we are. Khristos anesti! Alithos anesti! It replaces Hello, how are you? for a few days in some countries. A great way to remind ourselves in everyday ordinary moments that things have changed – that something has happened. Because we need reminding.

We just heard the story of two women, Mary Magdalene and ‘the other Mary.’ They were the some of the same women who stayed at the cross when Jesus was crucified. And now they’ve come to the tomb. They were at the cross; the disciples, you remember, weren’t there at the cross – they had fled in fear. And now the disciples aren’t there at the tomb. They’re somewhere else, disillusioned and afraid. But here come the women, at dawn.

And there’s an earthquake and the stone rolls away and an angel appears, and the guards at the tomb faint. But not the women. They listen to the angel, who says to them, Don’t be afraid! Jesus is risen. Come and see the tomb. And then go and tell his disciples to get to Galilee, where he’s meeting them. The guards are still lying there unconscious and comatose, but the women run to do as the angel tells them. And on their way, they meet Jesus, risen just like the angel said. And he tells them the same thing, Don’t be afraid – go tell my brothers to meet me in Galilee. And off they go.

Here’s one thing that’s amazing about Easter in church. Even though most of the year when we read stories from the gospels we hear about a lot of guys – Jesus and his disciples, Pharisees and scribes, tax collectors and paralytics, nearly every character is male – on Easter morning, the focus suddenly swings over to the women. In every story of the empty tomb in the four gospels, women take center stage – even when, like in Matthew’s gospel, we’ve only heard these women mentioned as a kind of afterthought: in his story of the crucifixion, Matthew says, ‘Many women were also there…they had followed Jesus from Galilee and had provided for him.’ No mention of why we hadn’t we heard about them in the preceding 26 chapters. At any rate, even though the stories about what happens at the tomb differ in each of the four gospels, all four accounts agree that women were the first ones there, and the first ones to see that it is empty. But women weren’t legally able to be witnesses – they wouldn’t be believed. They weren’t fully their own people. Any status they had came from the men they were attached to – the wife of so-and-so, the daughter of so-and-so. But these two women in our story today are just named Mary, one of them from Magdala, and the other one from somewhere else – not apparently attached to any man at all. Interesting.

The women come to the tomb for reasons that aren’t entirely clear – to grieve, to see if something will happen like Jesus said it would, who knows. Since we haven’t heard of them through the rest of the gospel, we don’t know why they followed Jesus in the first place, or why they provided for him. Something compelled them, it seems. So they show up. And they are told three things:

1. Don’t be afraid. There is nothing to fear – God has won.
2. Come and see. See the empty tomb – he is risen just like he said.
3. So go and tell, tell the disciples that Jesus is risen.

   Don’t be afraid – Come and see – Go and tell.

And they do. They have the same experience as the guards at the tomb, you’ll notice – the guards felt the earthquake, saw the stone rolled away, saw the angel – but instead of fainting, the women act. They believe from these signs that Jesus really is risen – or at least, they know something really amazing has happened – and they start acting accordingly. They go to tell. And on their way, Jesus meets them – they get what you might call ‘proof’ that the empty tomb means more than a stolen body. They leave the tomb to tell – and they encounter the risen Christ.

And so here we are on Easter today. Any number of things bring people to church today. Some of you are here every week, and this is just one more Sunday, but a special one. Some of you maybe came a little more during Lent, feeling the draw to a deeper commitment. Some of you are here for the first time, or the first time in a long time, with family, or because it’s the tradition of what you do on Easter. There’s extra flowers, extra music, everyone dressed up extra fine. There’s the Easter egg hunt. And later, maybe there will be Easter brunch or dinner, the ham or the lamb and the time with people you love. A friend of mine who writes for a newspaper wrote her column for today on how she longs for church at Easter, even though she doesn’t go any other time of the year (except Christmas). She talked about her ‘vague desire for spiritual renewal, for quiet meditation time, for a small connection to a better place.’ She acknowledged that her chance of finding those things in a one-off visit to church were slim. But I thought, good for her for knowing she’s looking – so many people don’t. So good for all of us, new, returning, not-so-new, for coming here, seeking whatever it is we’re seeking. Good things and good desires brought us here today. Let’s be thankful for all of that – music and joyfulness and family and feasting, all of those things are blessings and gifts. And I hope you do find something of that here today.

But then what? What happens tomorrow? Will today make any difference for you?

Let’s dig a little more deeply into our two Marys. Two women – second-rate citizens, not the ones at the center of the story, not the ones who would later take over the church. They came to the tomb and something happened. There were supernatural pyrotechnics and a radiant angelic being talking to them. They could have freaked out, like the guards. But they heard those words, Don’t be afraid. And they believed it, and then they heard, Come and see – so they saw the tomb empty, saw and felt this amazing turn of events. What a powerful thing, to hear the voice of an angel, to come face to face with the divine like that – they could well have decided that right there, that tomb, was the place to be. Let’s make it a shrine! This place is holy. Let’s stop here and consider just what it all means. Let’s replay the experience over for ourselves. And then, they could have gone back home, keeping this warm and wonderful feeling in their hearts. After all, who would listen to them? They were just women.

But that’s not what they did. They received orders, and they went to go do them. Go and tell the disciples about this. And so they did. And it was then, as they were on their way, that Jesus met them, Jesus who had been crucified on the cross, now risen and alive before them. He didn’t come back to the tomb to sit and reminisce with them about old times. He didn’t skip over them to head straight to the important people, the disciples cowering in the locked room. Jesus met them as they set out to do what they were called to do, and they saw him with their own eyes and grabbed hold of him with their own hands. And he said again, Don’t be afraid. I’ll meet the rest of the disciples when they get to Galilee. Tell them to go too. And again, off the women went.

I can’t say we have pyrotechnics today – no earthquake, thankfully, and so far, no angelic beings. But I hope something wonderful is happening here. Where two or three are gathered in my name, Jesus said, I’m in the midst of them. Yes, Jesus is here. And I hope we hear in what we do and say today the message: Don’t be afraid. God has won – the victory over death is complete. Nothing can get ultimate power over us, not the worst tragedy or loss or set of circumstances. God is with us through everything, even through death. We do not have to be afraid. Whatever you are facing, you do not have to be afraid.

But it doesn’t stop there. Like the women, we will be receiving orders today. At the end of our service we say what we call the dismissal, ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. Alleluia, alleluia!’ And then we go.

Because everything we do here today, the music we sing, the words we pray, the Happy Easter! Christ is risen! we say to each other, all of that could remain just a nice feeling for us, something to inspire us and comfort us as we go. But here’s the thing: the risen Christ is more than just a warm feeling. Resurrection is more than tradition and family and food and all of the good things of this day. The risen Christ is in our hearts, yes – but the risen Christ is also out there, waiting to meet us. And for most of us, the risen Christ becomes a reality we can grab hold of only when we go love and serve – when we put our own skin on him, and make him real in this world. That is where Easter really starts – that’s where resurrection starts making a difference.

And yes, I’m talking to you. This is not just a message for the churchy people, for the important people on the vestry, for the professionals, for the grown-ups. This is for everyone, for every single one of us who showed up here today for whatever reason we came. Even if we think we’re second-class citizens in this religion thing. Even if we’re not sure why we’re here. We’ve come and seen. We’ve been reminded, don’t be afraid. Now, our orders are, go and tell.

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. It means, get out of here, carry that peace of Christ in your hearts if you found some here today, and go love and serve. Don’t be afraid. Do what brings love alive. I can give you some ideas: Take extra time with your kids and your spouse; turn off the iPhone and really listen to them. Reach out to your coworker, the one you had words with a few weeks ago, and ask them to talk about it. Go next door and meet your neighbors, the ones you’ve lived next to for 10 years without more than a nod. Do something tangible to make our air and our water cleaner so your grandchildren will be able to breathe. Find something good about the politicians you hate, and write them to thank them for that. You can fill in the particulars for yourselves, I think. But do you get me? Go and minister, go and love, and Jesus will be there. Don’t be afraid. You’re part of the resurrection – we all are the Easter people. The risen Christ becomes real to us, becomes real in this world, when we do his work. So let’s live it. Amen. Christ is risen – he is risen indeed. Alleluia.

John is the only gospel that includes that detail of Jesus on the cross, giving his mother Mary into the care of his beloved disciple John. In many ways I find the Jesus in John’s gospel less human than in the others, but this one little exchange opens this window into the very human relationship between Jesus and Mary. Luke is the one who gives
[Read more ...]]]> When my son Benjamin was 7 weeks old, he developed a fever that landed him in the hospital for 4 days. It turned out to be viral meningitis, which sounds worse than it was – he never really was very sick, and he recovered quickly. But with such a little baby, they take every measure to be sure – so he was tested for all kinds of terrible things, and he and I had to stay together in the hospital until they were quite certain all was well. We were there in mid-December, including December 12, the day of the festival of the Virgin of Guadalupe. I had a lot of quiet time to reflect and pray and worry. And on that day I found myself talking to the Guadalupe, begging her presence, knowing that she of all people knew well what it was to lose her son. I don’t know if it’s true what some people tell me, that there’s a special bond between mothers and sons – maybe it’s that, or maybe it’s that early scare, or maybe it’s simply that with this my second child I’m more able to relax and love him – but the idea of losing my little boy fills me with dread I can’t even voice. And on this day, this Good Friday of remembering Jesus’ death, I can’t help but think of Mary losing her little boy.

John is the only gospel that includes that detail of Jesus on the cross, giving his mother Mary into the care of his beloved disciple John. In many ways I find the Jesus in John’s gospel less human than in the others, but this one little exchange opens this window into the very human relationship between Jesus and Mary. Luke is the one who gives us more of a picture of the young Mary with the baby, her firstborn – a child born in such extraordinary circumstances, with angels visiting her and Joseph, and strangers coming from all around to see the newborn child. And Luke gives us that glimpse into parenting the adolescent Jesus, when Joseph and Mary have to return to the temple to find their missing son, only to have him seemingly dismiss their concern with ‘didn’t you know I’d be here?’ John has the story of Mary prodding Jesus into his first miracle, changing the water into wine to save the wedding celebration from shame and ruin. And there are hints in the other gospels of Mary turning up with her other children to persuade Jesus to stop this crazy preaching and come home. What would it have been like to mother Jesus? The sword that the prophet Simeon predicted would pierce her soul seems to have done so over and over again – piercing her with his youthful rejection, with his heedless march into public infamy and danger, and finally with his humiliating, criminal death on the cross. Could she possibly have held onto the message the angel gave her at the very beginning, that all of this was somehow meant to be? What parent could allow suffering in their child without suffering even more intensely themselves?

Especially in the Renaissance, artists were drawn to depict this suffering – the sculpture theme of the Pieta, where Mary holds her dying son, was popular for devotional art in Europe for several centuries; as well as paintings of Mary weeping or standing at the foot of the cross. In the Pieta, Mary holds Jesus as she must have held him when he was small – this grown man spread across her lap just as the baby and then the boy once was. That human sense of a mother’s loss serves as a sign of the real physical death of the real physical Jesus. It is a very physical thing, being a parent – maybe especially being the mother, whose body is slowly changed by the growing baby, who gives birth and nurses him at her breast, one of the surest reminders we have that we are incarnate beings. Messy and amazing all at the same time, there you are, holding that child, shocked at the physical realness of this being who has come into the world in ways we still can’t really fathom even though we were there. Imagine Mary then, holding her son’s dead body at the end, feeling the weight of his physical self, and yet knowing that he is no longer there. Oh, what an ache to let him go.

That letting go, of course, is an inherent part of parenting. This small creature comes from you, and yet from the very beginning they start moving away from you. Indeed, your purpose as a parent is to help them move away from you, hard as it may be. Our culture probably prizes children’s independence more than any other, but everywhere, children do and must grow up, separate individuals inside their own minds, with paths to follow that are only theirs. As little as she may have understood him, Mary had to let Jesus go do what he was called to do and be – even as what he did and who he was led him inexorably toward suffering. She must have been afraid for him; perhaps she was sometimes disappointed in him, just as many of those who followed Jesus for a while turned away later when they realized he wasn’t who they thought he was. At times she probably thought he was on the wrong path altogether. Could she have at all understood what he was meant to be, even with the divine messages at the beginning? None of his disciples really did, even though Jesus told them over and over again. What Jesus was and what he was about were so radically new and different that no one really seemed to grasp it until later – and maybe even now we’re still not so sure. With all of that, Mary had to let Jesus go more completely than any other parent.

But that letting go is also an essential part of the spiritual life for all of us. We all carry with us dear images and plans that we hold onto as tightly as a child, as if they were physically real. Images of God and how God works in our world. Plans for our lives and what we want to do with them. Visions of the future and where we’re going. And as we progress along in life, these images and plans and dreams have a way of getting blown up, getting smashed or changed or redirected in ways that bring us disappointment, grief, and confusion. We thought we would get the job, and we don’t. We thought the marriage would last all our lives, and we find ourselves alone. We thought that God would heal our loved one, and they die. It can leave us angry with God. It can leave us reeling and unsure where to turn next. If we are honest, we want to say to God, how could you? How could you leave me like this? How could you lead me so far only to disappear at the end?

Which is one reason why the gospel stories hold so much power for us, centuries later. All of those with Jesus, his friends and followers and family, all faced this grief and disappointment and loss at his death. Whatever they thought he was, they each were bound up with him, entwining him with their own hopes and dreams, their own visions for what would happen next and what he meant to them and to the world. And then he died. And they had to let him go, and with him, all of what they had projected onto him. Just as we do, every time we come to this point of death in our lives.

But this point of loss and grief is not the end point. Jesus returned to them, his friends and family – but differently. There is another Mary, Mary Magdalene, who was one of the first to experience Jesus after the resurrection. But Jesus tells her, do not hold onto me. Let me go. Her first instinct must have been to reach out to him, to grab onto him and hold him close. But perhaps he is saying, holding onto my physical presence is not the point. I am here in front of you, but everything has changed. You have something to do now, a message to give, a witness to proclaim. Let me go, and go be my apostle. Jesus’ friends did indeed have to let go of him, and they did not get him back again. Instead, they got more, more than they could grasp and hold onto, more than they could comprehend or imagine. Their lives were utterly changed and redirected.

None of the gospels mention Jesus appearing to his mother after his resurrection. I wish I knew if he did, and what that was like for her. Perhaps there was a fresh kind of pain in seeing her own flesh and blood so completely changed before her, so beyond her ability to have and to hold. But in and despite that pain, what joy. Her child, now the Lord of all life. Her hopes and dreams taken up, blessed, broken, and given to feed the world. What Jesus would have offered to her he offers to us all: let go. Let go of what you insist upon so dearly; let go of the pain and the grief and the loss; let go and let the fuller life I have for you begin. Be changed, and be new. And see, our resurrection too begins. Amen.

But we don’t get to relish that scene for very long, for before we’ve gone too far into the service we hear about the other scene instead. Isaiah talks about one who is beaten and despised; the psalm cries out, ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am in trouble.’ And then we heard the other part of Jesus’ story, what happens just a few chapters later in Matthew’s gospel: Jesus’ betrayal and arrest, and being put on trial before the religious leaders and then the Roman governor, and his best friend deserting him, and all those crowds of people who had just been shouting for joy now shouting for him to be killed. And Jesus
[Read more ...]]]> It’s a dramatic day today, with two very different scenes: in one, the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, with the crowds shouting Hosanna! and spreading palm branches before him; and in the other, the long night of Jesus’ arrest and trial and his torture and death. In the first story I imagine bright sunshine and birds singing along with the people, lots of hubbub and excitement – the hustle and bustle of the city and of a great parade, all the rowdiness of crowds outdoors. And Jesus is poised in the midst of it all, giving somewhat mystical orders to his disciples to procure a donkey and colt, confidently claiming the symbolism of the old prophecies of the Messiah king. And we celebrate it ourselves by singing one of our loudest and most confident hymns, ‘All glory, laud, and honor,’ and we march along with our palm branches in a way completely different from any other Sunday. In a very public, right out there in the neighborhood kind of way – this is a story to be proud of, it looks like.

But we don’t get to relish that scene for very long, for before we’ve gone too far into the service we hear about the other scene instead. Isaiah talks about one who is beaten and despised; the psalm cries out, ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am in trouble.’ And then we heard the other part of Jesus’ story, what happens just a few chapters later in Matthew’s gospel: Jesus’ betrayal and arrest, and being put on trial before the religious leaders and then the Roman governor, and his best friend deserting him, and all those crowds of people who had just been shouting for joy now shouting for him to be killed. And Jesus is mostly silent in the midst of it all, allowing all of this to happen to him. And he is tortured and mocked by the soldiers, and is crucified, and dies, and strange events happen, an earthquake and people being raised from the dead and the temple curtain being torn, and a Roman centurion, a soldier, says that this must have been God’s Son – but realizing it too late to do anything about it.

It’s a lot of story to take in in a short space of time – and it’s a lot of emotional ground to cover, too. Jesus looks very different from the first scene to the second – in the first, he is telling his disciples exactly what to do and looking very authoritative; in the second, he is completely silent except for two confusing and enigmatic answers to the high priest and to Pilate the governor, answers that mostly amount to no answer at all. And yet in both scenes Jesus seems to be actively choosing to act as he does. He chooses quite deliberately how and when he will enter Jerusalem, and does so even though anyone can see that this public display will only antagonize those in power. And when he is arrested as expected, Jesus seems to choose to go willingly, and not to give an answer to the questions asked of him, not to defend himself against their accusations. In one scene he chooses action, and the crowds like that: Jesus being the powerful ruler, coming in to be their new king, flying in the face of the forces aligned against him. In the other scene, he chooses not to act – and the crowds don’t like that at all. When given the option, they shout out that they want the criminal Jesus Barabbas to be released instead of Jesus called the Messiah. And as Jesus hangs on the cross, he is mocked by three different groups of people, all of whom say something like, You could save yourself and you don’t – why not? obviously you’re a fraud after all. What fools we were to think you were powerful.

Every time we read a story from the gospel, we’re invited to imagine ourselves into the story – what would it be like to be healed, or to be called as a disciple, or to be there when Jesus fed the 5000? But Palm Sunday is the one day when we make that completely explicit, by reading the long gospel story in parts, and by all of us taking the part of the crowds. We do that to make the story come alive for us in a different way, because we believe that this story of Jesus’ suffering and death is central to the whole of the gospel – how it was he came to die, and what effect that has on us, is something we want to experience in the here and now, not just remember as an old story of the past. We read the part of the crowds together because we believe that Jesus died for all of us, that we are in that way responsible for his death just as much as those who were there shouting for it. We don’t want Jesus released – we want Barabbas. Let Jesus be crucified.

