Church of the Holy Spirit

Pentecost 3 June 13th, 2010

2010-06-13T05:51:00.000-07:00

Pentecost 3
June 13th, 2010

In this week’s Gospel Jesus comes to town a stranger.
Many of you know how that is: finding yourself in a new place, wondering if you’ll meet anyone, if anyone will invite you into their lives.
The Gospel shows two wildly different reactions:
The exuberance of the woman, her outrageous gift to Jesus, cracking open the alabaster jar of nard, the most expensive perfume in the store, breaking the elegant designer jar and pouring the oil extravagantly out on his feet
Jesus contrasts her over-the-top generosity with the respectable Pharisee’s lack of hospitality.
She gave Jesus the best she had, the Pharisee gave him second best.. She trusted that he wouldn’t reject her; the Pharisee hedged his bets.

Just one month shy of nine years ago I came to you as a stranger in your midst. You didn’t know me or my family, except the superficial facts the vestry and search committee had told you.
You welcomed us like the woman with the precious oil. You broke open your lives to me.
You entrusted me with precious parts of your lives: I baptized you and your children; I prepared many of you younger people for confirmation, and a number of you for reception in the Episcopal Church. You have confided in me, you’ve told me your stories—the happy ones but also the sad, scary, awful ones maybe you haven’t told anyone else. You shared with me your worries and joys in the present, your fears and your hopes for the future. I have heard your confessions formal and otherwise, and we’ve grieved together as we’ve buried your loved ones.
You haven’t held back.

My dears, do you have any idea what a great church this is? I hope you do—if not, I’m about to tell you!
I have never had to worry whether we’d be ready for action when I came in on Sunday morning. You routinely display competent, confident lay leadership in worship, outreach, finances, stewardship, facilities, and education. All this is normal for CHS, but let me assure you it’s rare! My colleagues got tired of hearing me brag about you!
You listened to me—for a preacher that’s a great gift in a congregation—and sometimes you disagreed, sometimes you agreed, and often you were willing to entertain some new ways of looking at things. In turn, you brought me your ideas—here are just some of them: the Farmers’ Market, Al Anon, our relationship with Salem Children’s Trust which generated our Thanksgiving and Easter dinners; the Bike ‘n Barbecue, our amazingly prolific Quilting group. It was easy—all I had to do was listen and say “What a great idea!”
You were so brave, stepping forward in 2003 to buy the land and buildings on Highland Street—that was a pretty wild leap of faith! Throughout the years you’ve been solid. You’ve stuck together through some hard and painful times.
There’s one gift that might be easy to downplay, but I think is essential to how this congregation works—your ability to laugh together. I remember (I mentioned this in our last vestry meeting) in a budgetary hard time, sitting downstairs in the CLC doing a book study while the budget committee met upstairs. They were facing a daunting prospect. But suddenly what we heard from upstairs was—laughter, not mean or cynical, but faith-filled. It was “we’ll get through this with God’s help but boy do we need God’s help” kind of laughter.

As I stand on the brink of leaving this ministry, I know that being your priest has changed me. You have taught me, stretched me, consoled me, demanded things of me I thought I couldn’t do. I will carry all this with me through the rest of my life.

I want to say two last things:
First, I know that inevitably over the past nine years I’ve done and said (or not done and not said) things that need forgiveness. In the words of the Act of Contrition I learned as a child, I “am heartily sorry for having offended you.” Please forgive me.
Second, I want to leave you with a “charge”: Dearest people of Church of the Holy Spirit, dear friends---during this transition, please guard yourselves against the temptation to pull inwards, to circle the wagons, to play it safe.
Instead, let yourselves be challenged. Keep your eyes peeled for those folks within the congregation and outside it who need a touch of God’s love. Then, with the wonderful entrepreneurial spirit that lies deep in this church’s DNA, figure out what to do about it. Remind each other to take risks for the sake of the Gospel.
You young people, help them out! Claim your place in the church! Share your ideas and talents with Bob Cochran and the vestry, Gwynna and the worship committee, with Paula and the outreach committee—you are smart and you know things the old folks do not know---be willing to teach them.

And now I leave you confidently under the tender care of the Holy Spirit, whose constant loving presence is at the heart of this church, prodding you here, comforting you there, and sustaining you always.