Well, crowds, here we are today, and as we read this part together, we’re still faced with those two pictures of Jesus in the story: Jesus the all-powerful, and Jesus the vulnerable. And just like the crowds that were there that day, I think we still don’t like the second picture very much. We like superheroes. We like tough guys and people with high self-esteem. We want our stories to end with power and a strong sense of self, and for any pain along the way to be erased in the glory of the happy ending. We want to think that what God really wants for us is health, wealth, and happiness – and if we don’t have those, we want to know why God doesn’t come through. And so over the centuries, what Christians have usually done with this image of the silent Jesus standing before the crowds is to invest the picture with a kind of power, to read the happy ending back into the scene and say something like, well, he knew he’d be resurrected and it would all work out ok, he knew that his God was bigger and tougher than these guys in front of him and that they would get their comeuppance – or even, he didn’t really suffer the pain that much, because he was God. We make him out to be that muscular Jesus of the movies, and give thanks that now because of his toughness we all get to live happily ever after. That’s the way we like it.

But the problem with that is that it requires us to ignore that Jesus breaks his silence in this story only to cry out words that come from Psalm 22, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ – before crying out once more and dying. Jesus experiences actual pain and suffering, actual weakness and vulnerability unto death. And clinging to the idea of a powerful Jesus doesn’t mesh with the rest of his teaching, what he said to his followers time and time again: ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me…for those who lose their life for my sake will find it.’ Jesus teaches pretty clearly that powerlessness and vulnerability, willingly and freely choosing that vulnerability, is how we’re supposed to live. Looking out for number one, defending ourselves from attack, and being safe and secure aren’t actually values Jesus ever teaches us or models – no matter how instinctual those may be, no matter how much we may see those ways celebrated in the world around us. In fact, he teaches and models the exact opposite: Lose your life for my sake, and you will find it.

To all of us crowds Pilate calls out, Is this the Jesus you want to vote for? Because voting for him is going to have some real implications for your life. “Pilate said to them, ‘Whom do you want me to release for you, Jesus Barabbas or Jesus who is called the Messiah?…Which of the two do you want me to release for you?’” What do we say?

The last of our long Lenten gospel readings. And what a powerful one. Mostly it’s a story we think of as the raising of Lazarus. But really, that part only happens at the end. And so the story is even more about Mary and Martha, Lazarus’ sisters – and about the long wait before the miracle comes.

All three of them, it seems, were close friends of Jesus, a family with whom he was deeply intimate. Judging by the order in which they are named, Martha was the oldest and Lazarus was the baby brother. And Lazarus, their beloved brother, and Jesus’ dear friend, falls terribly ill, so they send for Jesus. And Jesus does not come. And Lazarus dies.

And the next day, Jesus does not come. Nor does he come the following day. It is only when four days have passed, when all hope has been abandoned, that Jesus shows up. The belief at the time was that the life force of the body stayed nearby for three days – but by four, it was gone. And by four days, the body would be beginning to decompose. And only on the fourth day does Jesus come.

And it is not as though he were unavoidably held up, or far away, unable to get there in time. The story says he tarries – he stays where he is two more days on purpose.

When he finally does come, before he’s even got to the house, Martha comes out to see him. We don’t know the way she greeted him. But I
[Read more ...]]]> Have you ever come to a place where you have given up all hope? Has it ever felt like God waited just too long to help? That’s what I’ve been thinking about from the gospel we just heard.

The last of our long Lenten gospel readings. And what a powerful one. Mostly it’s a story we think of as the raising of Lazarus. But really, that part only happens at the end. And so the story is even more about Mary and Martha, Lazarus’ sisters – and about the long wait before the miracle comes.

All three of them, it seems, were close friends of Jesus, a family with whom he was deeply intimate. Judging by the order in which they are named, Martha was the oldest and Lazarus was the baby brother. And Lazarus, their beloved brother, and Jesus’ dear friend, falls terribly ill, so they send for Jesus. And Jesus does not come. And Lazarus dies.

And the next day, Jesus does not come. Nor does he come the following day. It is only when four days have passed, when all hope has been abandoned, that Jesus shows up. The belief at the time was that the life force of the body stayed nearby for three days – but by four, it was gone. And by four days, the body would be beginning to decompose. And only on the fourth day does Jesus come.

And it is not as though he were unavoidably held up, or far away, unable to get there in time. The story says he tarries – he stays where he is two more days on purpose.

When he finally does come, before he’s even got to the house, Martha comes out to see him. We don’t know the way she greeted him. But I would imagine that she is confused, outraged, bewildered. Lord, she says, if you had been here, Lazarus would not have died. The question beneath it I hear is: where the hell were you? Later when Jesus comes nearer to the house, her sister Mary comes to him and asks the same question. What must they have been suffering and thinking in those dark days after their baby brother died?

A few weeks ago I received a box from Nancy Jacobs, a former member of this church who has been a longtime member now of the church I grew up in, St Margaret’s in Bellevue, WA. Among other things, she included a few copies of a journal from 1988 called Sharing, a small magazine that was devoted to stories of Christian healing. That issue had the story my mother wrote about our family – certainly a story I’m aware of at some level all the time, but one I hadn’t recently reflected on. I read the story again in a whole new way this time. It’s the story of my sister, who was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 12, and our family’s suffering with that through her teenage years. Now that I have children of my own, it struck me very differently – I felt more keenly what it must have been like for my mom. My family was part of St Margaret’s during that time as well, and the year my sister was diagnosed, 1970, they had a healing service for her at church. It was the time in the church when healing prayer was especially popular, the so-called charismatic renewal, and many people came. Everyone there talked about how my sister was glowing that night. The cancer was in remission and coincidentally, the doctors in charge of her care decided the next day by a drawing of straws to try no treatment at all. My parents took this as a sign of God’s action: my sister had been miraculously healed.

But a few months later, things started to go downhill again. In fact, after that healing service happened, over the next five years, my sister relapsed four times. In the early 1970s, there weren’t a lot of options yet for what to do for leukemia. My sister said, what’s the point of a healing service if you’re not healed, and I’m sure my parents thought the same thing.

Meanwhile, I had been born – an unwelcome turn of events from most people’s perspective. But after a few years they checked the family again, and checked me for the first time, for a possible bone marrow match for my sister. I turned out to be a nearly identical match, and so in 1975, 5 years after that healing service, my sister had the risky new procedure of a bone marrow transplant, with me as the donor. It took. She is still alive today. I can forget what an amazing story this is – I grew up with it all of my life. But now that I am a parent, the thought of those five years, of my family’s hopes soaring and dashing over and over again, is heart-wrenching. God was sent for, and God seemed to take a very long time in arriving.

And of course, my sister’s story was in the end a success story. Many of those she knew in those years at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center did not make it – healing prayers or no. My sister’s story ultimately is one of healing and miracles – but I know that many of us here could tell stories of begging for God’s action and healing, of waiting, of what felt like intolerable delay – and of what felt like God not acting. It is hard, hard indeed, to know what sense to make of that kind of story.

It makes me feel all the more for Martha and her sister Mary in today’s story. The amazing thing about Martha is that even in what must be total grief and agony, even as she confronts Jesus for not coming in time, she still professes faith. Even now, with my brother dead four days, she says, I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him. I trust you, she says. I know that even though everything is hopeless, that all the doors are shut, God through you can act. She doesn’t know how – when Jesus tells her Lazarus will rise again, she answers sort of hopelessly and yet obediently, yes, I know that there will come a time for resurrection at the end of all things. But when Jesus says, no, not just then, I mean now – I am the resurrection, right here in front of you – despite the fact that he has failed her and her family, she says, I trust you. You are the Messiah.

I almost think that Martha’s faith in this moment is the greater miracle in this story. We know because we have heard this story before that Jesus will indeed raise Lazarus from the dead, that something amazing will happen. But Martha doesn’t know that. All she knows is that her family’s best friend, the one that they had been hoping in, has let them down, so completely down that her brother is dead. How can she believe that this is not the end?

Maybe Martha had a hard time facing facts and kept hoping despite it all. Maybe she just doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But I imagine that she says that she trusts Jesus because she knows Jesus. She has spent enough time with him, welcomed him into her home, talked and laughed with him. She knows him enough to trust him. And not simply because he is her friend and things have gone well between them up to this point. She knows that somehow her friend is so completely aligned with God that through him, something can happen. The God who has acted in dark and desperate times throughout salvation history will act now in her life as well. The one coming into the world, the Messiah, is the promised incarnation of everything God has done up to that point. The God who brought a child to Abraham and Sarah when they were too old to have one; the God who brought Joseph into Egypt to help his brothers, when they had tried to kill him and sold him into slavery; the God who had brought the Israelites out of their slavery in Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea; the God who had led the people through the desert and kept them alive there for 40 years; the God who over and over again had opened doors that were shut, had turned curses into blessings, had breathed life through all the times of death and devastation. That God has been and is now the God of unlikely salvation. And yes, Martha says, I trust in that God. I believe.

Stories about healing can be hard ones to tell, because for every story of a miraculous healing, we can tell ten about the healing that never came. Why did it happen to my sister and not to so many others? She has struggled sometimes with that question over the years. But the powerful thing about Martha’s witness in this story is that it is not after Lazarus is raised from the dead that she professes her faith in Jesus. In fact, in many of the healing stories in the gospels, the person tells Jesus they believe in him before the healing ever happens. For us hearing the stories all these years later, perhaps, the ending of those stories matter – proof, we can say, that Jesus was who we think he was. But for those face to face with him, grieving over their loved one, all they know is that they trust him, they trust that somehow he will bring the healing they long for. Something about him makes them believe.

When we are in those long times between – when we have cried out for God and we are waiting, waiting, waiting for action – times when the healing or grace has come so late, or times when we think it hasn’t come at all – all we have to go on is whether we are willing to trust. To trust based on other stories, to trust based on our own desperate hopes, yes, both of those – but maybe most profoundly, to trust because we have spent time enough to know that the God who is dealing with us is the God of life, the God who works out all things for good. Which means we trust that even if the outcome we long and yearn for doesn’t happen – if Lazarus is not raised, if the transplant is not successful, if our marriage is not saved or our child is hurting or the job goes to someone else or any other number of painful things that we are faced with too often in this world – even so, we trust him who says, I am resurrection and I am life. Trust me, God says to each of us, trust me and you will live – deeply live.

It happens that I’ve been reading about Quakers this last week, in particular about their views on money as I prepared the adult ed forum for this week. Their practice is to be very intentional about money, always conscious of who is affected when they think about buying something or taking a new job – which is partly why they were historically such good businesspeople, very frugal and conscientious in their management of things. And it struck me in my reading, and in this current situation, that being a Quaker is very, very difficult. No question is simple and straightforward – their principles are unyielding and their commitment to integrity is absolute. But just how to apply those principles in any given situation, always
[Read more ...]]]> In the New York Times this last week there was a story about a private school in Manhattan called Friends Seminary, a school that was founded in the 18th century by Quakers. The Quaker meeting that began the school is now having doubts about staying connected with the school. It’s not uncommon for churches and their schools to part ways, usually because of liability issues or the school getting too big for the church to manage. But in this situation, the meeting is concerned that the school has become un-Quaker. Tuition is over $32,000 a year, and so only a fairly elite tier of students attend. Since Quakers have simplicity and equality as core principles, this rubs many of the meeting members the wrong way, you could say. The Quaker process, however, does not allow for taking a vote about such things – you sit in silence together when debates heat up and wait for consensus. So there have been a lot of discussion, with a lot of sitting in silence, and no clear decision yet.

It happens that I’ve been reading about Quakers this last week, in particular about their views on money as I prepared the adult ed forum for this week. Their practice is to be very intentional about money, always conscious of who is affected when they think about buying something or taking a new job – which is partly why they were historically such good businesspeople, very frugal and conscientious in their management of things. And it struck me in my reading, and in this current situation, that being a Quaker is very, very difficult. No question is simple and straightforward – their principles are unyielding and their commitment to integrity is absolute. But just how to apply those principles in any given situation, always within the counsel of their community, never as lone ranger individuals – it’s a complicated process. They struggle to see the way God sees, listening to each other for the Spirit’s guidance. No wonder there are now only 520 Quakers worshiping in Manhattan these days.

I was thinking about this because we have a few stories today about seeing the way God sees, and in both cases, it’s clear that it takes work. In the first story, the prophet Samuel is told by God to go and anoint a new king, since Saul has not turned out well. Samuel goes to the home of Jesse and watches his sons, waiting to see which one of them God has chosen. But it’s not the one he thinks. Samuel is impressed by Eliab, but God says, don’t judge by appearances or height – I look at what is within. So Samuel looks at every other son, but none of them are the one. Finally Samuel insists that they call the youngest, who is out watching the sheep, and lo and behold, David turns out to be the one, and Samuel anoints him. Samuel has to ask for what he is not seeing before he sees the one God desires. And, curiously, David also gets the seal of approval for his appearance – ruddy and handsome, with beautiful eyes. But this seems to be a bonus, not the main point.

The John story is about this same tension of seeing and not seeing. It’s a healing story, but the majority of this long passage is about what comes after the healing. One of things that’s unusual about the story is that it’ s an instance where the person healed doesn’t ask for the healing at all – the man born blind is more of a teachable moment at first, as Jesus answers his disciples’ question about whether sin had something to do with his blindness. Jesus heals the man, it seems, to prove a point, tells the man to go wash in the pool, and then walks on. He sort of leaves this guy to his fate – and with what happens afterward, you almost wonder whether he would want to thank Jesus or not.

Because first his neighbors start on him: Is this the same guy? He used to sit here begging, and now he’s walking around able to see. What is this? How can this be? And so the man tells them about what happened, how Jesus has healed him. But instead of rejoicing with the man that now he can see, these neighbors are bothered and upset. Things have changed, and they’re not happy about that. So they bring him to the Pharisees, getting the authorities involved. The Pharisees also ask how this happened, and so the man tells his story again. But again, instead of rejoicing at the good news, the Pharisees fixate on how this healing was done on the Sabbath, a terribly unacceptable time for healing to happen. No good godly person would do such a thing, they say – but then others say, yes, but how could a sinner do a healing like this? And back and forth they argue. They turn again to the man and ask what he thinks. Well, he says, this man must be a prophet, because he healed me. Wrong answer: God plays by the rules, and we must too. Their understanding of Law and tradition just won’t allow that something like this can happen.

So then the man’s parents get called into it. Yes, they say, this is our son, yes, he was born blind, but no, we don’t know how he can see now. Same response. They should be thrilled at this wonderful thing, but they’re simply afraid of what might happen to them. So they back off – I dunno, go talk to him about it! So one more time the Pharisees question the man, trying to get him back into the debate about what sort of person this Jesus is. The man now says, Look, all I know is, I was blind, and now I see. They can’t hear that, so then he says, If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. It’s obvious! Can’t you see that? And so they throw him out of the synagogue.

The one who was blind is the only one who sees who Jesus is. Everyone else is blind to what is right in front of them. That’s the point the gospel writer is making, of course. So at the end of this experience, the man born blind now sees. But he has also been rejected by his neighbors and his family and his faith community. He never asked for this healing to happen; he may have been perfectly content being blind, we don’t know. Now, however, he sees, and he is alone. And then and only then, Jesus shows up again, and reveals himself fully to the man. And the man worships him, and believes.

We’d like to think that this is not how it happens for us. We are attracted to this Jesus guy; we are drawn to worship and believe in God; we want to accept that we are forgiven and loved and to see the beauty of God’s hand in the world around us. And we want to believe that as this happens, we will be led to more and more blessing in our lives, easier and easier paths to follow. We’ll be in the zone, we’ll see doors open to us that had been closed, we’ll have nice people around in our lives, it will become clear how we are to proceed in each moment. And in everything we do, we’ll have God right there at our side, ready to call on for help.

But instead, things tend to get more complicated, as the Quakers in Manhattan are experiencing right now. We can’t just see the beauty around us; we also see the pain and the heartbreak, the waste of the world and its resources, the inequality of wealth and how we live – and we find ourselves urged to do something about it. We don’t just float along with other nice people around us; we get honest about our own compromises and selfishness, we rub up against other real people and we have to work out how our community will respond to hard things. As some of us discovered this last week in the conflict and reconciliation workshops, we might even have to sit down and talk directly with people we utterly disagree with in order to move forward as a community. And as the blind man in the story experienced, we may not even have a sense that God is there at all; it may feel like God has just wandered off and left us in this difficult spot all by ourselves. Experiencing God and having our eyes opened even slightly leads us further into the fray instead of away from it. No fair.

Of course, the man born blind in John’s story doesn’t seem to complain about his healing. He begins as a blind beggar, you remember, someone things happen to, not at all an actor on his own stage. He doesn’t ask for the healing, but it happens to him anyway. His neighbors notice it and talk about him as if he isn’t there, but he cuts in, beginning to articulate his story. I am the man – this is what happened to me. He doesn’t at first know who Jesus is or where he has gone. But then the Pharisees question him and deride him, and slowly the man begins to witness. First he says, Jesus must be a prophet. Then, ‘all I know is, he healed me.’ And finally, ‘look, this has never happened before in the history of the world! It’s astonishing! Of course Jesus is from God!’ And at last, when Jesus finds him again, he is ready to believe, offering Jesus his heart and his worship. In other words, the man born blind sees more and more and more throughout the story, until at last he sees as God sees, and is ready to say that to others no matter the cost. Despite all that he has lost by the end of the story, he offers no lament or complaint – he is elated with what he has gained. Sight, and knowledge of God, the intimacy of talking with God face to face. After an experience like this, he isn’t a beggar anymore, waiting for scraps to be thrown to him – he’s a missionary and a witness. He can’t help it: there’s too much good news in this to keep it to himself, even if others aren’t able to see it with him.

As the Quakers are experiencing, it is work to live faithfully and with integrity. And we are experiencing that as well in our community. We’re learning and growing. Whether we’ve been here 30 years or we’ve just arrived today, it’s a journey we’re on. We are most of us pretty blind most of the time. We have our own set of criteria and categories that we judge and assess others by, things we learned as children or in school or in our work. We have assumptions about how the world works and what is right and wrong. But along the way on the journey of faith we begin to see our blindnesses, we begin to get a sense of other ways of seeing. We start looking for Christ in one another as our baptismal covenant says; we start seeing and feeling the pain and the joy in the world. And we find that we need one another to see the whole story, we need the wisdom of others to make good decisions, that we need to take time together to do that. I suppose on the one hand it’s more of a hassle, isn’t it? But on the other hand, we can’t help it – the deeper we are drawn to the heart of God, the deeper we go into the hard questions. But the deeper we also go into the answers at the root of all of it: God’s love for us; life abundant; every one a child of God. It’s simple and difficult all at the same time. May we know and trust the God who gets us into it – that we will indeed see him face to face, and know the love we seek. Amen.

But suddenly I became powerfully thirsty, so thirsty I was convinced I was dehydrated. When I’m dehydrated, I faint, and I suddenly felt thirsty
[Read more ...]]]> Last November I attended an 8-day conference called CREDO, something the national church offers to all clergy. It’s a chance to get away and reflect productively on what’s working in your life and what needs to change, spiritually, vocationally, financially, in your mental and physical health. My conference was at a gorgeous camp in the swampy coastal lowlands of Georgia. There was lots of time built into the schedule for quiet and reflection and long walks, all of it balm to my tired soul. During one stretch of quiet time I sat and wrote in my journal, reflecting yet again on one of my perennial problems, my inability to take the time to deeply engage with God. Always I feel the thirst for God, but rarely can I or do I really drink from the well. Suddenly I slammed the journal shut. I was tired of thinking about it. Here I had 45 minutes till our next worship service – I was going to go sit and pray, darn it. But where should I pray? I fretted. Go to the chapel, came the response. Yes, but they’ll be setting up for the service in the chapel, it’ll be all noisy in there, I countered. Go to the chapel, it came again. Fine. I went to the chapel. No one was there at first. I sat in quiet, eyes closed, settling into the peacefulness. After about 5 minutes, the door banged, and in came one of the leaders of the conference, getting ready for the service. I sighed and settled back into silence. Then came more people, arriving for the service. I settled again, and sat.

But suddenly I became powerfully thirsty, so thirsty I was convinced I was dehydrated. When I’m dehydrated, I faint, and I suddenly felt thirsty enough even to feel faint. I got up and went to the sacristy to find water. The priest getting ready for the service saw me and immediately asked, Kate, will you read the first reading? I agreed and went back to my seat, drinking my water. So I looked at the reading. It was from Isaiah, chapter 41. It read, ‘When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water…’ I stopped reading, and I started laughing. Laughing so hard I was almost crying. I looked up at the ceiling and suddenly realized that the strange light fixtures I’d been puzzling over looked like giant water dippers. I looked out the window and saw nothing but the smooth river passing by. All around me, there was water. It was like God got out the megaphone and said, DRINK IT, IDIOT. Hurl away the barriers, and just drink.

It is a constant puzzle to me why we don’t drink the water. Our spirits long for God; I believe that at the root of every desire we have is a desire for God. And yet we more often than not try to fill that desire with other things, things that do not satisfy. And then we wonder why we’re unhappy.

Our Exodus reading and our gospel reading both touch on this idea, the living water that God offers us. In each of them we hear something of that exchange between God and us – God offering us what we long for, and us not getting it, not responding. In the Exodus story, poor Moses is dealing with the wandering Israelites. He’s brought them out of slavery, but now they’re thirsty in the desert, and all they can do is complain. So God gives Moses a boon – strike the rock, Moses, and water will gush out. And so the people drink. But it’s not too long before they’re complaining again, and off worshiping the golden calf while Moses is up the mountain talking to God. The God of fire and smoke and living water is too much for them – they’d rather focus on something simple and tangible that they can see, even if it’s a creature of their own making – even if it can do nothing for them.

And in the gospel story, the Samaritan woman has that exchange with Jesus. He tells her he has living water for her and she says, but you don’t have a bucket. He says no, this water doesn’t require a bucket, you’ll never be thirsty again, and she says, great, then I can stop coming here to this well. She simply doesn’t understand what this water is all about. So then Jesus gets personal, telling her to get her husband – knowing that she has had several relationships with men. She’s been looking for love in all the wrong places, you could say – she’s been trying to satisfy her desire in ways that do not satisfy. This seems to get home to her, though she tries one more tactic to avoid: arguing about where and how to worship. Our customs and rituals are near and dear to our heart, so near that they can take the place of God as well. But Jesus brushes this distraction aside also, saying, you don’t worship the worship style, you worship God in spirit and truth. And with this, the woman finally admits her true desire: I know that Messiah is coming. He will show us everything we long for. And Jesus says, I am the one. There it is: She gets that Jesus is the real deal, and off she goes to tell her people about him. But the episode isn’t over yet – back come Jesus’ own disciples, who immediately take up the confusion again. Rabbi, eat something, they say – he says, I have food to eat enough. They say, did someone give him something to eat? No, Jesus says, not that kind of food. Doing God’s work is my food. Ohhhh, they think. Right. But they don’t really get it. And then all the Samaritans come back onstage with the woman and spend time with Jesus, and they say, ah, we get it. He is the Savior of the world. He is the food and the drink we desire. And the gospel writer’s point is, the Samaritans are getting it before you, the people of Israel. Here is the living water. Why don’t you drink?

The writer Barbara Brown-Taylor makes the point that our doing this is as if we were babies who, when offered the milk to drink, choose the pacifier instead. We choose the thing that eases our immediate need, even though it is not the thing that nourishes and feeds us. Another writer, Gerald May, says that this is the definition of addiction. We attach ourselves to things that do not truly feed us, and avoid the thing that we most need. Anything can take this place – not only the addictive substances of alcohol and drugs, sex or adrenaline rushes, but busyness and work, our own competency and ability, our relationships with loved ones…things that could be otherwise good. Instead, they become problematic, because we seek in them what they cannot supply – the meaning of our lives, the nourishment of our souls. We might get an immediate sense of completeness back – it feels good to do a job well, it feels good to be with the person we love, it feels good to be in control of a situation – but it doesn’t last. At some point comes the 3am dark time when all the things we’ve set up around ourselves seem hollow and empty. At some point comes the crisis when those things are taken away from us. The loved one dies or leaves us; the job ends; we see that we weren’t in control of things after all. And then we need that living water, that sustaining bread of life, and we need it in a hurry. If we have stayed in touch with our need for it, if we’ve stayed in relationship with God in some way, we can find our way back to the well. It is always there for us to drink from, God is always so very thrilled to have us return. But all too often, we’ve forgotten by then where the well is, or that there ever really was a well. The dark night of the soul becomes very dark indeed.

But as God pointed out to me in Georgia last November, the living water really is always there. We don’t have to do something special or say the right words or organize our lives or apologize before we can turn to God – God is always there ready to receive us. The true nourishment we need is offered to us always. The problem for us is that God doesn’t always receive us on our terms alone. When we choose a lesser substance to satisfy us, we one way or another stay in the driver’s seat – or at least we think at first we’re in the driver’s seat, before true addiction or obsession kick in. We satisfy ourselves the way we want to, on the timetable we have devised. We do it more or less our way. But when we turn to God instead, when we ask for that living water, we don’t control just how it will happen. As Jesus tells the woman, it can become a spring of living water gushing up, more than we can ask or imagine to satisfy our need, more than we can control to stay neat and tidy. As we have seen in these last weeks, roaring, rushing water is a mighty force – catastrophic to our neatly laid plans and routines, cleansing of the clutter and debris we cherish so much. We are no longer thirsty, but we are no longer the same – our lives are changed forever. And we’re not always sure we want that kind of change.

But God knows it scares us. God is unpredictable, yes, but God is always loving. God wants and desires most deeply what is to our deepest good. We are not going to be destroyed or washed away, though we may be upset and turned over for a little while. We need to drink from the well; we need the love of God to survive. Without that water life is indeed empty and hollow, and we are tied up with bitterness. We need to stop for just a moment and say, help. We need to stop at the end of the day to be grateful for what we have, and to say, thank you. We need to simply sit for a few moments in the sun and let God speak to us. We can’t do it all ourselves. We can’t find what truly satisfies all on our own. So ask God for the water – take a sip of what is offered. It will change you, yes – but it will nourish you and feed you like nothing else can.

And when we’re not reading about Japan, we’re reading about Libya – the brutality there, and now the possibility of our involvement in stopping it. Heartbreaking and scary all at once.

This week also happened to be the week that Jim and I had an appointment to meet with an attorney to begin drawing up our wills, something we have put off for far too long. It meant that Monday evening we spent pulling things together and talking about who should be guardians to our children if we both died. And since our attorney also recommended considering advance directives for health care, our drive to Berkeley to the appointment on Wednesday was filled with discussion about what kind of end-of-life decisions we
[Read more ...]]]> This week the news has been particularly horrible to read. At the beginning of the week we saw pictures of the devastation by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Then we began hearing about the problems with the nuclear reactors, and about how paralyzed the leadership in Japan seems to be at addressing the crisis. We’re familiar with the pattern of tragedy in the news – a terrible calamity happens, the death toll is calculated, survivors are found, the story recedes from the headlines. But this is a tragedy that seems to be getting worse and worse, rather than better with time. And as the fears about the reactors have risen, WWII survivors have relived the horror of Hiroshima; more recent memories of Chernobyl or even just Three Mile Island have replayed in many minds. I’ve remembered the nuclear fear of my childhood, when it seemed possible that Russia could decide to bomb us at any time. The already staggering tragedy going on Japan has now touched all of us, and it has stoked all of our fears.

And when we’re not reading about Japan, we’re reading about Libya – the brutality there, and now the possibility of our involvement in stopping it. Heartbreaking and scary all at once.

This week also happened to be the week that Jim and I had an appointment to meet with an attorney to begin drawing up our wills, something we have put off for far too long. It meant that Monday evening we spent pulling things together and talking about who should be guardians to our children if we both died. And since our attorney also recommended considering advance directives for health care, our drive to Berkeley to the appointment on Wednesday was filled with discussion about what kind of end-of-life decisions we wanted to make. How do we want to die, in other words.

Perhaps picking up on all of this, Frances asked me as she went to bed Wednesday night, ‘Mama, when am I going to die?’ I said none of us know that – but that I hoped it wouldn’t be for a very, very long time. She wanted to know how it was she would get to heaven, and I said that since I haven’t been there I don’t know, but that I believe that God will hold us and take care of us when we die.

So I have been thinking a great deal about death this week – as perhaps have many of you. First of all, a question: how many of you have made out your wills? How many have done advance directives about health care? You may not know that even our Book of Common Prayer notes that it is the duty of every Christian to make out a will – it’s there at the end of the prayers for thanksgiving for a child, that we should put our affairs in order to care for those we will leave. It is well worth the spiritual energy and time to do so, to focus on our own mortality and what will be left when we die.

But even if we don’t do that, events like the catastrophe in Japan bring home our mortality to us in a big way. Scenes of such devastation, such vast numbers killed in seconds, are so hard to comprehend. We struggle to take it all in. It just goes on and on. And perhaps we wonder, how can God let something so horrible happen? How can so many lives be snuffed out so quickly? Doesn’t God have anything to say about such tragedy? Couldn’t God stop it?

I’ll admit, when I began to try to see how these questions fit with the readings presented to us for this Sunday, I wasn’t sure how they did. That conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus in the gospel is all about birth, not death. But then I began to imagine the scene, what Jesus and Nicodemus thought of each other as they talked. There’s Nicodemus, a Pharisee, scholar and teacher, sneaking in to see Jesus at night when no one is looking. He says, ‘We can tell – I can tell – that you must be from God, because you’re doing amazing things.’ Jesus responds, ‘Ah, you can see that because you have been born from above.’ In other words, he’s complimenting Nicodemus, saying he’s far along on the spiritual path. But his response puzzles Nicodemus, who misunderstands him. ‘What do you mean, born again? How can anyone get born a second time?’ So Jesus tries to explain: ‘Not born again physically, silly, I mean you have to be born from above, born of water and the Spirit. The Spirit is uncontrollable, a free gift.’ Nicodemus says, ‘What??’ And Jesus, apparently exasperated, says,’ You’re a teacher of Israel, and you don’t get what I’m saying?’

These characters in the gospel stories are stand-ins for us, I think. By their blundering and confusion and clueless questioning of Jesus, they give us cover – asking the questions and making the mistakes that we do too. Or that we would do if we weren’t trying to be so religious and pretend we understand everything. We can lurk behind them and wait for the answer. But the answer’s not always that clear. Our questions seem like obvious questions to us. Be born again? How can we crawl back inside the womb? I don’t get it. This terrible suffering – how can God let such tragedy happen? I don’t get it. But to God these same questions may sound like, why is purple not orange? Or how come today isn’t yesterday? Nonsensical questions, in other words, questions that reveal the limitations of the questioner more than they probe at any real truth. God may well want to throw up her hands and say, you still don’t get it??

No, we don’t really get it. We’re not equipped to get it, not completely. We see things according to the assumptions we’re born with, assumptions of the law of gravity and linear time and death as a final end. We can’t help it – it’s how we’re made. And yet something in us won’t rest with those assumptions. We hear whispers that they’re not 100% accurate, that what we see may not be all there is. We sense that somehow, maybe we even get an actual glimpse of the thinning of the veil – the thin places the old Celts talked about. All of us can probably tell stories of our own or someone else’s of things that are hard to explain by the usual methods, times spent at the deathbed of a loved one when we heard or saw somebody else, or times when we knew something somehow we couldn’t otherwise have known. The cynics and realists among us argue that all of that is wishful thinking, as if it’s better somehow to be limited. And yet the stories persist. And so we’re drawn to find the answers.

The Spirit blows where it wills, Jesus tells Nicodemus. You say you see I’m from God – well, that means that you won’t always understand me or know where I’m coming from or where I’m going. But I’ll try to explain it anyway – so he talks to him of life-giving water, of God’s love, of eternal life, and maybe Nicodemus gets something out of it. Nicodemus has come to seek Jesus out – something has touched him, tugged on him, gotten him there even under cover of darkness. No, he doesn’t understand everything Jesus says to him, at least not on an intellectual level. But it seems that some part of him does experience living water in Jesus’ presence – some part of him does experience God’s Spirit moving in him and around him. Jesus’ explanations may confuse him, but Jesus himself, the fullness of his presence, answers him. I think that’s what Jesus means in that famous verse we heard today – whoever believes in him will have eternal life – bring your questions, bring your anxious thoughts and imaginings, and offer them to me. Look at me, the face of love. Be at rest. Drink the water you thirst for.

And so it is for us. Something has tugged and pulled us here today too. It may be under cover of something comfortable and easy, like seeing our friends or doing our duty on a Sunday. But it’s blown us here, here with what may be hard questions for us about suffering and loss, fresh from watching terrible images on our televisions. And I think that same Spirit blows among those who haven’t come to church today to look for answers – who may have gone elsewhere for comfort, or who may be trying to console themselves that there is no comfort. Why is there suffering – why did so many people die this week – why do we lose the ones we love? The answers to those questions may not be understandable to us on one level. Loss and tragedy can’t be easily explained, put neatly in a box that makes them bearable. Death and suffering are unbearable. Any theological explanation can wind up sounding like too much of a pat answer.

The answer we are given ultimately is Jesus. In Jesus we see the God who loves us and everyone. We see the God who brings healing to the sick and sight to the blind and hope to the desperate. We see the God who weeps over his friends’ suffering. We see the God who gives up everything for those he loves, the God who suffers and dies a shameful death. We see the God in whom life is more powerful than death, who shows us that death is not the final end at all, that resurrection is possible.

So look at the face of that love and that abundant life. Throw your questions at him, and your confusion and frustration about the suffering of this world and our lives. Bring your thirst for healing and hope and drink; bring your wounds and allow God to heal you. You may not get the clear answer to the questions you started with – but you will get the answer your soul deeply desires.

My great-aunt Edna, then in her 80s, would come occasionally to stay with us, and she came to visit while I was in the grip of this particular enthusiasm. One day while she was out of her room, I wandered in. There on the bed was her handbag, and before I even quite realized what I was doing, I reached in and pulled out a $20 bill – and pocketed it. Later that same day I went to the toy store with a friend – and with that $20, I bought a beautiful Breyer horse.

Well, it didn’t take long for my aunt to notice the missing money, and she mentioned it to my dad, who then sat me down and got me to admit the ugly truth. Since by then the money was spent, he paid my aunt back himself – I had to apologize – but I got to keep the horse, which seems amazing to me as I look back on it. But maybe my dad realized what would happen – I never could play with that horse without feeling kind of sick about it, and ashamed. And I certainly never, ever again took something that wasn’t mine.

Temptation – and its consequences.

Today we hear two different stories of temptation – the archetypal one of Adam
[Read more ...]]]> When I was a young girl I went through a period of playing with horses – not real horses, but the model Breyer horses with the beautiful flowing manes and raised hoofs all sculpted out of plastic. I coveted new ones, and whenever I could save up my allowance I would go buy one, looking over all the models and planning which one I wanted to buy next. With the horses I would act out various imaginary adventures for hours.

My great-aunt Edna, then in her 80s, would come occasionally to stay with us, and she came to visit while I was in the grip of this particular enthusiasm. One day while she was out of her room, I wandered in. There on the bed was her handbag, and before I even quite realized what I was doing, I reached in and pulled out a $20 bill – and pocketed it. Later that same day I went to the toy store with a friend – and with that $20, I bought a beautiful Breyer horse.

Well, it didn’t take long for my aunt to notice the missing money, and she mentioned it to my dad, who then sat me down and got me to admit the ugly truth. Since by then the money was spent, he paid my aunt back himself – I had to apologize – but I got to keep the horse, which seems amazing to me as I look back on it. But maybe my dad realized what would happen – I never could play with that horse without feeling kind of sick about it, and ashamed. And I certainly never, ever again took something that wasn’t mine.

Temptation – and its consequences.

Today we hear two different stories of temptation – the archetypal one of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the story we call simply, The Fall. And the one of Jesus in the wilderness, confronting the devil. Similar temptations in each story. But vastly different responses.