Pentecost May 23, 2010

2010-05-23T04:18:00.001-07:00

Pentecost
May 23, 2010

The Feast of Pentecost means so many things:
--the end of “Eastertide”
--the celebration of the birthday of the church, the capital ‘C’ church, when the Holy Spirit came down upon the disciples and pushed them out and into the world with Christ’s healing message—birthday cake for coffee hour!
--our special (official word ‘patronal’) feast here at Church of the Holy Spirit

I love Pentecost because it is a passionate feast—see all this red?
The description of the first Pentecost in the Book of Acts could hardly be more passionate: the mini-hurricane of wind filling that rented room in Jerusalem, then fire—fire!—above the heads of the astonished men and women, and finally the passionate rush of words, words, words that poured out of their mouths, words—where were they coming from?, words they had no control over, words that translated themselves in midair into all the languages of earth.
They were in the grip of something—Someone—a Spirit—bigger, deeper, way more articulate than themselves. This Someone, this Spirit, was taking control, changing them and their world carrying them along with it.

Have you felt that Spirit? I have, every once in a while. No “sound as if of a great wind,” no tongues of flame above my head (although sometimes it does feel as if my hair is standing on end), but—this is it, for me—a sense of pure wonder at something much bigger than I am moving me where I never expected to be going.
In this church, about eight years ago, a committee headed by Bill Batchelder was charged with looking at how the church might expand its physical space. We met with an architect for about a year. At the end of the year, he gave his report. He showed us that it would be cheaper to buy new land and build or retrofit other buildings, than to try and expand this church building. He was surprised at the outcome.
I remember it so clearly: We all walked out of the Undercroft. I don’t remember what season it was but it was chilly. We looked at one another and we knew, knew!, that the Spirit was pushing us where we’d never expected to go. It was scary and exhilarating all at once.

Pentecost keeps on happening. Recently I was roaming about online and came upon a blog whose headline read: “How the Holy Spirit Moves Today . . . in 100 Words or Less.”
I’d like to read some of the responses and after each, to pause and consider how the words resonate in us.
So . . . “How does the Holy Spirit move us today?”
Here’s Byron Wade, an African-American Presbyterian pastor in North Carolia:
“Many people question if the Holy Spirit is at work in the world today. Put on some different eyes and see—
The claiming of an infant in baptism
The faith of a spouse in the loss of a loved one
The building of a Habitat for Humanity home
Strangers assisting in areas of a natural disaster
The grace exhibited to one another after a difficult discussion
And the ability to awaken to see a new day . ..
Then you can say the Holy Spirit is at work.”

Reflection: Putting on your “different eyes,” look for one place in your life and the world around you where you see the Holy Spirit at work, in your family, the church, the world around us.

Here’s quite a different take on “how the Holy Spirit moves today.” Listen to the words of Sam Hamilton-Poore, Professor of Spirituality at San Francisco Theological Seminary:
“Closer to us than our own breath and breathing, the Risen Christ fills us with his own Spirit—quietly, intimately. With this breath, this power, we then go about the everyday, unspectacular, grubby work of forgiveness. Breath, forgive; breathe, forgive; breathe, forgive. Although we often long for the dazzling or spectacular, we live in a time, a world, in need of people who breathe in, regularly, the quiet power and grace of Christ’s Spirit—and people who, likewise, breathe out, regularly, the power and grace of forgiveness. Our world—so spectacularly broken and burning—needs people for whom reconciliation is as normal and natural as breathing.”

Reflection: Name or imagine someone you need to forgive (building on our Lenten work together on forgiveness). For just a few minutes, breathe in the Spirit, breathe out forgiveness.

In the briefest comment on the blog, a woman named Cas Mata offered: “The Holy Spirit works within the darkest corners of your life, where no one else dares to go.”

Reflection: Take a look at one of these dark corners of your life—a place, maybe of fear, or shame, or deep discouragement—and let the cleansing wind of the Holy Spirit blow through it.

Coda: Pentecost with its rush of wind and fire gives us the Holy Spirit, the mover and changer, who can sweep us off our feet.
But the Holy Spirit comes also as Refresher and Comforter, and I want to end with this image. The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins captures the Spirit who never ceases to care for us in his poem “God’s Grandeur.” Here are the last lines I’ll read them slowly so we can savor them):
. . . And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights from the black west went,
Oh, morning at the brown brink eastwards springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with, ah, bright wings.