Adam and Eve live happily in the garden of the Lord, a beautiful, lush place where all they need is provided. All is well. They have only one rule they must obey. And before long, they are tempted to break it. In comes the serpent, craftier than any other animal, and engages the woman in conversation. He simply asks a question. He’s perfectly reasonable. And he promises that they will be like God – you don’t have to be ignorant and limited like you are right now, you could be like God. You don’t have to depend on God – eat the fruit of this tree and you’ll know what he knows. You’ll know good and evil. The woman thinks, well, the fruit does look tasty. And it’s sure pretty. And hey, I want to be like God. So she eats it, and the man eats it with her. And the first thing they experience is shame – their eyes are opened, just like the serpent says, but they don’t like what they see. Suddenly being naked is no longer ok – what is good and natural and created by God now looks tainted and shameful to them. So they make clothes and cover themselves up. They know good and evil – or perhaps more accurately, although before they knew only good, now they know evil. And nothing is ever the same for them again. At the beginning of all the stories of Hebrew Scripture, temptation wins, and ruins everything.

And then we hear in the gospel of Jesus, at the very beginning of his story. Right after his baptism, he heads off into the wilderness to prepare himself. He fasts and prays for 40 days – part of why our season of Lent is 40 days, echoing his experience – and at the end, the devil appears, and offers Jesus three temptations. He’s perfectly reasonable. He even speaks in the language of scripture. You’re hungry, Jesus – and you will come into contact with many who are hungry in your ministry. Why don’t you use your power to make these stones into bread? You’re something really special, Jesus, you can do things others can’t. Try it out, jump off this cliff – you’ll be able to get them to listen to you this way. You want to get people doing things your way? You could have all the power you want over them. All you have to do is worship me. The devil is savvy. He picks the right temptations – all of them speaking to what Jesus is longing to do in the world, to feed people, to heal and reshape the forces that keep people captive, to bring all the people of the world to God. But Jesus resists him, each time essentially saying: I’m not here for power. I’m here for God. I will continue to love and follow God above all, and all I do will be rooted in him alone. And so the devil gives up – and God’s angels come and take care of Jesus, famished from his long fast. His trust in God, it seems, was well placed.

See, that’s the thing – temptation is always reasonable. Or at least it’s reasonable to us as we consider it. We can come up with all kinds of reasons why doing something we’re tempted to do – or not doing something we should do – is actually right, for ourselves and others. Evil is rarely obvious to us. It looks like the good, except not quite. It has to be attractive for us to consider it, after all. And usually it’s not presented quite so succinctly as in these two stories – usually we don’t hit one particular decision point and go from there down the road of either good or evil. We ease into sin slowly, maybe without even consciously considering what we’re doing. It may be a long time – or it may never come – before we realize how far off the mark we’ve drifted.

Of course temptation is different for each one of us. We cluck over celebrities in their big, splashy trainwrecks – Charlie Sheen is a good one these days, but there’s always someone. The high-profile temptations of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll may not be what we are facing most days. Which is not to say that they aren’t there as temptations, even for ordinary people. But I would wager that other sins, no less damaging to us and to others, are more common for most of us. Apathy perhaps, self-sufficiency, complacency, pettiness, worry, ambition, consumerism – the word we use for what we used to call avarice. Whatever the issue, they all have their root in one thing – the temptation that is common to the Adam & Eve story and to Jesus’ experience in the wilderness. Our central temptation is this: we are always tempted to live our lives without God at our center. Adam and Eve were rooted in God right from the beginning – it’s how we were made. But they, and we, lost it. And so we center ourselves around other things instead. We don’t want to follow instruction – we want instead to think we know better. We don’t want to depend on God or on others – we want to go our own way. We linger in pettiness and bitterness, judging other people harshly because we don’t see them with God’s eyes. We put our egos or our careers or our own vision or our love of material comforts ahead of where they should be – leaving loving God and loving our neighbor a distant second, or fourth, or fifth. So we eat the apple because it looks good to us, and everything is spoiled. Even what was good gets tainted somehow.

But Jesus’ resistance changes it all. He answers that temptation in the desert steadily with No – I will love God first. Throughout his ministry he continues to do this – loving God and loving others and thereby bringing healing and life and hope to people around him. At the very end of his life he does this, giving himself up in love for us and in trust that God’s promise of life will be fulfilled. And it is. His resurrection comes in three days. Through Jesus’ ardent steadfastness God is able to act, to sweep away all our compromises and rottenness and reground us and all of creation in love, God’s love for each and every one of us.

And so we are forgiven. For our tendency toward temptation, we are forgiven. For all the times we fail, we are forgiven. For all the times we choose ourselves first instead of God, we are forgiven. The good that was spoiled is made whole again; we’re offered the chance to let go of the shame. Our eyes are opened in a new way: with the example of Jesus’ steadfastness, with the revelation of abundant life despite all odds that we see in his resurrection, we can recognize temptation for what it is: we can recognize its cheapness, its shoddiness, its dinginess. Life is better, richer, fuller, when it is grounded in God. We breathe more freely when God is at the center of our existence. We know this, or we at least get glimpses of it, but we forget it. Which is why a season like Lent is good for us: time to take measure of where we are, of how closely we are aligned with God’s love and purpose in the world, how far off we have gotten. Time to disburden ourselves of the shame and anger and secrets that spoil life; time to joyfully reclaim the lightness of being we were made for.

Take hold of it. Do what you need to do to let go of the grime. Confess it – in prayer to God, in conversation with someone you trust, in writing – somehow, let it go. Examine your day at the end of the day. How often did you do what you did out of love? How often was it for other reasons? Do this for a while, and you get wise to what temptation looks like in the moment. Remind yourself that God loves you. Tell others that you love them. And when you can’t do this, ask God for help. Above all, in each moment, find something to be thankful for. That’s the discipline of Lent – and in doing this, we live.

I think we use the term ‘mountaintop experience’ because of the very story we heard today, the story we call the Transfiguration. It’s a story that comes in each of the synoptic gospels, and we always wrap up the church season of Epiphany, this season we’ve been in since Christmas, with this story. Before we go into Lent – the valley of Lent, you could say – we hear about the mountaintop. It’s an amazing story. Jesus takes his best friends and closest followers up the mountain and something incredible happens – he becomes dazzling with light, his clothes shining white, and Moses and Elijah, two pillars of the Hebrew
[Read more ...]]]> Have any of you ever had a mountaintop experience? By that I mean, an experience that was spiritually thrilling beyond anything else you’d felt, a time when you felt close to God and everyone around you, at peace with yourself, in love? Sometimes feelings like that come when we’re on a retreat or a weekend like Cursillo, or on a trip into the wilderness, or when we have our first child. I remember as a teenager going to spiritual renewal weekends, what a high I would be on for a few days when I returned. Or the thrill of backpacking up above treeline, how deeply settled I feel when I’m up there. But however wonderful, that feeling of exaltation doesn’t last, does it? Sometimes it’s only a little while, sometimes a few days – but eventually, we have to go back to work, we have to balance the checkbook and clean the bathrooms, we have to sit in traffic as we drive back across the Central Valley, and it all fades away. It’s the nature of mountaintop experiences that they don’t last. But that doesn’t mean they don’t change us.

I think we use the term ‘mountaintop experience’ because of the very story we heard today, the story we call the Transfiguration. It’s a story that comes in each of the synoptic gospels, and we always wrap up the church season of Epiphany, this season we’ve been in since Christmas, with this story. Before we go into Lent – the valley of Lent, you could say – we hear about the mountaintop. It’s an amazing story. Jesus takes his best friends and closest followers up the mountain and something incredible happens – he becomes dazzling with light, his clothes shining white, and Moses and Elijah, two pillars of the Hebrew tradition, appear with him. Peter and James and John have been wandering around with Jesus and hearing him speak and watching him heal and seeing him do amazing things, but this tops everything. And Peter, dear Peter, is absolutely beside himself. He just doesn’t know what to think or what to do, it seems, and so he starts babbling: ‘Hey, it’s a good thing we’re here, Lord, because you and Moses and Elijah should have some places to stay in up here! Wow, we could really do something great for you here! We could –’… but then there comes a voice, interrupting and silencing Peter, saying, ‘This is my beloved Son…listen to him!’ And Peter shuts up and falls to the ground, and so do James and John – and then the vision ends and just Jesus is there, looking normal again. And he says, get up, and don’t be afraid. And they go down from the mountain, and Jesus begins his journey toward Jerusalem and death.

Poor Peter. Of course he babbles and doesn’t know what to do. Maybe he wants to prolong the experience – maybe even in the midst of having it he already fears it slipping away. Maybe he really is frightened – his best friend shining like the sun and a voice from heaven booming out. It’s terrifying. You don’t have a close encounter with the living God without being terrified. That’s what it seems like, at least – every time an angel of God appears in the Bible, the first thing they say is, do not be afraid. Jesus says it too – get up, and do not be afraid. And Peter does seem to calm down – at least, he’s able to walk down the mountain with Jesus and continue following him. But his first instinct is frantic action, this idea of building some kind of booth or tabernacle – maybe it’s trying to provide some ritual religious context for what he’s seeing, or maybe it’s less coherent than that. Either way, Peter’s instinct is to put parameters around this wild and uncontrollable experience. What he is seeing is utterly beyond his ken, utterly incomprehensible – it freaks him out, and he wants to regain his equilibrium and sense of control. And he wants to sustain the experience, the moment of total intimacy with Jesus. But God’s voice from heaven interrupts him: this is my son – listen to him. Stop it, Peter, and just listen.

The picture of Peter we get from the gospel stories is pretty consistent in all the gospels – Peter the hothead, the impulsive one, the one to blurt things out and put his foot in his mouth. Peter who is scared out of his wits at Jesus’ arrest, who follows and hangs around to see what happens but then denies he has anything to do with Jesus, Peter who responds eagerly to Jesus in the end, yes, yes, Lord, I do love you. But the picture of Peter in other New Testament books is different – Peter in the book of Acts is more focused, more authoritative, part of the building of the new church; Peter in the epistles has the gravity of a respected elder. Somewhere along the way, Peter grows up, maturing from the fiery friend of Jesus to the pillar of the church. He has his mountaintop experience of God – really you could say he has several years of it, all the time he accompanies Jesus in his ministry. He experiences Jesus’ resurrection, a firsthand eyewitness to the empty tomb. But then he has to keep going – to keep following on with what Jesus is calling him to do even when the rush of Jesus’ presence is gone.

All of us are something like Peter, wherever we are on our journey – whether we’ve had what we would call a mountaintop experience or not. Peter in the gospels sometimes is the example of what not to do – but he’s also the example of real love for Jesus, and for trying hard to understand him. We want to follow Jesus; we want to understand his call to us; but our own stuff gets in the way. We’re uncomfortable not being in control. We’re nervous outside of our routines and rituals. We’re afraid. We get all tied up in knots, trying to live the way we think we ought to. We want to just do it our own way.

Again, that voice from heaven breaks in: listen to him. Listen to God, to what Jesus is calling you to. Hard to do. Our prayers tend – if you’re like me – to be full of the sound of our own voices, asking for things. Good things, important things, things that are right for us to ask for (and probably some that aren’t) – but it’s always us talking. And then we wait impatiently for an answer – usually giving God about two minutes to respond. When we don’t hear it, we get still more impatient. The thing is, relationship with God is just that – relationship. It’s not a drive-up window at MacDonald’s. Listening to God requires being in relationship with God. And we don’t always want to go there. Or rather, we want it and we don’t want it at the same time.

It’s like all relationship. All of us need relationships. We need other people, pets, somebody around to relate to, to talk to and hear from, to connect to. We need to be part of a group or maybe several groups. It’s elemental: babies who are never touched fail to thrive. We are geared to be with others. Unless we’re hardcore loners, we’re lonely without others. Most people long to find a life partner, or at least someone to be with more intimately for a time. And yet most of us aren’t that good at relationships. We tend to want to have our cake and eat it too, to have the person around for us without having to change anything of how we are. We can sometimes fall into the habit of wanting relationship only at our own convenience – neatly avoiding it when it isn’t what we’re wanting at the moment. This is why we make such extreme vows in our marriage ceremonies – till death do us part. When we make the vows, we’re all romantic and excited at the life ahead of us with this wonderful person we love. But marriage isn’t always like that – without those vows, it’s all too easy to wander off when things aren’t quite as we want them. The external commitment sometimes is the only thing keeping us there. We have to do a lot of daily work to stay in relationship, to have that relationship be a healthy one of love and respect.

And so too with God – we want God around and useful to us when we need it, and neatly disposed of when we don’t. The mountaintop experience is wonderful and we want it to continue, whether it’s the flush of first conversion or the profound experience of God’s closeness in a crisis; we’re less enamored, however, of the daily discipline of prayer and moral behavior. Showing up regularly, whether we feel spiritual or not, is hard. We wax and wane in our commitment to God – like Peter, we can be wildly enthusiastic when the rush of passion is upon us. But very quickly, we start wanting to shape it our own way – to control the terms and do our life how it suits us. The harder work of really following Jesus, however, means that we can’t be in control. We’re not passive in it – we have to be present to listen. We have to have our ears open and our eyes peeled, to see and hear God in what happens to us, in the voices of those around us, in the sound of wind in the trees. We have to be alert, but not fearful – alert to where God might be calling us to act, to trust – to be God’s people without fear.

Maybe that’s why we have this reading before Lent – a story of spiritual exaltation before we enter the time of discipline and penitence, the season when we are supposed to re-up our commitment, to focus anew on right relationship with God and with each other. Each one of us experiences God in a different way, some more ‘exalted’ than others. But wherever or however you got started on this journey, at some point following Jesus boils down to daily life. It’s not as fun – but it’s the stuff of real relationship. The mountaintop is the start of the journey – or the renewal of the journey from time to time. It changes us; it fuels us for what is to come. But then, Jesus says, Get up, do not be afraid, and let’s go down the mountain. There’s work to be done. There’s a world of suffering, there are people hungry and in need. Stay with me in this relationship, Jesus says – listen, and learn, and love.

So give thanks for whatever got you here to church today. Remember and relive what got you started in this love relationship with God – and let that reconnect you again with the discipline of prayer, and caring for others, and study of God’s ways, the things that will sustain your relationship with God. Listen to God – let’s listen to God together – and together let us respond with love for the world. Amen.

But even as given as I am to worry, I am amazed – appalled, even – at the level of anxiety in our culture. We live in what seems to be a terribly fearful age. Dangers seem to loom around every corner, far more than I remember they did when I was young. Is it really a more dangerous world? Or is it that we simply worry more – perhaps because we know more about what could go wrong? Take parenting, as one vivid example. For every time you read something like Dr Spock, who begins his book with, don’t worry, you already know how to do this, and babies are stronger than you think, you hear about 25 other voices telling you of all the horrible things that can happen to your child. Genetic mutations while they are in the womb – so you should have several tests to be sure things are ok before the baby’s born. Especially if you’re – gasp! – over 35. Complications in childbirth – so you are urged to follow the medical advice of doctors throughout. Illness and injury to babies and toddlers –
[Read more ...]]]> I have a habit of worrying. If I’m not sure of how something will be, I worry about it, at night, in my sleep, during the day, while I’m thinking about other things…worry worry worry. My mother is a worrier too – I came by it honestly. But I don’t want to be a worrier. I’d rather sit more lightly to things, roll with it all more easily – but it’s hard. So those words Jesus speaks, do not worry about your life, are such a balm to my soul. I long for that kind of trust, to simply rest and trust that God has things in hand.

But even as given as I am to worry, I am amazed – appalled, even – at the level of anxiety in our culture. We live in what seems to be a terribly fearful age. Dangers seem to loom around every corner, far more than I remember they did when I was young. Is it really a more dangerous world? Or is it that we simply worry more – perhaps because we know more about what could go wrong? Take parenting, as one vivid example. For every time you read something like Dr Spock, who begins his book with, don’t worry, you already know how to do this, and babies are stronger than you think, you hear about 25 other voices telling you of all the horrible things that can happen to your child. Genetic mutations while they are in the womb – so you should have several tests to be sure things are ok before the baby’s born. Especially if you’re – gasp! – over 35. Complications in childbirth – so you are urged to follow the medical advice of doctors throughout. Illness and injury to babies and toddlers – so you had better childproof your house, buy the right kind of equipment (new is better), and wash your hands constantly. Random attack by strangers, dogs, moving vehicles – so you had better check the sex offender registry for your neighborhood, keep your child with you at all times, and drive them back and forth from school in your large and indestructible SUV.

That’s just parenting. Did I mention the threat of terrorist attack? Radiation from cell phone use? Swine flu? An unknown person walking toward you on the sidewalk? The opportunities for worry are endless.

There are two things I notice about all this worrying and anxiety: one is, it makes people very unhappy and unable to live life well. Worry keeps us from enjoying what we have and being grateful for it; fear keeps us from trying something new that might expand us and our horizons. It’s not fun to be a worrier, and it doesn’t seem to do us any good. But the second thing I notice is that there are a lot of other people making a great deal of money off of anxiety. We buy new things if we’re afraid the old ones won’t be safe; we pay extra money for things like insurance and security systems; we earn less interest if we stay conservative in our investments. So why do we do it? Why do we spend so much time in fear and anxiety?

Well, it’s partly because those who benefit from our fear and anxiety make sure to keep it elevated. It suits their purposes to have us worrying and afraid, so they make sure we constantly hear about the reasons why we should be worried – in advertising and in other less obvious ways. Tragedies make better news stories, so we hear about those far more often than the more common times when nothing bad happens. But we also seem to go there ourselves more than we should – parents are quick to remind other parents of all the dangers lurking about, for instance. Even when everybody agrees that the neighborhood is safe – like this one – we’re still afraid to walk after dark. It’s as if we think that by worrying we can control things, that we can ward off the bad things from happening if we are always on guard. And we long, so long, to be in control.

I think that’s what Jesus is getting at with the words that started off our passage today: You cannot serve God and wealth. One of the key ways we try to combat all these anxieties is money. Buy the new product, pay for the alarm system, hike up the levels of insurance. And above all, make more money, because enough money will keep you safe. Our fears make us pull up the drawbridge of our lives, wall ourselves and our loved ones off from the rest of the world. Money helps us do that – if we have enough to keep ourselves self-sufficient, then we don’t have to depend at all on other people. But it’s not just money – there are other ways as well to try to stay in control. Refusing to talk about or listen to things we disagree with helps. Attacking other people helps. All the methods currently in play in the Mideast, as various governments attempt to maintain their power – all of those are things we can each employ in our own lives as well. Limit the available information, shut down opposing voices, hoard resources. But Jesus says clearly, You cannot give your allegiance and loyalty to money and to God both. Put more broadly, You can’t worship your own sense of control and worship God. Because putting your trust in God means, ultimately, letting go.

Did you hear all the comforting language in our scripture readings today? Revisit for a moment the passage from Isaiah: Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you, says the Lord. Or the psalm: I still my soul and make it quiet, like a child upon its mother’s breast; my soul is quieted within me. Or again, in Jesus’ words: God cares for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field – do you not think God will care for you? When was the last time you felt that safe and secure – like a child upon its mother’s breast? For a little child with reasonably responsive parents, their parent is God – their parent, they believe, has the power to keep them safe from all harm, to give them what they need. It is only as we get older that we realize our parents can’t do everything, and that we experience harm that our parents could not prevent. Go back in your mind if you can to what it felt like to trust like that – or if you didn’t have that kind of family, then imagine what it would feel like. Restful, isn’t it? Like you can let go, just for a moment, of all the cares and occupations of your life, the things that keep your shoulders tight and your jaw clenched. Like you can trust that someone else has everything in hand.

This is why I like going to a spa.

The hard thing is, it doesn’t always seem like God does have everything in hand. Bad things happen. We get sick, our loved ones fail. People betray us. We lose our money and suddenly we can’t even keep a roof over our heads. If God is looking out for us, how come things like this still happen? There’s no easy answer to this – after all, scriptures like we heard today do make it sound like God will take care of things as basic as the food we need. But I suppose if it were just about that, then we would simply be children on our mother’s breast – our every need met, cared for in all possible ways. Would we really want to stay children forever? There is a kind of innate selfishness in children that we take years to grow out of – some of us, of course, never do. A world that was set up to care for our every need would let us all stay just as selfish as we wanted to. And we would never get to that place of free choice in our relationship with God – we would simply be eating what was set before us and doing what we were told, as very small children do (very small, before they get to that independent thing at 3 months). We would not be choosing to love God at all.

But beyond that, I think what Jesus is saying is that there is more to what is good than meeting our own needs. Trusting that God cares for us requires trusting that God knows our needs even better than we do – that in our limitations we can’t see past the present moment and our present circumstance. But if God is God, then God does see further than we can – and God sees as well what is deeply needed by every other person in the world. Trusting that God cares for us doesn’t mean giving up and sitting on the street corner awaiting food – though it might be an interesting experiment to trust that radically; trusting God means believing that God is with us and carrying us through all things, good or ill. And so, rather than spending all our time and energy worrying about ourselves and our safety, spending all our money and resources shoring ourselves up, we could be working for the kingdom of God – caring for others (and their safety), spending our resources on those who have little, loving freely and without fear those the world has rejected. Our fear and our anxiety keep us walled off from one another. It keeps us selfish. And indeed, we cannot love God fully when what we are interested in most of all is our own self.

So ‘do not worry’ is more than just an impossible sounding task. It is a call for faithfulness. To trust that there is a God, that that God is loving, that God’s sense of the good is good enough for me – all of that is an act of faith. It certainly changes the way we live day-to-day – whether we feel constantly on guard or at ease, whether we direct our energies always to our own selves. It may change something of what happens to us, or at least how we react to what happens to us. And it definitely changes our priorities – seeking first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, looking out for others and this fragile earth, caring for the world as God does. You could call it an exercise in global change: as more and more do this, it would make it possible for all of us to trust more, because the world would become a more caring place. So this week, I invite you – if you find yourself worrying over something, offer it up in prayer to God. Hand it over to God and insist that God take care of it. And go about your way. Use your time and energy to care for another instead, and to count your blessings. And be thankful.

Now before you run screaming from the room, let’s explore this a bit more. How many of you here would call yourself a perfectionist? How many of you don’t call yourself that but…you can’t stand it when you make mistakes, you get irritated with other people when they make mistakes, and you work more than you should? Or if that’s not you, then how many of you were raised by a perfectionist? Did you always feel loved, even if you got dirt on your dad’s shorts or crashed the car or got a B in biology? Yeah, none of perfectionism is good, is it? But looking at the gospel reading today, it looks like God is a perfectionist too. ‘Be perfect, just like God is perfect.’

No. Let’s sweep that one out of the way right off the bat. Time for a little Greek lesson: The word translated ‘perfect’ is ‘teleios,’ which comes from the root word ‘telos.’ Telos means purpose, end, or goal. Teleios is variously translated perfect, whole, grown-up, complete, mature, full-grown. It does not mean perfect in the sense of never being wrong, or without flaw. Lesson here: When you read scripture, always, always remember that you are reading it in translation.

So our passage could also read, ‘be a grown-up, just like God is a grown-up – be the fulfillment of God’s purposes, just as God is always fulfilling God’s purposes.’ Which is maybe less scary, but if we think about it, no less daunting. And what Jesus said just before it – love your enemy, turn the other cheek, pray for people when they attack you, go the extra mile – none of that is easy stuff either. Easy to get back on the perfectionistic bandwagon – if I don’t do all these things, I’m failing.

Well, yes and no. You know that old debate about nature vs. nurture? Whether people have innate tendencies toward particular temperaments, or whether everything is learned from their environment? It seems like mostly these days experts say it’s a mix of the two: children do seem to come into the world with the beginnings of personality already intact, somehow inherited from the genetic pool they’re descended from. Two kids raised in the exact same environment don’t turn out the same – sometimes they turn out radically different. This has amazed me with my two kids – I don’t know yet how they’re going to turn out, but they’re definitely two different people, and they were personalities from the start. It’s an amazing thing, raising a kid – where on earth do they come from? I mean, really come from?

But also, how kids are raised – the home they’re part of, the schools they attend, the culture that surrounds them – shapes them as well, highlighting or downplaying elemental parts of their personality. I just watched the 2010 documentary ‘Babies,’ which films 4 different babies from radically different cultures around the world: Mongolian herders, Namibian tribespeople, Tokyo middle-class parents, and your typical eco-minded San Francisco parents. The babies are adorable, of course, but it’s also fascinating to see the basic similarities in infants – the way they scrunch their faces, flap their arms, learn to crawl and stand…no matter which baby, they reminded me of our own two babies. But then watching them in their own environments and the different ways they were being raised, I got to thinking how differently they would turn out: the Namibian and Mongolian parents tended to leave their kids on their own a lot, trusting them to the fates of dirt and germs and older siblings, while the San Francisco and Tokyo parents fussed over them a lot more. The Tokyo child was surrounded with techie equipment in her home with bright neon lights outside her window, while the Mongolian child crawled across open steppe under big sky. We have a hundred theories of child-raising in our culture alone – seeing all those different ways of different cultures reminded me again of how many ways people grow up. Each one of those babies started out with something like all other babies, but also something innate and unique to each – and each of them will end up very different from the others because of the culture that brought them up.

There are so many different ways to be human – and yet at the basic level we start out with the same thing: each one of us is God’s beloved child. Each one of us is made in God’s image – which means we are made to be holy, to be like God, to model our life on God’s example. And God’s example is lived out in real human life in Jesus, most fully – the things he asks us to do and be are things he lives out himself. It’s not something no human being has never been able to do. But each one of us is unique as well – as was Jesus. We aren’t asked to live Jesus’ life; we’re asked to live our own, to live out what it looks like being God’s beloved each in our own way. By nature we are each of us God’s child – and then our job, and that of the community around us, is to nurture us into God’s grown-up…with God’s help. So we do have responsibility here, of course – but we have help from those around us, and even more, we have a profound head start.

Because before we can work on our behaviors and attitudes, before we can go running off with these expectations for how to be, we have to remember what is innate about us: that we are beloved. Jesus himself heard that at the beginning of his ministry – before he ever taught or healed or preached or suffered on the cross, he heard that voice at his baptism say, you are my Beloved. And each one of us needs to hear that in order to live the life before us. God loves you. God loves you. And you, and you, and you. Stop for a minute – settle into that. God created you, and God loves you.

So, live into that now. Our task is to raise up this beloved child. So how do we raise our children to be good adults? We encourage them when they’re unsure about trying something new, we say no to them and help them regroup when they go astray, we give them opportunities to explore and learn – and ultimately, we love them. We seek out others – teachers, friends at church and school, neighbors – to love them also, and we hope that they find more people to love them as they grow up. It’s said that marriage is a chance for us to keep growing up – that our spouses take over where our parents left off. I think that’s what all human relationship can do, to help each of us grow up. That’s what loving community does – encourage us, redirect us when we need it, offer us new things to try and learn. That’s what we’re doing for each other here in this very church.

Be a grown-up, as God is a grown-up. Love one another, even your enemies. Do not retaliate when someone does wrong against you – instead, love them and pray for them. Being and doing all of these things starts with knowing who we are: God’s beloved. And then it takes the practice we’ve been talking about in recent weeks – practice supported by our community. Building and strengthening what helps us live into that with spiritual disciplines, with conscious thought about our behavior, with ways to stretch ourselves higher and better than before. And letting go and discarding what keeps us from living into being God’s beloved – old hurts, or bad habits, or resentments about other people. Prayer helps a lot here, as does confessing what we’ve done wrong. And ultimately, remembering again and again that we are beloved of God, always and ever.

Because when we know that, deep down and in our heart of hearts, then we find that these things Jesus tells us to do aren’t as hard as they initially seemed. If I am God’s beloved, then what can another human being do to me? If I am beloved, then I am secure – and I can reach out from my rootedness in God to help another, someone who may be striking out because of their own pain and need for love. I can easily pray for others when they hurt me, because I can love them – not in order to get something from them, but simply because as God’s beloved I love all the rest of God’s beloved children as well. I can love, because I know myself so well to be loved.

So yes, what Jesus says in today’s gospel is a tall order. But it’s not about doing something we’re not really capable of. It’s really about being ourselves, the selves God created us to be, the beloved lovers that make up the kingdom of God. God loves you. Be the beloved. And then go and love others. Amen.

Now before you run screaming from the room, let’s explore this a bit more. How many of you here would call yourself a perfectionist? How many of you don’t call yourself that but…you can’t stand it when you make mistakes, you get irritated with other people when they make mistakes, and you work more than you should? Or if that’s not you, then how many of you were raised by a perfectionist? Did you always feel loved, even if you got dirt on your dad’s shorts or crashed the car or got a B in biology? Yeah, none of perfectionism is good, is it? But looking at the gospel reading today, it looks like God is a perfectionist too. ‘Be perfect,
[Read more ...]]]> So the word gospel means good news – when we read the gospel we’re meant to hear in it good news for us and the world. Which is why in the Episcopal tradition we end the reading of the gospel with, ‘The Gospel of the Lord…Praise to you, O Christ.’ But there are some days when the gospel reading may not leave us feeling quite like we heard good news. My preaching professor in seminary said that in preaching, we always needed to bring the good news – in other words, a good sermon shouldn’t just be a harangue from start to finish. You can have some haranguing in it, but you have to wind it up with the good news. Well, today’s clip from the sermon on the mount seems to be more harangue than good news – to be fair, it’s still just the middle of the whole sermon. But we get several commandments from Jesus in that reading today, and then if you weren’t yet feeling overwhelmed, it’s wound up with one ultimate commandment: be perfect.

Now before you run screaming from the room, let’s explore this a bit more. How many of you here would call yourself a perfectionist? How many of you don’t call yourself that but…you can’t stand it when you make mistakes, you get irritated with other people when they make mistakes, and you work more than you should? Or if that’s not you, then how many of you were raised by a perfectionist? Did you always feel loved, even if you got dirt on your dad’s shorts or crashed the car or got a B in biology? Yeah, none of perfectionism is good, is it? But looking at the gospel reading today, it looks like God is a perfectionist too. ‘Be perfect, just like God is perfect.’

No. Let’s sweep that one out of the way right off the bat. Time for a little Greek lesson: The word translated ‘perfect’ is ‘teleios,’ which comes from the root word ‘telos.’ Telos means purpose, end, or goal. Teleios is variously translated perfect, whole, grown-up, complete, mature, full-grown. It does not mean perfect in the sense of never being wrong, or without flaw. Lesson here: When you read scripture, always, always remember that you are reading it in translation.

So our passage could also read, ‘be a grown-up, just like God is a grown-up – be the fulfillment of God’s purposes, just as God is always fulfilling God’s purposes.’ Which is maybe less scary, but if we think about it, no less daunting. And what Jesus said just before it – love your enemy, turn the other cheek, pray for people when they attack you, go the extra mile – none of that is easy stuff either. Easy to get back on the perfectionistic bandwagon – if I don’t do all these things, I’m failing.

Well, yes and no. You know that old debate about nature vs. nurture? Whether people have innate tendencies toward particular temperaments, or whether everything is learned from their environment? It seems like mostly these days experts say it’s a mix of the two: children do seem to come into the world with the beginnings of personality already intact, somehow inherited from the genetic pool they’re descended from. Two kids raised in the exact same environment don’t turn out the same – sometimes they turn out radically different. This has amazed me with my two kids – I don’t know yet how they’re going to turn out, but they’re definitely two different people, and they were personalities from the start. It’s an amazing thing, raising a kid – where on earth do they come from? I mean, really come from?

But also, how kids are raised – the home they’re part of, the schools they attend, the culture that surrounds them – shapes them as well, highlighting or downplaying elemental parts of their personality. I just watched the 2010 documentary ‘Babies,’ which films 4 different babies from radically different cultures around the world: Mongolian herders, Namibian tribespeople, Tokyo middle-class parents, and your typical eco-minded San Francisco parents. The babies are adorable, of course, but it’s also fascinating to see the basic similarities in infants – the way they scrunch their faces, flap their arms, learn to crawl and stand…no matter which baby, they reminded me of our own two babies. But then watching them in their own environments and the different ways they were being raised, I got to thinking how differently they would turn out: the Namibian and Mongolian parents tended to leave their kids on their own a lot, trusting them to the fates of dirt and germs and older siblings, while the San Francisco and Tokyo parents fussed over them a lot more. The Tokyo child was surrounded with techie equipment in her home with bright neon lights outside her window, while the Mongolian child crawled across open steppe under big sky. We have a hundred theories of child-raising in our culture alone – seeing all those different ways of different cultures reminded me again of how many ways people grow up. Each one of those babies started out with something like all other babies, but also something innate and unique to each – and each of them will end up very different from the others because of the culture that brought them up.

There are so many different ways to be human – and yet at the basic level we start out with the same thing: each one of us is God’s beloved child. Each one of us is made in God’s image – which means we are made to be holy, to be like God, to model our life on God’s example. And God’s example is lived out in real human life in Jesus, most fully – the things he asks us to do and be are things he lives out himself. It’s not something no human being has never been able to do. But each one of us is unique as well – as was Jesus. We aren’t asked to live Jesus’ life; we’re asked to live our own, to live out what it looks like being God’s beloved each in our own way. By nature we are each of us God’s child – and then our job, and that of the community around us, is to nurture us into God’s grown-up…with God’s help. So we do have responsibility here, of course – but we have help from those around us, and even more, we have a profound head start.

Because before we can work on our behaviors and attitudes, before we can go running off with these expectations for how to be, we have to remember what is innate about us: that we are beloved. Jesus himself heard that at the beginning of his ministry – before he ever taught or healed or preached or suffered on the cross, he heard that voice at his baptism say, you are my Beloved. And each one of us needs to hear that in order to live the life before us. God loves you. God loves you. And you, and you, and you. Stop for a minute – settle into that. God created you, and God loves you.

So, live into that now. Our task is to raise up this beloved child. So how do we raise our children to be good adults? We encourage them when they’re unsure about trying something new, we say no to them and help them regroup when they go astray, we give them opportunities to explore and learn – and ultimately, we love them. We seek out others – teachers, friends at church and school, neighbors – to love them also, and we hope that they find more people to love them as they grow up. It’s said that marriage is a chance for us to keep growing up – that our spouses take over where our parents left off. I think that’s what all human relationship can do, to help each of us grow up. That’s what loving community does – encourage us, redirect us when we need it, offer us new things to try and learn. That’s what we’re doing for each other here in this very church.

Be a grown-up, as God is a grown-up. Love one another, even your enemies. Do not retaliate when someone does wrong against you – instead, love them and pray for them. Being and doing all of these things starts with knowing who we are: God’s beloved. And then it takes the practice we’ve been talking about in recent weeks – practice supported by our community. Building and strengthening what helps us live into that with spiritual disciplines, with conscious thought about our behavior, with ways to stretch ourselves higher and better than before. And letting go and discarding what keeps us from living into being God’s beloved – old hurts, or bad habits, or resentments about other people. Prayer helps a lot here, as does confessing what we’ve done wrong. And ultimately, remembering again and again that we are beloved of God, always and ever.

Because when we know that, deep down and in our heart of hearts, then we find that these things Jesus tells us to do aren’t as hard as they initially seemed. If I am God’s beloved, then what can another human being do to me? If I am beloved, then I am secure – and I can reach out from my rootedness in God to help another, someone who may be striking out because of their own pain and need for love. I can easily pray for others when they hurt me, because I can love them – not in order to get something from them, but simply because as God’s beloved I love all the rest of God’s beloved children as well. I can love, because I know myself so well to be loved.

So yes, what Jesus says in today’s gospel is a tall order. But it’s not about doing something we’re not really capable of. It’s really about being ourselves, the selves God created us to be, the beloved lovers that make up the kingdom of God. God loves you. Be the beloved. And then go and love others. Amen.

I talked some last week about how Jesus wasn’t always nice – how he didn’t always say things that made people feel comfortable. Today’s gospel would be a good example of that. This is sort of the ‘if you thought you were doing well, think again’ text. It’s not enough not to murder – don’t even get angry and insult people. It’s not enough to steer clear of adultery – don’t even think about it. And if you divorce, it’s even worse. By these standards, every single one of us has broken God’s law. With standards like these, how can we not? So what do we do?
[Read more ...]]]> Our 4 year old, Frances, loves hearing stories – and somewhere along the way it became enshrined in ritual that Mom or Dad telling her a story can get her through anything: long walks home, teeth brushing, and so on. After several months – years – now of ‘tell me a story,’ it’s easy to run out of ideas. But happily, Frances has started offering suggestions. So she and I are now embarked on a series of Frances and Aidan stories, about a brother and sister who are almost but not quite like a future version of Frances and Benjamin. A regular occurrence in their relationship is arguing and putting each other down, sometimes escalating into yelling – until Mom or Grandpa or someone intervenes and they apologize and remember they love each other. It’s a pretty obvious theme, and one I not so subtly hope will offer a way forward for Frances when her own brother grows up enough to be a pest. Siblings have a way of bickering and fighting – but hopefully, also a way of reconciling and loving each other fiercely. Something like what we can do in community.