Easter 7 May 16, 2010

2010-05-21T06:37:00.001-07:00

Easter 7
May 16, 2010

Last week, as most of you know, one of the men from the Mentally Handicapped Offenders’ Program was confirmed by Bishop Robinson.
The Bishop was late getting to the church because of road construction on 93, so we had time for conversation as Perry, Michael (who’d been confirmed out of the same program two years ago), and I waited.
Michael leaned over to me and asked, “So what’s next?” “What?,” I said. Perry chimed in, “Well, first we were baptized, then we’re confirmed—what’s next?” Michael said, “Being ordained a priest is next, isn’t it?”
And I realized that they were seeing the Christian life as a sort of ladder, with baptism as the bottom rung. To be a good, faithful Christian you had to climb the ladder. A definite sense that each rung up made you a better Christian. Sort of like academic degrees—AA, BA, MA, PhD. Being an academic means climbing up the ladder.
Being a Christian for them meant climbing from basic baptism to exotic bishophood.

I tried to explain that the image of a ladder is dead wrong.
Baptism is not the bottom rung. Baptism is IT.
Confirmation, I told Perry and Michael, strengthens our awareness of what it means to be a baptized person. It reminds us who we are—but it doesn’t make us any more or any better Christians.
They weren’t convinced. “What about priests?”, they said, “aren’t priests more important than regular baptized people? Aren’t you more important than us?”
I was burbling something about priesthood being just a sort of specialization among all the possible ministries of baptized peoples, when the bishop walked in.
If I’d had a few more minutes I would have told Perry and Michael a story: the story in today’s first lesson, about the baptisms in Philippi.

Philippi—a Manchester-sized city in northeastern Greece—was a wild place.
Fortune-telling spirits, temples to every god and goddess in the Roman pantheon and a few others besides, plus a pretty rough idea of justice.
All Paul and Silas did was cast out a slave girl’s demon, and they wound up being beaten and thrown into jail.
That night an earthquake struck, serious enough to knock down the walls of the jail and somehow unfasten the prisoners’ chains.
Things happened quickly: the jailer woke up, saw the wreckage of the jail, and grabbed a sword to kill himself before Paul’s god, who was obviously more powerful than his gods, Jupiter and Mars, could get to him.
But just in time he hears a voice call calmly out of the wreckage, “Don’t be afraid, we are still here,”
The jailer can’t believe it. He can’t believe that his prisoners hadn’t escaped, that they had actually put his welfare before their own safety.
He can’t understand it. What kind of God could inspire that kind of foolhardy courage? More importantly, that kind of compassion. Not Jupiter, not Mars. Only, as Paul explained to them, Jesus Christ, who became human not to gain power and victory, but so that God’s justice and mercy could live on earth.
That was enough for the jailer. What did he need to do to turn himself over to Paul’s God. That very night he was baptized, and his whole household with him.

They were baptized and then Paul and Silas left them, the only Christians in this pagan town, except for a few others. How many?—20? The number of worshipers at 8:00. At the outside 30.
What was that like, for that tiny group of just-baptizeds to be left there in Philippi? Isolated, all alone, amidst all those temples to Jupiter. No preachers, no priests, no bishops, no support or encouragement except what they gave to one another.
How likely was it that such a small group would survive? Yet the fact is that survive they did, and more—That little group grew to such an extent that not too many years later Paul wrote to them sending greetings to “the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the bishops and deacons”?
How could that happen?

Baptism. Simply—baptism.
The jailer and his friends in Philippi knew that they were different after they were baptized, and they knew the difference didn’t come from them. They knew that as that water poured upon them, God was right there working in them, the Holy Spirit was right there changing them, turning them into a new and mysterious thing—a Christian.
And here’s the amazing thing: it worked. No bishops, no priests, no teachers, with only the occasional letter from Paul, the community grew and grew through each person living out his or her Spirit-given, baptismal gifts—-for compassion, teaching, counseling, leadership, prayer .
If I’d had a chance to tell the story of the jailer and his friends in Philippi to Perry and Michael, here’s what I hope: that they’d understand what it takes to make a church: baptized people, each one with the gifts they have been given by the Holy Spirit—gifts to be embraced and exercised in the church and in the world.
In Baptism, God the Creator welcomes you; Jesus Christ becomes your brother and master and guide; God the Holy Spirit blows into you the particular and unique gifts you, YOU, need to do God’s work as part of the church, gives you POWER to do that work.
And despite the fact that priests and especially bishops!—get to wear fancy clothes and have special titles—here’s the bottom line theologically: the gift, the calling of each baptized person is of equal worth-------yours, and yours, and mine, and Gene Robinson’s. It’s not ordination that makes a church, it’s baptism that makes a church.

We’re about then to witness not just a joyful event for Graham’s family and the congregation—we’re about to witness a miracle.
You probably won’t be able to perceive it—probably we won’t see angels around us or feel the strong wind of the Holy Spirit—but God will be acting here in the next few minutes in a very specific way, and when we greet Graham at the Peace he will be different, a full, gifted, and equal member of the People of God, our brother and future coworker in God’s work of compassion and mercy.nkj

May 9, 2010

2010-05-21T06:35:00.002-07:00

Gwynna, May 9

Raising a temple in three days. Rebuilding Jericho. Burning bushes and parted seas and loaves and fishes. The Bible is filled with these crazy whiz-bang big-impact moments. Fortunately, neither God nor my father called to ask me to do anything like that.

I want to first thank Susan for reading my letter last week. I hope my exhausted, sun-drenched brain adequately conveyed the wonder I experienced. I have to apologize right off, though – while I have meditated long and hard on St. Francis of Assisi’s quote to “Preach the Gospel; if necessary, use words,” I’m going to use a LOT of words today.

Next, I want to try to thank every one of you. You sent me forth on a mission I was eager to accept, but nervous to undertake. I didn’t know anything about Mississippi except that I’d never wanted to go to the Deep South, I wasn’t too sure about spending a week in some God-forsaken town with a bunch of backwater hangers-on who didn’t have the good sense to leave when their community was destroyed, and I wasn’t at all sure what I was going to eat for five days.

Well let me tell you, I figured out what to eat – boy, did I! The ten of us did our utmost to prop up the seafood industry before it goes under, and I have plenty of recipes for next year’s Mardi Gras, oil slick or no.

But, while God did not lead me down there to create some amazing miracle, I also didn’t go just for the food. As for some God-forsaken town, I was sorely mistaken. God is in every crack and crevice, on the wind in the smell of new-sawn lumber, in the eyes of the driven locals determined to put their all and everything into rebuilding, come heck or, yes, high water. As one crew member said, “You may look at us and see a little underdeveloped city. That isn’t what we are, and that isn’t how we are going to stay. We are alive, and we thank you for helping us show it.”

The little underdeveloped city he was talking about is actually a collection of communities on the Gulf coast of Mississippi. We stayed in Waveland and worked in Bay St. Louis; the two are virtually seamless. As we drove in Sunday night from New Orleans, I was struck by the sight of completely normal, everyday America-small-town businesses not twenty yards from abandoned, storm-battered buildings, with more functioning buildings on the other side. The flip-flopping of new and destroyed, light and dark, past and present made my stomach lurch. Throughout the week, I sensed that the storm is never far from the minds of locals. It drives everything. It is more than just a reference point, it defines them.

In that definition, though, is immense pride, stubbornness, and thanks. Wherever we went, we were thanked. This was no mere, “Hey y’all, thanks for coming, come back now y’hear.” This was thanks from the gut, from deep within; thanks that has been pouring out for years and will continue to pour out as long as the help pours in. The members of these communities know they would be lost without the generosity of people like you who send people like me to sweat, shiver, burn, freeze, and pound nails and thumbs. Within that thanks, though, is also a nervousness. The torrent of out-of-town volunteers has become a stream, and is dwindling to a trickle. As the head of Mission on the Bay put it, “We are no longer the disaster du jour.” Slowly the locals are starting to volunteer. Five years on, their lives are finally stable enough that they can give to others. Like the airline instructions to put on your own oxygen mask first, they had to build their own homes, rebuild their own businesses, take care of their own families before they could reach out. They are getting there, and both Habitat and Mission on the Bay are seeing more locals at their worksites.