I talked some last week about how Jesus wasn’t always nice – how he didn’t always say things that made people feel comfortable. Today’s gospel would be a good example of that. This is sort of the ‘if you thought you were doing well, think again’ text. It’s not enough not to murder – don’t even get angry and insult people. It’s not enough to steer clear of adultery – don’t even think about it. And if you divorce, it’s even worse. By these standards, every single one of us has broken God’s law. With standards like these, how can we not? So what do we do? Well, we can throw up our hands and not even try…or we can get hyper-critical and judge everyone around us… both of those are tempting – but I think by these we’re missing the point.

This language about ‘the law’ can steer us in all kinds of wrong directions. There’s a kind of Christian thinking that says, the law has nothing to do with us, it was just the old covenant: Jesus set us free from it altogether; there’s another related kind of thinking that says, the fact that the standards of the law are so high and we can’t meet them is God’s way of steering us toward Jesus as our savior; there’s yet another kind of thinking that says, Christians are still supposed to follow all the rules, and otherwise, we won’t get to heaven. All of these theologies can co-exist in anyone of us without us realizing it – that’s why we can end up secretly comparing ourselves favorably with others when we’re living righteously, while tossing it all out and saying, ‘well, God doesn’t care, I’m forgiven!’ when we’re not. And then worrying about whether we’ll get to heaven or not in the end.

I think part of the problem is our understanding of what the law is for – tangled up maybe with what we think civil laws are for, or the kinds of rules we teach our children. In those cases, laws are about rules: do this, don’t do that, and you’ll stay within the bounds. Break those laws or rules, and you’re out of bounds, and punishment will follow. But God’s law isn’t that. It’s about relationship. Commandments and rules in Hebrew scriptures are meant to guide us to right relationship. Look at the 10 Commandments, the most basic set of rules in scripture: rabbinical writings in Judaism point out that the first four of the commandments are about being in right relationship with God: you shall have no other Gods before me, do not make idols, do not swear falsely by God, honor the Sabbath day; while the next six are about being in right relationship with each other: honor your parents, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not covet what belongs to your neighbor. They’re rules, yes; but they’re rules meant to help us relate better to God and to one another.

So in what Jesus is saying in today’s gospel, he’s trying to get us past the legalism and into what it is like to truly live in right relationship. His point is, it isn’t enough to say, well, I didn’t murder anyone today, I’m doing well. There’s more to it than that: when we get angry and blow up at each other, when we say hurtful things to each other, it damages us and damages our community. When we objectify another person with our desire instead of relating to them as a full child of God, it damages us and damages our community. When we break relationship instead of working to heal it, it damages us and it damages our community. (Though I think in Jesus’ sayings on divorce we need to remember that divorce in Jesus’ day was a pretty one-sided affair, initiated only by the man and without really requiring a good reason. Women and families suffered enormously as a result.)

So it’s not enough just to follow the rules. I think we’re all probably clear on that. But the question for us is then, are we in our community in the right relationship with God and with each other that Jesus is directing us toward? What kind of community is this that we are in? what kind of community do we want to be part of?

I attended our diocesan clergy conference this week. The conference leader was a priest named Stephanie Spellers, who has written a book and done a lot of work on what she calls radical welcome – truly welcoming everyone into the church as a child of God. One of the ideas she suggested was going out into the neighborhood and surrounding community and initiating conversations with people who are not a part of the church, and asking them, among other things, what kind of community do you long for? Because, she argues, everyone is longing for community – it may or may not be a church community, but listening to the answers people give can give us clues to what our church should be to welcome people in. It’s a good question, I think: what kind of community do we long for? I wonder how each of us would answer if we were honest. We might want a community that confirms us in what we already think is true, that joins us with people who think just like us. Some communities do that. We might really want one that gives us friends and something to do. Some communities offer that. But maybe we long for a community that transforms us, that makes us into lovers of God and our neighbor. Frankly, it’s this last one that really means church – the other kinds of community can be met in many different spheres in our culture already. Only the church is centered on God and transformation. If we’re not interested in that, let’s be honest – we can find our opinions confirmed and our social lives enriched better elsewhere. Church doesn’t do those things as well; and church demands more than that.

Church should be – I’ll say it, should be – where we work to get ourselves in right relationship with God and with each other. Which might really mean some work. What would happen if we really followed what Jesus said in that gospel passage – if as each of us approached the altar today, we considered whether anyone else here had something against us. And if there was something that wasn’t right between us and another here, we’d leave, go find that person, sit down, and make peace. And then and only then, we’d come back here together to worship. What if we lived that radically? We just might have to put off communion for a while today until everyone had a chance to talk it all out.

Few communities – maybe no communities – have nothing they need to work through. And I’m not just speaking hypothetically for us at ECA. This community has had to deal with the courts and accusations Jesus talks about, right in our very recent past. It has been a live question for this community, what does Christian community look like. There was a real betrayal of the community, in the actions of a member and previous treasurer of our churches, and people here had to decide, how would we respond? Those in leadership decided on a course of action that they felt was consistent with Christian values – this week everyone will receive a letter from our JV Board president Sue Scaff outlining the situation one last time. And then, in one way, the issue will be closed. We will not be revisiting what to do in regard to the wrong that was done to our community. We will move on in that sense. But what we will still need to deal with is the real damage that was done here: what friendships were broken, what feelings were hurt, who felt part of the process and who felt excluded. People have things against one another in this very community. It’s a time for us to take Jesus’ words seriously – a good chance to take our own temperature for how we are community. This may not be the only time or topic we need to work through as the years go by –as I said, real communities always have to work things through in real life. And I don’t think this is a make-or-break moment for this church community as a whole. But it can certainly be a learning for us, if we choose to take it this way. And it could be an unhealed wound if we don’t.

It matters that we do the work to be in right relationship with each other. It matters that we are in right relationship with God. And as Jesus noted, sometimes it is with our own sister or brother that we need to do the most work. If we have been angry with, or talked badly about, or blown up at someone, the result is not so much a black mark on our record as God considers us for heaven – it’s that that relationship is harmed and needs healing. We can’t just blithely pretend that everything is the same. We need to stop and seek forgiveness; we need to offer it too. We need to do the long hard work of true reconciliation. It’s one of the ways church is different than other communities, that we expect this of ourselves. Because living in relationship, right relationship with God and each other, is what the kingdom of God, the family of God, is all about.

So let’s think for a few moments about salt. We sometimes use that expression, the ‘salt of the earth,’ in describing someone – and by that we usually mean that they’re good, dependable people, perhaps not the most intellectually fired up or well-educated folk, but people you can trust to be what they say and do what needs to be done. It’s a compliment, but perhaps not the most shining compliment in our culture. We get that phrase from this scripture, of course. Beyond that, salt is a natural element that we tend to take for granted in our well-refrigerated culture, but it was essential to preserving food when there were no other means of doing so. It also seasons the food, keeping it from being
[Read more ...]]]> We’re spending several weeks with Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and it occurred to me this week – it’s kind of strange to preach a sermon on a sermon, isn’t it? It sort of feels like trying to coast in on someone else’s good ideas. But then, I suppose that’s what preaching on scripture always is. And of course, a sermon from 2000 years ago in a different culture and place doesn’t always translate directly for us – even if it were written down verbatim, which it’s unlikely this was. Some scholars, despite the story I told last week of visiting the Mt of Beatitudes where Jesus preached this, think that he didn’t really preach it all as a long sermon to the crowds anyway – that it was really more likely instruction for his inner circle of disciples. But whomever it was for originally, we have it now. And today we heard, You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world. Well, what does Jesus mean by that?

So let’s think for a few moments about salt. We sometimes use that expression, the ‘salt of the earth,’ in describing someone – and by that we usually mean that they’re good, dependable people, perhaps not the most intellectually fired up or well-educated folk, but people you can trust to be what they say and do what needs to be done. It’s a compliment, but perhaps not the most shining compliment in our culture. We get that phrase from this scripture, of course. Beyond that, salt is a natural element that we tend to take for granted in our well-refrigerated culture, but it was essential to preserving food when there were no other means of doing so. It also seasons the food, keeping it from being bland and perhaps covering the taste when it has spoiled slightly. It also had a number of symbolic meanings in Hebrew scripture. It was used to ratify covenants and it was eaten in meals together, symbolizing a shared relationship of loyalty and friendship. It purified things in worship, and completed the sacrifice. In rabbinical writings, salt symbolized wisdom. But in the most obvious sense, salt makes things better – especially makes things taste better. The American diet includes a lot of salt, so much so that health professionals are encouraging most of us to reduce our intake. Salt is used especially in processed foods, transforming subpar ingredients into tasty, addictive snack foods – and it takes some work to train our palate out of salty foods. Saltiness is something we crave, it seems – something Kraft and General Foods know how to capitalize on. I know I love it. My favorite medical advice ever was being told to eat salty foods during my pregnancies, because my blood pressure kept dropping. I thought, wow, lucky me. But I digress. Salt: it gives flavor, it keeps things from spoiling, it purifies things, it means wisdom and relationship.

So onto the next phrase: You are the light of the world. That image is a little more familiar to us – though usually we focus on how Jesus is the light of the world, not us. Be our light in the darkness, O Lord – we know all too well what it feels like to stumble along in the darkness at times. We have all gone through the darkness of depression or illness or relationships gone bad, or through long dry times in our spirituality. Sometimes we feel like we’re in some kind of darkness for years on end. When we go through this from time to time, we think, how can we light up the world? There’s the song, of course: this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine – the idea being that each of us has something to offer, and we shouldn’t hide it, we should be that thing we’re created to be. Someone once talked about a thousand points of light, and whatever we thought of that person, that was a good image. If we are each of us lights for others, then the world gets brighter. People can look at us and see something that lightens their darkness; they can see better in this world because we help light it for them. Maybe at times we just give a little light, or maybe we grow into being a lot of light – or as Nedi preached to us last week, maybe some of us even catch on fire for God.

So if we take Jesus’ words as what we’re supposed to do and be, we’re supposed to be salty, fiery people. Maybe we can think of people we know who are salty, even fiery. Jim and I sometimes commented on the people we knew in New York City, how intense they were. It was like someone had taken their personalities and distilled them down, generations of ethnic and cultural traditions and opinions and dispositions concentrated into these fascinating people. We knew more ‘characters’ there than anywhere we’ve lived. Sometimes they were hard to take, frankly. But they were always interesting – never bland. You never run out of things to talk about with a New Yorker.

This concentration of personality is a quality I have long admired in monastics as well. I used to take my retreats at Mt Calvary in Santa Barbara, a retreat center run by the Episcopal Order of the Holy Cross. (Sadly, that beautiful place burned down a few years ago.) In New York I spent time with the sisters of the Community of the Holy Spirit, both at their house in Manhattan and at their farm in Brewster, in the Hudson Valley. And I’ve taken a few other retreats and spent time with members of other Episcopal and Catholic religious orders over the years as well. I think before I spent time with monks and nuns I just assumed they would be dreary people, something like the stereotype of Catholic nuns whacking kids’ hands in school. But real monks and nuns aren’t like that at all, at least not the ones I know. They’re salty. They pursue hobbies like the cello, astronomy, organic gardening and sustainable living. They laugh and curse and act like themselves, completely like themselves – as if all that time in community, leaving behind the dramas of pursuing romantic relationship, spending time in prayer and worship and focused work on things they’re passionate about, all of that marinates them into these deeply authentic, real people. Sometimes totally eccentric – sometimes a little annoying or abrasive if you aren’t used to them, because they’ve stopped caring what you think of them. They are who they are. They are salt. And they’re fiery.

Our self-focused culture puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of being yourself. Find yourself, be all that you can be, don’t be a hypocrite. Plenty of people just go along being themselves without all the analysis, of course – they’re the ones we call the salt of the earth – but a certain number of louder voices in our culture, celebrities, writers, therapists, etc., insist that it should be our lifelong quest to be fully ourselves. And there’s truth to that: it’s so easy to forget, to try to be what someone else wants you to be: to be what your parents want you to be, what your boss or clients want you to be, what your partner or spouse wants you to be. It’s hard sometimes even to know who you are without all of what others put on you. And then when your spouse dies or leaves, or you retire, or an illness or an accident takes away some of your abilities, you’re adrift – you don’t really know who you are, it turns out. You don’t know how to be yourself.

All of that is true – and the call to know yourself and be yourself is important. Especially so for girls growing up in our culture today, or for children of immigrants, or any other number of groups whose identities can so easily be lost. But the problem is, ‘being yourself’ isn’t enough. Your self, for most of us, is a pretty flawed thing. Being authentically yourself might mean being a real jerk, to put it bluntly. I can’t say I liked every New Yorker I met, or thought that they were offering much to the world by being themselves.

But I compare that with monastics I know. Not every monk or nun is an advanced spiritual master, of course – there are many who have entered the monastic life and somehow not yet managed to grow deeper in the process. But those that have are striking: they are themselves, but not simply themselves. They have become who God created them to be. They have become people who are salty and full of light, a light that is not of their own making. And whether they’re polite or good company or not, you want to be around them.

And of course, the fullest picture of what it looks like to truly be yourself in this way is Jesus. Look at how many people were attracted to him, following him around the countryside and risking everything to be near him. He was sometimes hot-tempered and abrasive, he spoke the truth when people were hoping for nice comments, he said some hard things to people who needed to be redirected. And he was fully who God desired him to be. He was light – so much so that he was on fire with God. He was salty – salting the world with the flavor of God. It’s compelling. That’s what Jesus is calling us to be.

So how do we do this – how are we salt and light? Here’s one story: this comes from the Story Corps, the oral history project that has now archived more than 30,000 interviews with people around the country. A hospital chaplain told a story of visiting the facility in the basement of the hospital where she worked, where medical instruments were sterilized for use in upcoming procedures. Each set of instruments is put together for a particular procedure, and is labeled with the name of the patient and the date of the procedure. The woman who did most of the work told the chaplain that every day as she went about these menial tasks, sterilizing items and bundling them together for surgeries, she would pray for the patients by name. John is having a knee replacement – here are the instruments for his procedure. God, please be with John and heal his knee, give him courage and strength now as he prepares for his surgery and quick healing afterward…be with Mary in her heart bypass…be with little Sarah in this transplant…Amen. Every person in that hospital having a surgical procedure, without knowing a thing about it, was being prayed for by that woman – a menial, low-paid job transformed into ministry. She was a light; she was flavoring the world, every moment, with God’s salt.

Being salt and light doesn’t necessarily mean changing the world. Or, it does – but not the way we usually think of it. It doesn’t mean we have to find some heroic task to perform. It just means that we live our lives fully, each day. That each day we go about our tasks and duties with integrity. And that as we do so, we allow God’s light to shine through us; we allow God’s zest and passion and fire to burn in us and through us and shed light on this dark world. We let God be our light, and our salt; we let that show through everything we do.

Look at the cover of your bulletins. This is a picture of salt and light – of salt crystals with light shining through them, magnified. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? And yet it’s nothing special. Ordinary matter, showing God’s glory in the world. Just as we’re supposed to.

And God surprised me there. It was only the second full day of our travels, and we had already visited numerous holy sites in Nazareth and Cana and Mt. Tabor (the site associated with the Transfiguration). I was one of the few non-English clergy in the group, and we were led by two English priests who had prepared a liturgy for us in each holy place. One of those priests is a friend of mine, but we differ somewhat on how we approach worship. And by the second morning I was already sick of the worship. Every holy site had
[Read more ...]]]> One January several years ago, I went on a pilgrimage to Israel.  It was one of those tours set up for clergy, in the hopes that we would be inspired to one day take a group of parishioners on a similar pilgrimage (with the same company, of course).  It was a whirlwind 8 days of driving around in a bus and jumping in and out of various holy places – not my preferred method of seeing a place, but ok enough for a first experience.  One of the places we visited was the Mt. of Beatitudes, the site revered as the place where Jesus preached his Sermon on the Mount, what we just heard from today in the gospel.  The site of that sermon is on a slope high up above the Sea of Galilee, with a wide-open vista to the south over the sea and the surrounding mountains and hills.  It was very green this time of year – like California, the rains bring green to what is usually a dryer place – and the morning we were there, the sun was shining warm and the sea was perfectly calm.  It was an amazingly beautiful day to be outside.

And God surprised me there.  It was only the second full day of our travels, and we had already visited numerous holy sites in Nazareth and Cana and Mt. Tabor (the site associated with the Transfiguration).  I was one of the few non-English clergy in the group, and we were led by two English priests who had prepared a liturgy for us in each holy place.  One of those priests is a friend of mine, but we differ somewhat on how we approach worship.  And by the second morning I was already sick of the worship.  Every holy site had a church on it, many of them, to my taste, ugly, overly ornate buildings.  And in every site we heard a scripture reading related to the site – that part was ok – and said a prayer, and sang a hymn…a six-verse English hymn, sung at full volume, in a tempo that began slow and became even slower as we went.  Clergy, especially male clergy, especially English male clergy, tend to sing really loud and really slowly.  I was not liking it.  And I was also encountering what was for me at the time a fairly typical set of doubts, which run something like, I’m a priest, I should like this, but man, this is SO churchy, maybe I’m in the wrong profession, etc.  So in this state I arrived at the Mt. of Beatitudes, filed in along with the others to the very ugly little church, endured the hymn, and fled outside, down to the garden where I could see out over the lake and feel the sun.  I thought, that’s it, I must be a pagan.  Get out of the church and go outside, stop the hymn and be still in the silence – clearly the response of a pagan.  I should write the bishop immediately.

But as I sat out there in the warmth of the sun, hearing the birds and seeing the sea sparkling below, I remembered suddenly where we were.  This was the place where people think Jesus preached.  Gathered around him on the grass, or maybe up above him on the slope for the purposes of acoustics, were crowds of people, sitting outside and listening to this man.  People who spent their days outside, farming these hills and fishing on this sea, listening to this person who spent most of his time also outside, wandering, teaching, healing, feeding people.  Whenever Jesus had a crowd, he took them to some place outside where they could all spread out and hear him.  And all of this he did in the region where he grew up and came into adulthood, in the beautiful area around the Sea of Galilee, a place he must have loved for its beauty something like how I was loving it, how I love places like Sierra peaks or California hills or the green fields of Oxfordshire.  This Jesus lived much of his life outside and, apparently, loved being there.  It was a Jesus I had never really connected to until that moment.