The excitement at those worksites is palpable. There is more work than time, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to do everything. Ours was something of a lonely group, coming just after the spring break rush and in the middle of two tornado systems and an oil spill that will surpass the Exxon Valdez. The Americorps groups that would have worked with us were whisked off to Yazoo City to help with disaster relief there. We spent our time preparing the sites for a big week, with almost 100 women raising walls and roofs after we left. Our humble progress was difficult to see, but in a way that made it even more rewarding. Our work was not glamorous, it wasn’t flashy, but it needed to be done, and we got it done.

We worked on two sites, one with just the pilings sunk and the other, the cop’s house, with just a bit of exterior work to finish before attacking the interior. I call the nearly-finished one the cop’s house primarily to make it easier to reference, but also because the homeowner, a police officer in Bay St. Louis where we were working, was on site almost every day with a paint brush, staple gun, sander, doing whatever needed to be done. I didn’t get much of a chance to chat with him, but seeing him pour his own sweat equity into the home was a powerful reminder that we were piecing together more than blocks of wood and soffits. Unfortunately, we never got to learn about the family whose home we built from the pilings to the subfloor and deck, but they, too, will put their sweat equity into their house when the time comes, swelling the ranks of local volunteers as they work off their commitment that comes with owning a Habitat house.

The Bay-Waveland chapter of Habitat is like the little engine that could. It didn’t even exist four years ago, a testament to the stability and vibrancy of the region before Katrina. It was under the wing of the Jackson chapter for several years as they got through the first massive rush of need and help. Now operating on its own, it buys up any non-flood-plain land it can afford in order to build single-family homes. In addition to these homes scattered throughout the community, the chapter has started the first of two eighty-home subdivisions. Complete with open space, playground, walkable streets, and proximity to local businesses and commuting routes, these houses will transform Bay St. Louis in a palpable, visible way. Several members of my group are already planning return trips next fall and spring, and one has declared he intends to help “finish the city.” I hope to match him nail for nail whenever I can.

The week was magical, in the sense that we were removed from life and placed in a world where everything we did was out of the ordinary. I’ve often wondered what it must have been like for Jesus’ disciples to leave their homes and their work and set off into a different world, and I think I got a taste of that. I very seriously considered quitting my job and staying down there, and would have if Susan hadn’t told me I had to preach this week. The fact that we did nothing miraculous, we got dirty and sweaty and we got annoyed with each other and we did things wrong and we were away from our friends and family made the whole thing stronger and more powerful. We weren’t some white knights riding in to save the distant princess, we were humble workers in a long line of humble workers just doing what we had to do. I felt then, and still feel strongly, the quietness of God working through me. I was preaching the Gospel with my sledgehammer, and by God I hope to never stop talking, even if sometimes, I have to use words.

Easter 5 May 2nd, 2010

2010-05-21T06:35:00.001-07:00

Easter 5
May 2nd, 2010

When I was traveling in India 15 years ago or so, I frequently went out into the villages with professors or staff from the seminaries I was staying in. They would take care to prepare food for me and any other western guests to eat when we were invited into people’s home for a meal.
Every time it happened, it felt awful. I felt we were embarrassing, even belittling the our hosts in the villages, en though I appreciated the health risks this arrangement was designed to avoid.
One evening, late in my trip, on my own in far south India, I was traveling not with professors but with a local acting group to whom it didn’t even occur that there might be a problem.
After the performance, we were as usual invited into a tiny hut for a meal. No electricity—oil lamps on the floor, a cow lowing in the next room). A spotlessly cleanly swept dirt floor.
The hostess spread out banana leaves as plates and ladled a bit of stew out on each one. In South India, you don’t use forks—you dip in with your right hand.
So I did. In that circumstance, how could I, a white western woman, a visitor to their village, say no to these kind people who were expressing their welcome in food.
It was delicious and my digestive system survived. But when I got back home, a friend said, “You could have been sick for months! What were you thinking?!”

At the beginning of the lesson from the Acts of the Apostles this week, Peter is facing a tribunal of his fellow disciples and they are saying, in effect, exactly the same thing—“what were you thinking?!”
To backtrack a bit: It has been a few months or even a year since Jesus’ death and resurrection. The disciples still worship in the temple, but they are also vigorously preaching that Jesus Christ was the Messiah and that believing in him, following his “way,” led men and women to a radically new life.
Thousands of Jews in and around Jerusalem have listened to them and been baptized. That was the good news. All preachers like to know that their preaching has made a difference!
The bad—or at least confusing— news was that something else was going on. Their fellow Jews were not the only people listening to the disciples. Non-Jews, Gentiles (that’s what ‘Gentile’ means—simply a non-Jew), were also drawn to this story of Jesus Christ.
Because no one had expected this to happen, nobody had made any decisions about whether this would even be allowed. They were Jews and Jesus had been a Jew—the Jews were God’s chosen people. Enough said, right? And yet Gentiles were flocking to Peter and others to ask about Jesus.

As in my experience in Tamil Nadu, the flashpoint for the tribunal’s “what were you thinking?” question to Peter was about food.
Word has reached Jerusalem that Peter has not only been preaching to Gentiles, but also eating with them. Worse--at these meals he has been consuming “unclean” food, food by Jewish law, what in later Judaism is called “kosher” food.
The disciples didn’t know about germs and food poisoning, the things which worried my friend, but they did know that their Scriptures taught that some food was “clean” and other food was “defiled” or “dirty.”
So they have called Peter on the carpet to say, “God can’t want you to do that! You risked spiritual death by eating forbidden food. What were you thinking?!”

Peter could only defend himself by what he had seen and what he had heard. By a vision and a voice.
A tablecloth lowered from heaven filled with live animals hissing, roaring, chirping—every one of the animals a provocation since they were commonly eaten by Gentiles and forbidden to Jews. (A friend once referred to this passage as the “story about the pigs in a blanket.”)
As usual, at first Peter misses the point and self-righteously refuses them as unclean. But the voice, that so familiar voice of Jesus Christ, with, probably, that so familiar tinge of “just be quiet and listen to me, Peter!,” won’t let Peter off the hook. Instead he utters these game-changing words: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”
“Game-changing” because suddenly the old rules don’t hold anymore. Suddenly God, the God Peter thought he knew, is doing a new thing.
With Peter’s vision, Christ declared that God was opening things up. New things, new people, were being given by God to nurture the body of the church.

Interesting, I hope, but can this story possibly say to us? Sure, as Gentiles, as non Jews, we are the beneficiaries of Peter’s vision and the disciples’ acceptance of it, but . . . ?
Yet I believe that Peter’s vision is highly relevant to you all right now.
At this time of transition, you might be tempted to close ranks and resist new energy and new ideas. The power of “we’ve always done it this way,” which has historically not been particularly powerful in this congregation, might begin to grow stronger. You might be tempted to reject new menu items in favor of the old tried and true.

There’s no way for us to predict what God will offer Church of the Holy Spirit during the next year or so.
Already we’re seeing change: What seems to be a strong cohort of new members? There’s God’s creative energy at work!
During the next months and years: New ideas about liturgy and outreach? God’s creative energy at work.
New leadership? God’s creative energy at work.
Who knows what else? All we know is that our God is the God of surprises who will set the table of your future with unforeseen delicacies,, then smile and say: “What did you expect, my dears—the same old thing? What were you thinking?”

Easter 4 April 25, 2010

2010-05-21T06:32:00.000-07:00

Easter 4
April 25, 2010

“Lo, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because you are with me.”
I’ve spent this weekend so far literally in the valley of the shadow of death.
Yesterday I presided at the funeral service for Conna Fitzpatrick after spending Saturday morning talking with her family. She and her husband Jim had effective not been apart at all ever since they met in the early 40’s in wartime England. Almost sixty years of marriage—Jim is wondering how he can walk the next months and years of his life without her.
Thursday, Friday, and yesterday were my monthly volunteer three days as chaplain at Speare Hospital. One woman was coming to terms with the fact that she could no longer care for herself and needed to move permanently to a place where she could receive more intensive help. A group of neighbors had accompanied the ambulance carrying a neighbor who lived alone to the hospital, not knowing what was wrong, just knowing that she was gravely ill and that she had no one else to care for her. They’d settled themselves into the waiting room, prepared to stay as long as needed, to pray for their friend, to be there when, or if, she woke up.
All of these people, for different reasons, are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.