Now, lest you think that my great epiphany of this pilgrimage was that we should just tear down the churches and go outside (and we should do some of this), let me hasten to add that I had a few more moments of transcendence along the way, some of them in the midst of very traditional churches.  But what I took away from this experience on the Mt. of Beatitudes is the reminder that God always surprises us – that we are by no means in control of how or when God speaks to us, or how God is opening up new things in us.  I was despairing of ‘experiencing God’ on this trip.  Even though it was a religious pilgrimage, it wasn’t set up the way I wanted it to be, and so I assumed that I wouldn’t have any kind of spiritual moment at all. And right when I least expected it, God appeared.

Which, for me, opens up the words of the familiar Beatitudes that we just heard.  So familiar we might forget to hear them – blessed, blessed, blessed…yeah, yeah.  Again, we’re right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry:  in Matthew’s account, Jesus has been baptized at the river Jordan, and has tested his call in his 40 days in the wilderness.  He has called a few followers away from their fishing, and has begun to teach and proclaim the good news of the kingdom, and to heal those who are sick.  And so he has a great crowd following him at this point.  He has no great credentials, no august lineage or official patronage; he’s just the carpenter’s son – but he’s got something, apparently, that draws people.  So he takes his disciples up to the mount above the sea and begins to say these words to them.

Blessed – or perhaps it could be translated, happy, or honored – are those who are poor in spirit, who mourn, who are meek, who hunger and thirst for righteousness…who are reviled and persecuted on my account.  A whole list of people and states of life that we don’t usually think of as blessed at all, and certainly not happy.  And it would have been particularly surprising for those listening to him – prosperity and good reputation and a good family were the signs of God’s blessings, not the opposites.  Come to think of it, we usually assume that as well, don’t we?  We talk about feeling blessed when things are going well for us – when we get the job, or the tests come back benign, or we have a wonderful vacation with our family.  We don’t say we’re blessed when everything seems to be going wrong.

But the list of ‘blesseds’ that Jesus preaches corresponds pretty directly with the state of those who were gathered to listen to him – those who had left family and livelihood, who had walked away, or been thrown out from, traditional codes of honor and righteous living.  People who were pursuing a life that was offensive to many around them in that culture, enough so to be persecuted.  Jesus’ words to them were a reassurance, a comforting statement that they had embarked on the right path, no matter what others may say of them.

But they’re also a kind of outline of what the kingdom of God requires of all of its followers:  humility, lowliness, hunger for righteousness, purity of heart, peacemaking, readiness to stand firm in tough times.  This is the picture of the world according to Christ – a very different picture from the world according to us.  This list of ways to be ‘blessed’ is a surprise – it is not what we expect, or what we would perhaps like to have affirmed…it is counter-cultural, and it’s counter our usual ideas of self-interest as well.  This list demands that we change, that we give up a great deal, perhaps, and that we see through different eyes to see the blessing of that life.  It’s a list that demands work from us to live into.

I’m going to assume that even though the Beatitudes are so counter-cultural, we’re something like those early followers of Jesus.  What he says is surprising, but compelling.  We want to be blessed the way he talks about – otherwise we could find other things to do with our Sunday morning than sit here in church.  So how do we live this out?   We love each other, we look for Christ in the face of everyone we meet, we trust that God will provide in times of need, we care for those around us before worrying over ourselves.  Yes, we all know that, don’t we – but still, how do we do that??  Last week I talked about our call to live differently than the world around us.  One person afterward said yes, so true – but how?  I start off the day with good intentions, but then so soon…I forget.   Longtime habits of selfishness and anger, ways we get along just fine in the me-first world around us, are hard for us to break – and all of us have them.

Well, it takes some effort on our part.  Just like learning any new skill, it takes practice – how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice…how do you get to heaven? Practice.  Benjamin is a good model of this:  he’s been walking for a few months now, and he loves his new mobility.  But he’s not that that good at it yet.  So he falls a lot, oftentimes on his bottom and sometimes forward on his hands.  When he falls, he picks himself back up and starts off again – unless he’s tired or frustrated, when he sits and cries a little and needs some reassurance and comforting before he starts walking around again.  But he always does start walking again, because there’s an inner imperative driving him on – he must walk, and the only way to do it better is to do it.  He’s not conscious of it really, but he keeps trying – and one day in the not so distant future, he’ll be as sure-footed as our 4 year old…even though now that looks like a long ways off.

So how do we learn to walk in this path?  I think the first step is for us to hone our own self-monitoring system, learning to be aware of ourselves and our motivations and behaviors.  When we fall, we have to notice that we’ve fallen in order to pick ourselves back up.  Sometimes it helps to have other people we can trust to hold us accountable – so that when we go off acting in our bad old ways, there’s someone to point it out, lovingly, to us.  Sometimes that’s what a church community can do for one another – as long as we’re willing to speak, and hear, that truth with each other.

So having noticed our failings, we try again.  Sometimes we’re good at picking ourselves up and trying again – other times we’re not so much.  Like a toddler, we feel frustrated with our inability, or we hurt ourselves or are sad about hurting others.  We need someone to comfort us, to reassure us that we’re doing ok, that we can heal and we can ask forgiveness and we can indeed try again.  Another thing a church community can do for one another.

But the surprise is, the work of growing in faith isn’t all on us.  Ultimately what we need to do most of all is pray – to open our hearts to God and simply talk, about what we’re happy about and what we’re sad about, what we’re proud of and what we’re ashamed of.  And then surprises happen – we suddenly find it easier to forgive something we used to be very angry about, we feel lighter about a loss that in other times would have thrown us for a loop.  We can let go of something we used to need for security and safety.  It turns out growing up, growing to be a better person, a better follower of Christ, isn’t exactly a linear process.  Growth spurts happen without our realizing it.  One day, suddenly, we’re walking, and we don’t fall anymore – or anyway, not nearly as much.

The spiritual journey is surprising.  We so easily lack imagination.  We expect things always to be the way they were before, that we’ll never get out of our ruts and neither will the other people around us.  We don’t expect God to burst in when we’ve decided God isn’t around.  But every now and then, we catch a glimpse of God in some unguarded moment, while we’re sitting in the sun, or watching our grandchild, or talking to someone in conversation, and it breaks in on us anew. God is there in unexpected ways; we should always expect the unexpected.  Blessings arrive in ways we don’t see coming. And blessed are we when we can trust that God is doing a new thing – and that we can trust where it might take us.

They cast their nets in Galilee, just off the hills of brown; such happy, simple fisherfolk, before the Lord came down. Contented, peaceful fishermen, before they ever knew the peace of God that filled their hearts brimful, and broke them too.

It starts off so gently. Just a whiff of foreshadowing at the end of that first verse…before the Lord came down…and then that unsettling bit in verse two about broken hearts.

Growing up in a fishing family in the 1st century, I don’t think you don’t have a lot of options. You don’t have the leisure to consider your vocation, to agonize over different careers and places to live. You simply do what your father does, helping out in the family business. It’s simple and straightforward, but let’s not romanticize it. Were they happy simple fisherfolk? Maybe – but maybe they were hopeless and despairing fisherfolk too. Or maybe they were simply doing the day-to-day thing to survive, without stopping to ask whether they were happy or not. Probably that’s most likely. And then Jesus came along and changed everything.

I know someone with a story like this. She was the daughter of doctors and had always assumed she would grow up to be a doctor. When it was time to apply to college, she applied to a university in the Midwest with a good premed program, and got in. A few months before she was to start, she went to a party with some friends – and there she met a guy she really liked – really, really liked. As they chatted, she asked him where he was going to college in the fall, and he said, ‘Western. Where are you going?’ Without thinking, she blurted out, ‘I’m going to
[Read more ...]]]> I’ve always liked that hymn we just sang:

They cast their nets in Galilee, just off the hills of brown; such happy, simple fisherfolk, before the Lord came down.  Contented, peaceful fishermen, before they ever knew the peace of God that filled their hearts brimful, and broke them too.

It starts off so gently.  Just a whiff of foreshadowing at the end of that first verse…before the Lord came down…and then that unsettling bit in verse two about broken hearts.

Growing up in a fishing family in the 1st century, I don’t think you don’t have a lot of options.  You don’t have the leisure to consider your vocation, to agonize over different careers and places to live.  You simply do what your father does, helping out in the family business.  It’s simple and straightforward, but let’s not romanticize it.  Were they happy simple fisherfolk?  Maybe – but maybe they were hopeless and despairing fisherfolk too.  Or maybe they were simply doing the day-to-day thing to survive, without stopping to ask whether they were happy or not.  Probably that’s most likely.  And then Jesus came along and changed everything.

I know someone with a story like this.  She was the daughter of doctors and had always assumed she would grow up to be a doctor.  When it was time to apply to college, she applied to a university in the Midwest with a good premed program, and got in.  A few months before she was to start, she went to a party with some friends – and there she met a guy she really liked – really, really liked.  As they chatted, she asked him where he was going to college in the fall, and he said, ‘Western.  Where are you going?’  Without thinking, she blurted out, ‘I’m going to Western too!  What a coincidence!’  They went out the next night on a date, and from then on, they were completely attached – and no way could she go to the Midwestern university she’d been accepted to.  So she switched her enrollment over to Western – and there, frustrated by the long complications of registering for the premed program, she spontaneously decided to do education instead, which had a strong program at Western.  When she finished school, she married the guy, she became a teacher, and they lived many happy years together.  She says now she couldn’t imagine ever being a doctor – being a teacher was exactly the right path for her life.  All because of a party, and a flash of chemistry with another person.

Sometimes it’s like that, isn’t it?  We can go along for years and years in one track without ever stopping to think about it.  The requirements of the day-to-day take up all of our time and attention, and we don’t really consider anything else.  But somewhere in the depths of our souls something is stirring and coming to life, and one day, a chance comment, something we read or overhear, makes us change.  Sometimes that change is in a new direction that everyone in our life applauds us for: yes, that was just right for you, good for you for following your heart.  When people around us like the profession we choose or the mate we bring home to the family or whatever it is, it is a strong affirmation of the rightness of our choice.  Whether it seems spontaneous or not, it is the right thing.

But sometimes our choice doesn’t sit so well with our friends and family.  The woman whose story I just told had to go home and tell her parents that she wasn’t going to that prestigious premed program after all, that she was going to Western and she had no good reason for why.  It turned out that she had always assumed she’d be a doctor because they had always assumed that – and when she told them she was choosing education instead, her father didn’t speak to her for a month and nearly pulled all of his funding for her education.  Although they grew to like the man she married, they never did let her forget that she was supposed to be a doctor, and it rankled in her for years.

Her decision caused some pain for her family, but her story is a relatively minor example of going against the grain:  compare the stories of people whose choices run up against more than just their parents…people like Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Mother Teresa – revolutionaries who felt the call of something so profound that it took them out of their contexts altogether into something that changed the world.  Such people rarely find that the world is happy to be changed, of course.  Many such people are killed because of what they do.

So that nice hymn we sang goes on:

Young John who trimmed the flapping sail, homeless, in Patmos died.  Peter, who hauled the teeming net, head-down was crucified.

It is easy for us to forget that following Jesus is that kind of choice.  Surrounded by a culture that is still nominally Christian (in the most watered-down sense possible), it doesn’t raise much flap that we go to church.  Some friends or family might raise an eyebrow if they don’t go themselves, there may be some new neighbors we’re embarrassed to share this with, but by and large, it’s not that big a deal.  It’s right in line with the Golden Rule and being a good citizen and all of those inarguable ‘values’ that make our society function.  We have to look to other countries and cultures to remember the danger of being Christian – the stories we hear from Iraq, or Israel, or India, about persecution and violence toward Christian groups, are a reminder that it isn’t easy everywhere to be a Jesus follower.  All the same, most of that kind of persecution has its roots more in ethnic than religious conflict.  It still doesn’t connect much to us in our situation.

When I talk with families about baptizing their children, I sometimes do an exercise where we write up all the values of the culture around us in one column, and all the values we hear in the gospels in another column.   After brainstorming together, the cultural values column usually lists things like success, wealth, good reputation, get there first, the one with the most toys wins.  The gospel values column lists things like turn the other cheek, love your enemies, give up your possessions, the last shall be first.  With that in front of us, I try to make the point:  baptism isn’t just a cultural act, meaningless except for traditions’ sake.  Baptism is a countercultural act.  Being Christian means bucking the system.

When Jesus came and called those happy fisherfolk, they got up and followed him.  Something in them made them ready to respond immediately.  And they left their families behind, and their livelihoods, and all they had known.  Not every disciple of Jesus made this radical a break – there were many who were described as his followers who still lived in households with their families, still practicing their professions.  But some of them did leave it all.  Maybe they were the ones who needed to leave it all behind in order to see what was truly important.  Jesus didn’t say that every follower had to make a radical break.  But by calling some in that way, he made it clear:  following me is more important than culture and customs and security and all of that.  But sometimes, when we try to follow Jesus, even us in our relatively easy context today, ‘all of that’ exerts a pretty powerful force on us.  It pulls on us from the advertising around us, from our friends and family, from our workplaces – and it pulls from inside of us too.  It’s work to live out gospel values – they’re different than the usual thing around us.  It’s certainly work in the corporate world of profit and loss, or in the school world of competitive academics.  But it’s work here at church, too, like in any group of people – working to forgive instead of holding onto grievances, seeking the good of the other person instead of protecting ourselves, making peace directly with one another rather than gossiping and poisoning the community.  Sometimes we forget how much we have accepted the culture’s norms as the right ones even for church:  all too easy for us to measure our success in our investments and number of members, instead of how much we have blessed the world around us.  You have to work hard, and think hard, to follow Jesus – and the system around you may well not reward you for it.

So why do it?  I suppose each one of us has to answer that for ourselves.  Because deep down we know it is the right way to live.  Because our day goes better and we feel better when we do it.  Because when we forget and just go along with the mean old world then we don’t like how mean we become too.  Because life just doesn’t have enough purpose otherwise.  Somehow even those contented or discontented fisherfolk recognized in Jesus something they needed and wanted – something that drew them away from all the security of their life and knowledge into scary and dangerous waters.   The goal was worth the risk.

If we think it’s worth the risk, then let’s go for it.  Let’s be people who really live out what we see in the gospels:  let’s live it out in our marriages and relationships, let’s live it out with our kids and grandkids, with our neighbors and colleagues at work and school, with the people we see on the streets every day.  Let’s be a church where we practice loving each other, deeply and truly – not stooping or settling for the ordinary meannesses of the world around us.  Let’s be Jesus’ people, here with each other and for the world.   Let’s be the blessing we seek in the world.

Back to our hymn:  The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod.  Yet let us pray for but one thing – the marvelous peace of God.

So today’s story fits for us, but it had a different use in the early church: this story from John functioned as a piece of propaganda, if you will. John the Baptist had quite a following of disciples and hangers-on before Jesus came along, and many of them may well have thought John was the long-awaited Messiah. Starting off with this narrative about John’s disciples becoming followers of Jesus is the evangelist’s not-so-subtle way of saying, come on over everyone, it’s Jesus, not John, who is the Messiah. John the Baptist himself speaks to Jesus being one
[Read more ...]]]> So, with that gospel reading, we’re still…in the beginning.  As we kick off this new year, we’re still hearing the beginning of the stories about the adult Jesus.  Today we heard John’s version of Jesus’ baptism story – last week we heard Matthew’s version.  And then the gospel reading went on to tell of the beginnings of Jesus’ recruiting campaign – starting to gather the circle of disciples who would follow him through his few years of ministry, and who would carry that ministry on after he was gone.  For us starting out together in our ministry here at ECA it’s all good timing – the parallels between what we’re hearing about Jesus and our own story are just so perfect.  No, I’m not Jesus, and you’re not here to follow me – God forbid on both counts.  But maybe some of you are here checking me out, this new rector you’ve heard tell of, and seeing where this church, rector included, might be headed.  Some of you might be interested enough to come along and see what happens, and maybe even to invite others.  I hope that will be the case – and I’m excited to see where this journey takes us.

So today’s story fits for us, but it had a different use in the early church:  this story from John functioned as a piece of propaganda, if you will.  John the Baptist had quite a following of disciples and hangers-on before Jesus came along, and many of them may well have thought John was the long-awaited Messiah.  Starting off with this narrative about John’s disciples becoming followers of Jesus is the evangelist’s not-so-subtle way of saying, come on over everyone, it’s Jesus, not John, who is the Messiah.  John the Baptist himself speaks to Jesus being one who ranks ahead of him, one who came before him, and then he points out Jesus to the disciples as the Lamb of God – and off those disciples go after Jesus.  It’s a little bit the changing of the guard at the Jordan River:  there’s a new kid in town, and everyone’s talking about him, and let’s see what happens if we follow after him.

But at a deeper level, this story serves as a narrative of the spiritual life, the life of faith all of us are engaged in, one way or another – people of several centuries ago and us today.  After the baptism, hearing what John the Baptist says, the two disciples start off after Jesus.  Jesus turns around and sees them following, and they have a short, strange conversation.  Jesus says, ‘What are you looking for?’  The disciples reply, ‘Where are you staying?’ – a seeming non sequitur – and Jesus replies in turn, ‘Come and see.’ And so they do, and later, they start bringing their friends and family along .

It’s something like what happens with all of us.  We don’t hear anything of the inner thoughts and emotions of the two disciples, but they have been John’s disciples for at least a little while.  Something makes them turn and start to seek after Jesus instead.  It may be that they trust John, and when he says, there’s the Lamb of God, they figure they’d better follow that guy.  It might be that they’re in the habit of being disciples, you could say – they’ve been following John because they’ve heard something from him that resonates with them and sounds like truth, and now that the truth seems to be elsewhere, they’re going to follow that way.  It might be that something has happened in their lives, some kind of crisis that has them looking for answers.  We don’t know from the story – but any one of those reasons might be enough to get us on the path as well.  Maybe we’ve always been churchgoers, and then something triggers us to go deeper and really see what this spiritual life is all about.  Or maybe we’re new to all of this, nudged by some inner prompting, or a desire to do right by our children or family, or loneliness and a need for community, and so we’ve tried coming to church.  Whatever it is, we’ve started following after something that might just lead us to God.  Whatever makes us do it, we’ve started looking.