What a powerful image that is!
The word “valley”—valleys are low, closed in—in emotional valleys we can feel dejected and depressed, as if there is no way out.
And what do shadows do? They throw a haze over things, darken them, dim the colors. In the shadows, it’s hard if not impossible to see things clearly. In a shadowy landscape we have to grope our way forward, squint our eyes to catch even a glimpse of light.

I’m sure you are all familiar with the work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross on death and dying.
In her writings she identified “stages of grief.” She said that when someone is grieving they experience denial, bargaining, anger, guilt, and acceptance (I would add fear).
These “stages” don’t occur (she tried to make this clear in her later writings) in any particular order, and they don’t happen just once. You might think you’re done with denial—you’ve worked hard and faced up to whatever it is—and then a few weeks later—wham!—you find yourself thinking—“it’s not really happening, they made a mistake, I don’t have to go through this.”
These stages of grief provide a map for walking through the valley of the shadow of death.

That map is not just helpful when we’re clearly in grief.
Have you ever taken one of those “how much stress are you in?” tests in Readers’ Digest or whatever? The first time I did I was amazed that events that sound pretty good like “moving to a new home” or “starting a new job” are just as stressful as clearly awful events like “losing a job” and, of course, the death of someone close to you.
That’s because change itself, even good change or change for good reasons, always takes us on a journey through the valley of the shadow of death.
It makes sense, because all change involves some sort of death. In any change, something familiar passes away, something new takes its place.
And in that journey from familiar to new, we inevitably find ourselves jumping back and forth from one of Kubler-Ross’ stages to another. Denial to bargaining, guilt to anger and back again, acceptance one day only to find yourself in denial the next. And sometimes, in the midst of it, flashes of excitement or joy.
It’s pretty obvious where I’m going with this.
This is the first time I’ve seen most of you since you received my letter announcing my intention to retire in June.
Tim came and a good number of you stayed after church last Sunday to talk with him. I know you’re talking and e-mailing one another, and that’s good.
But now, here I am and here you are. And for just a few minutes right now I’d like to switch this sermon from my talking to you to all of us talking to one another. I’m hoping that what I’ve just said about the stages of grief (and, more broadly, the stages that occur in all big changes), might help us all realize what’s going on in our hearts and our minds.
Are there questions or comments?: ………………..

Yearning
Active listening

…………………………………..
Thank you. I won’t use the sermon time for this again—we need to keep on pondering the relationship between God’s word and our lives re together as we’ve done for these past nine years.
But I do suggest that we all continue to be attentive to our emotions, our “stages” of grieving this change, and help one another with them.
And I’d love to meet with each of you personally during the next two months. Those of you who were here when I came know that many of us met over tea or coffee to get acquainted in those first few weeks and months. I would love to do that again for everyone willing to take the time.

To close, I want to remind you of something both Psalm 23 and today’s Gospel shout out: You are not lost sheep, you parishioners of Church of the Holy Spirit. You are found sheep!
Even walking through this shadowy valley, remember what the psalmist says, “I will fear no evil because you are with me.”
In the Gospel, Jesus says it even more strongly: “No one will snatch you out of my hand.” When I read that, early in the week, I cried because it seemed to be speaking directly to me and to us—“No one will snatch us out of Christ’s hand.”

Easter 2, Year C April 11, 2007

2010-05-10T07:15:00.002-07:00

Easter 2, Year C
April 11, 2007

We’re just past Easter and the glow of Easter remains but it’s so easy for it to fade away. Easter alleluias get swamped by the noise of the world outside the church walls or the clamor inside our own heads.
I’ve been told that people who have experienced being “born again” or being “baptized in the spirit” sometimes have this experience. After moments or days or months of ecstatic experience of God, the “stuff” of life wears them down and they wonder, was that experience true? Questions and doubts creep in: Wasn’t it supposed to last forever?
For those of us afflicted with moments—or more than moments—of questioning and doubt, today’s Gospel gives us a patron saint, Thomas.