So Jesus turns around and asks the two disciples, what are you looking for?  Good question, Jesus – it could be they are hoping for the revolution and overthrow of the Roman Empire, or it could just be they want personal healing.  People followed Jesus for all kinds of reasons then – and still do.  So what is it we’re looking for today?  What brought you to church today?  Maybe right now you’re looking for meaning, trying to make sense of something in your life or the world around us – why people are willing to kill others because of their political affiliations, like what happened in Arizona and happens all around the world every day…or why our kids are behaving the way they are, or any number of things that don’t make sense to us.  Maybe we’re looking for comfort and companionship, the deep love that comes from being truly known by God and by a community of friends and family.  Maybe we’re looking for things to go back to how they were in some kind of golden past when life was better than it is today – or for things to finally change and be what we’ve always longed for in our future.  I think each of us would answer Jesus’ question just a bit differently, if we were speaking honestly from our heart of hearts.

Whatever it is we’re looking for, we want to know where to find it.  So the disciples say to Jesus, where are you staying?  Where can we find you?  It’s the 6 million dollar question of faith, isn’t it:  where is God when we need him?   I think the whole enterprise of faith is something all of us get impatient with from time to time – following without being sure, living as if we understand and know God’s ways even when we don’t.  We’d really rather have the certainty of knowledge:  I have met God and this is where God lives, and when I want to go away and then come back, God will still be right here.  It’s what my toddler son needs – he wants to wander off and explore, but he always needs to come back and make sure one of his parents is standing right where he left us.  When we aren’t right there, he gets upset.  We all want to be sure of what’s important to us, to come to a place and know that’s the place to stay in, where it all makes sense.  If we’ve had a spiritual experience in church, we want to come back to that church and have that experience again.  If we’ve had a stretch in our prayer life where we really felt the presence of God, we want to keep having that feeling – and then we want to go on about our lives and do what we want without being too bothered about what God’s presence might be asking of us.  That was great, God – now I’ll be off, and we’ll talk again next time, and I know you’ll be right here – right?

But Jesus doesn’t entirely answer the disciples’ question.  He doesn’t get out his appointment book and say, I’m staying at Joe’s house, why don’t we meet for lunch next week?  Instead, he simply says, come and see.  Now is a good time, let’s go.  And off they go, and before too long, they start inviting others along as well.  And likewise, Jesus gives us that same invitation:  Come and see.  It’s not an invitation that offers any guarantees about where we’re going; he doesn’t establish himself as a static presence in a findable location; he doesn’t say whether any of what others have said about him, or what we’re hoping for from him, is true.  He simply says, come and see.  It’s risky, isn’t it?

When Jim and I were out here in late October to interview for this position, we got a pretty powerful message about this from God.  It came from the navigation system in Alex Dykes’ car.  At the end of the first full day, we had finished the interview and dinner up at Jackie Whitlock’s house, up in the hills.  Alex had loaned us his car to use, and he helpfully programmed the Nav system to guide us back to our hotel, since we didn’t know what we were doing with that thing.  Jim and I were talking in the car, comparing notes, wondering aloud what God was doing and whether we were being called to come here, when in boomed the voice from the Nav system:  ‘Stay on the road, and await further instructions.’  So you see, God does use technology.

And indeed, that’s all we could do – it was a whole month later that the beginning of an answer came, in Kimberly Axtell’s phone call inviting me to become your rector.  And it was months later than that that we actually got here and started with you – and who can say now just where we are all going?

But that message is clear:  Come and see.  Get on the road, stay on the road, and wait to see what happens next.  Something is bound to happen, after all.  It might not be what you expect at all – it might not even look on the surface like what we are looking for.  But if we are trying to follow after God, what we find will be, deeply, right for us.  We will find what our heart of hearts is truly looking for.  As Paul wrote to the Corinthians in that bit of the letter we heard today, God is faithful.  God does follow through.  Yes, we’d rather have the certainties:  God in our corner, or even in our pocket, ready to be useful according to our standards.  But if we are truly seeking after the living God, we simply don’t know where that will take us.  All we have to go on is what other people witness to us, like John the Baptist did to the two disciples.  All we have to go on is our own memory of how God has been present to us in the past.  All we have to go on is our hope for what is to come – and that that hope will be taken up and make holy in God’s greater hope for the world.  What are we looking for?  Come and see.

First I think we have to explore what baptism means. And as I say when I prepare people for baptism, it means a whole lot of things. Over the centuries since the Christian practice of baptism began, it has accumulated many meanings, as most of our symbols have. Baptism means for us new life, cleansing from sin, the death of the old, repentance, belonging to community, initiation to the church – and more besides. It’s a little unclear just what baptism would have meant to John the Baptist and those seeking his baptism, however – it wasn’t a widespread practice of the time, from what we can see. The language of the gospels focuses mostly on John preaching about repentance, about the need for Israel to turn back to
[Read more ...]]]> We’re celebrating today the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord.  It’s the feast that marks the beginning of Jesus’ ministry:  in each of the 4 gospels, Jesus is baptized, and then begins his work of preaching, teaching, and healing.  Today we heard the version of the story from the gospel of Matthew, in just a few short verses.  And it has this interesting exchange between Jesus and John the Baptist.  John is baptizing in the river Jordan, drawing crowds from Jerusalem and all the countryside with his fierce preaching about repentance and purification.  Jesus comes out to see him as one of the crowd, and John looks at him and says, ‘You want to be baptized by me??’  Jesus responds, ‘It is fitting for us to do this’ – and so John baptizes him, and the dove descends upon Jesus and the voice is heard, this is my Beloved.  It’s a curious scene.  Why is Jesus being baptized, exactly? And what does he mean by what he says to John?

First I think we have to explore what baptism means.  And as I say when I prepare people for baptism, it means a whole lot of things.  Over the centuries since the Christian practice of baptism began, it has accumulated many meanings, as most of our symbols have.  Baptism means for us new life, cleansing from sin, the death of the old, repentance, belonging to community, initiation to the church – and more besides.  It’s a little unclear just what baptism would have meant to John the Baptist and those seeking his baptism, however – it wasn’t a widespread practice of the time, from what we can see.  The language of the gospels focuses mostly on John preaching about repentance, about the need for Israel to turn back to God.  Presumably John protests the idea of Jesus being baptized because he recognizes him as God’s Messiah, one who should have no need of a ritual of confession and repentance.  But Jesus says, this is fitting for us…we need to do this, John.  It is not what John is doing or what Jesus is about to do, but what they are doing together.

Think of who John is in the story.  He is described in detail earlier in the gospel, someone who is clothed with camel’s hair, eating locusts and wild honey, living out in the wilderness.  He’s portrayed, in other words, as a prophet of the old style, a prophet in the line of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah and all the rest.  All of them also came and spoke a message from God, calling Israel to repentance.  So here at the beginning of the Jesus story, in the New Testament, we have a prophet like those in Hebrew scriptures, in the Old Testament.  Jesus, the word of God incarnate, is baptized by the prophet who speaks the word of God.  The continuity is essential:  God has spoken of old and that word still stands – and that word spoken in different voices through the centuries now stands before us.  In other words, nothing of what God has said before is nullified; knowing and understanding God’s voice in the past is what helps us recognize God’s presence here and in the future.  The old and the new are both parts of God’s story – not one without the other.

I don’t know about you, but I have an instinctive love of the new.  I love embarking on new projects, starting the new tube of toothpaste, reforming myself in a new image.  And I love using up the old stuff and throwing things out.  I used to love trying out new exercise routine or diets, moving to a new job or a new place to live, embarking on a new love relationship, discarding what wasn’t working with the old one.  Over time I have learned the hard way that new isn’t always better, of course – that unless the new venture is in line with who I truly am, it’s bound to fail, and that there is much to be gained by working with what is already there instead of jumping on the next train I see.  (Jim is glad to hear this.)  I’m still tempted by new reforms of life, of course – every time I come back from a retreat Jim steels himself for my new great plan for living better, only to watch me slip back into my usual patterns.  It’s the standard story of New Year’s resolutions, of course – perhaps in a week or so we’ll have a quiet show of hands to find out which of you are really sticking by the ones you made this year.  (I’ve learned not to make them, myself.)  And of course the culture around us is all about the new.  That’s why our landfills are full of things we’ve thrown out, why our computers and smartphones are obsolete after a few months.  It fuels our consumer culture to keep buying new things rather than trying to repair or just live with the old ones.

Gradually, though, our culture seems to be changing a bit on this.  We’re starting to understand that we can’t just keep throwing things away without destroying our planet, that we can’t just use the resources around us without replenishing them.  We won’t have plastic bags offered to us in San Jose come next January, since we just keep throwing those away and making a mess with them.  And in other small ways, at least in certain parts of the country, people have started embracing the ethic of recycling or reusing things rather than simply tossing it all in the garbage.  My mom, who was raised during the Depression, likes to point out that all the ‘new’ thinking about living ecologically is just like the frugality she learned as a child:  don’t waste things, but reuse them.  Not such a new idea after all – though in this case, throwing out our old disposable habits would probably be better for us all.

Recycling and reusing the old isn’t just what we do with our possessions, of course.  There’s a spiritual practice that is part of the adult formation program Education for Ministry, called writing your spiritual autobiography.  It’s the practice of looking back at your life through various lenses and seeing where God was active in the past:  when particular people guided you particular ways, or you read a book that spoke to you, or you made a big decision that started you on another path.  The idea is that the clearer we are on how God has acted in our life up to this point, the clearer we can be on where God might be acting now, or in the future.  It’s an essential way of recognizing God’s fingerprints, you could say.  It also can be the basis for faith:  when we can see that God was faithful with us in the past, we can trust that God will be faithful to us in the future.  Whereas if we fail to listen to the wisdom of that voice in the past, we might fail to recognize it in the future – not to mention repeat the mistakes we could have learned from in our past.

It’s a practice we’re involved with at ECA now, in a less formal way.  As we get to know one another, you are telling me stories of your past, of how things were when other priests or other people were here.  It is important work for a community in transition:  listening for and valuing where God has spoken in the past, through other voices and in other contexts.  It’s how we know who we are, and how God has manifested himself to us.  And so being attentive to our past can help us be alert to where God is calling us now – new voices who are speaking God’s name to us, in new ways.  It’s important that we listen to both:  If we disregard the past in favor of the present, we can head off in ways that are inauthentic to us; likewise, if we only look to where we saw God in the past, we might miss the new ways God is calling us now.  It’s important that the old and new do this together.

Which brings us back to baptism.  With all the layers of meaning, ultimately baptism is a symbol of who we are:  children of God.  John the Baptist preached repentance, and repentance is about returning, starting over – not starting off on a different tack altogether.  Even the later language of baptism about death and new life is not about jumping into something brand-new and unheard-of.  Thomas Merton talked of how we let go of or die to our false self, what one author defined as ‘what I have, what I do, and what people think of me’ – and find our true self, our center where the image of God resides.  Who we are truly is this:  children of God, created by God in love, created so that we might love.

So what has been teaches us.  God has spoken in many different ways in each of our lives and in the collective life of this community:  we need to listen to those stories and remember them.  The prophets of scripture still have much to say to us today.  And when we listen to the voice of God in our individual and community stories, we get to know God better.  We get savvy to God’s ways, readier to recognize all the ways God turns up in this world.  With this knowledge, we can see God and hear God and follow God more closely – today in this moment, tomorrow, and on into what comes next.  That is how we return more and more deeply to our center, to who we are as God’s children.

And so, in order to ground ourselves afresh in who we truly are, I invite you to join with me in renewing our baptismal vows.

It’s rather like getting married, actually. After a period of courtship – writing letters, phone calls, progressing to visits across the country – we decided to get engaged. We planned our marriage, set up the house, got our parent’s permission (Bishop Mary), and now here we are, married. I suppose the wedding ceremony will be the installation later this month, but legally now, we’re a done deal. And so now we start learning about each other in earnest, learning what it’s like to live together. We’ll learn all kinds of things to love about one another, things to cherish and delight in together. And probably we’ll learn things
[Read more ...]]]> We have the gift of an extra Sunday in our Christmas season – extra time to settle into the feast of the Incarnation, which of course does last for 12 days, whether you’ve still got your tree up or not.  And what a gift for us here, as we start together on the incarnation of our life together.  I wasn’t able to be with you on Christmas Eve, but I do get to celebrate the last part of Christmas with you.  It’s the perfect season for starting out together.  We’ve known about each other for a long time – I knew about you and a few of you knew about me way back in July, and then over the months, more and more of you have come to know more and more about me, and I about you.  But only today are we putting flesh on it, so to speak, all of us meeting each other and starting the long adventure of getting to really know each other.  We’re incarnate to each other starting today – not just as a set of hearsay or ideas, but real people, starting real relationship together.

It’s rather like getting married, actually.  After a period of courtship – writing letters, phone calls, progressing to visits across the country – we decided to get engaged.  We planned our marriage, set up the house, got our parent’s permission (Bishop Mary), and now here we are, married.  I suppose the wedding ceremony will be the installation later this month, but legally now, we’re a done deal. And so now we start learning about each other in earnest, learning what it’s like to live together.  We’ll learn all kinds of things to love about one another, things to cherish and delight in together.  And probably we’ll learn things about each other that annoy us a little too, things we’ll have to learn to live with or work through together, just like in any marriage.  It’s the nitty-gritty of life together, real incarnate life, that we’re starting today.

We had three options for our gospel reading today, you probably noticed – there are several stories about the infant and child Jesus and not a lot of time to tell them in church, since starting next Sunday we start telling the stories of the adult Jesus and his ministry.  So today we could have heard the story about the 12-year-old Jesus going to the Temple, seeking out the wisdom of the elders there and worrying his human parents.  Or we could have told the story of the visit of the wise men, the story of Epiphany, which is this Thursday.  I’m confident that you all will be here for the 7:30 Eucharist on Thursday to hear that one, so I took the risk of saving it till then.  Instead, I picked our first option, the story of the flight to Egypt.  It’s the scary story in the Christmas series – the dark reaction of worldly power to the beautiful story of the Nativity.  Joseph is told in a dream to take the baby Jesus to Egypt, out of harm’s way, because Herod the King is seeking to destroy him.  While they are in Egypt – in the part left out of today’s reading – Herod orders the death of all baby boys in Jerusalem.  Only when Herod dies does Joseph get the word that it is safe to return, and even then, he has to settle in another town to feel safe.  Love comes down at Christmas, and finds the world to be a dangerous place.

It’s a story that makes a point:  in other words, incarnation is not all rosy.  There are a lot of sweet images around Christmastime, the pretty crèche scenes many of us have in our homes showing Mary all lovely and the gathered animals around the manger so peaceful.  We dress up the children as angels for the pageant, we light candles and sing gentle hymns like Silent Night, we make and eat too many sugar cookies and treats.  All of that is wonderful, and all of it is right, for there is a lot of sweetness in the story of God coming to be with us in the person of a little baby.  But of course it’s only a piece of the story, for we know what comes to pass when that baby grows up – how he will anger people and say and do challenging things, and how he will suffer and die on the cross.  Some of the older American Christmas hymns speak to this, like the song Poor Little Jesus:  ‘O, poor little Jesus, this world gonna break your heart.  There’ll no place to lay your head, my Lord – O, poor little Jesus.’  Our experience at Christmas can bear this out also:  for all that Christmas is a time of joy, for many it is also a time of grief and sadness:  grief over the empty places at the table, loneliness when there is no one to be with, anxiety and despair when there’s not enough money to create the Christmas that advertisers tell us is good.

So there’s a lot of joy and celebration today, and there has been for several weeks.  But we’re also made aware of the other parts, the darker parts, the parts that make it all more complex.  Incarnation is a complex doctrine – God becoming one of us in all our humanity, the dark and the light.  We call Jesus Emmanuel, which means God with us.  And that means God with us through everything.  Not just the good parts or the ‘spiritual’ parts or the parts we’ve cleaned up for public view.  But everything: the scary times, the stupid embarrassing bits, the dark corners of our hearts.   It’s good news, but it’s challenging news as well, isn’t it?

C. S. Lewis talks about how we tend to approach having God in our lives:  think of our self as a house:  perhaps we have a problem with our kitchen sink, and so we invite God in to fix the sink.  But when God comes in, God starts poking around all the corners of the house, pointing out things that need fixing or redoing entirely – and it turns out God isn’t content just to fix the sink, God wants to totally remodel our house and make it into a palace for himself.  In other words, we can try to keep God consigned to the ‘spiritual’ section of the bookshelf, but God is really everywhere in our lives, ready to act if we let him.

In the church where I grew up, there was a man named John who sang in the choir.  He only sang in the choir because his wife was the organist, and although he didn’t think much of church or believe in God, he thought it was important to spend time with his wife on Sunday.  He would sing the choir pieces and then somewhat ostentatiously read a book during other parts of the service (they were in a choir loft so this was possible without being seen by the congregation).  Somewhere along the way, though, he started listening to the sermons, and gradually he stopped reading his book, though he still wouldn’t say the creed.  One day, when the choir got up to file forward for communion, John got up as well, and received the bread and wine.  He started meeting with the rector, asking a lot of questions about faith.  And some years later, John went to seminary and was ordained a priest, becoming a rector of another church in that diocese.  Let God in a little, and there’s no telling where God will take you.

I talked about our new life together as being like a marriage, but if there was ever a marriage where everything but everything was known, it’s the one between God and each of our hearts.  And though God loves us completely and totally, God’s not content to leave us as we are:  God wants to make us into who we really are, God’s children.  It’s a relentless project.  As our opening prayer today says, God humbles himself to share our humanity and wants to bring us into his divinity – and God will work to do so without ceasing, giving up everything for love of us, in order to restore us to who we were created to be.  Incarnation is not just a pretty story for Christmas or a onetime thing that happened 2000 years ago.  God incarnate is the whole deal, and demands the whole deal from us – little by little perhaps, but no less completely.

So we’re at a new beginning today.  It’s the new year, 2011, a fresh start.  It’s the beginning of our ministry together, you all at ECA and I as your rector.  It’s the feast of the Incarnation, celebrating the beginnings of God with us in the person of Jesus, God taking our humanity in order to bring us into God’s own life.   And in all of this, it’s a new chance to invite God in to all of our lives.   To invite God into this new year, and all that will come to pass in it.  To invite God into our common life, our ministry here at ECA and in Almaden and beyond.  And to invite God into our whole selves, opening our hearts to love for and from other people, opening our minds to the questions about what is true, opening our wills to allow new things, new directions, new hope.  God is here – God is always here; the question for us is simply, are we here?  Are we fully incarnate to God, to one another, to the life of the Spirit among us?  Perhaps not yet, not fully, not the way we could be – but it’s a good time to start again on that path.  May we begin well, and may we love well, this year, the next year, and always.  Amen.