Thomas’ story this morning actually begins before the text of this Gospel. He and other disciples—men and women who had followed Christ and were still reeling from the crucifixion two days before—were hiding out for fear of both Jewish and Roman authorities who may be planning a mop up operation to get rid of Jesus’ followers as well as their teacher, their master, their friend.
On Easter morning, Mary Magdalene came knocking on the door. See them—Thomas with the others, squinting through the peep hole, unbolting the door, sliding it open just a crack and finally just wide enough to let her slip through.
“I have seen the Lord,” she cried. “Oh sure,” they say, and make sure the bolts are shot fast when she leaves.
Thomas can’t stand it, and takes off. It’s just too much pressure. Better run the risk with the crowds outside than stay in the emotional pressure cooker of that locked room.
His friend is dead—brutally executed in the most degrading death possible—leaving them stranded in Jerusalem far away from their homes in the small towns of Galilee.
What is he feeling? He can’t sort it out. Sorrow and fury that Jesus had let himself get in such a position—why couldn’t he save himself? Mad at himself and everyone else—except the women—for running away, envy of the women for staying, disgust at Peter for denying Jesus—and Judas, Judas with whom he’d walked along every day of the past three years, how could he have betrayed their friend, their master, to the enemy? And now Mary Magdalene walzing in and tries to raise their hopes with this incredible story, “I have seen the Lord!”
Who wouldn’t be furious, who wouldn’t be cynical, who wouldn’t lock up his heart against being hurt again, and slam out of that room?!

Poor Thomas.
For the past three years he’s been faithful, even when he couldn’t understand what Jesus was talking about, because something in him had so longed for what Jesus gave him. Food for his spirit. A sense of wonder at God’s love active, here and now. Hope.
Jesus’ presence and teaching have answered his longings for meaning in his life. Given him a purpose beyond himself. Swept him up in the pure joy of seeing people healed. For the time he walked with Jesus, he felt himself to be a true child of God, a coworker with Jesus to bring in the kingdom of God on earth.
As he walks the streets on Jerusalem he laments in his heart, What now? What now?

Reluctantly he goes back to the room to be greeted by his friends—“We have seen the Lord!” He explodes, “No! I’ll NEVER let myself believe again. Unless I see the marks of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” NO more second hand reports for me, thanks. No more gullible Thomas.
A week later (he’s not making it easy) Jesus comes back. He graciously offers to Thomas just what he has demanded.
Does Thomas actually touch the wounds? The Gospel doesn’t say. But whether he physically touches them or not, in that moment of encounter Thomas experiences the risen Christ, and all the bonds of fear and anger and cynicism and doubt break loose and he utters a cry of faith so powerful it could shatter the windows: “My Lord and my God!”

The extraordinary thing about this moment is that it is Thomas, the doubter, who blurts out this exclamation of faith, recognizes Jesus as God.
Could it be that it was just because he was honest with his doubt that Thomas saw the risen Christ so clearly?
This story assures us that we don’t need to feel guilty about our moments (or more than moments) of doubt. This story assures us that we can still approach the risen Christ, following confidently in the footsteps of our patron saint Thomas.
This story assures us that we can approach Christ as ourselves in all our wondering, doubting, and questioning.. We don’t have to leave our doubts outside the door when we come into this place.
Thomas didn’t pretend to believe when he couldn’t. He cried out “what is the point of believing?” in a crazy, violent world.
Christ came and met him precisely in that emotional woundedness. Christ reached out his wounded hands and raised him up.

Thomas’ story then is a story of hope for most of us. It promises that, doubters though we be, Christ will encounter us where we are.
Where do those encounters occur? Here, perhaps, I hope, in church during common worship. And certainly beyond the walls of the church, in love, friendship, acts of justice and love, and all the unnamable, unpredictable graces of daily living.
Thomas’ story promises that even if we are weak, if we doubt, if we grieve, Resurrection love, ultimately stronger than death, will go on and on and on.

Alleluia, Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia!

Easter Day April 4th, 2010

2010-05-10T07:15:00.001-07:00

Easter Day
April 4th, 2010

If we were in Russia this Easter morning, when we met people at church or on the street we’d shout “Christos voskresye!” –“Christ is risen!” –and they’d shout back, “voeesteno voskresye!”—“Truly he is risen!” and then we’d kiss three times.
It’s the idea of the triple kiss that grabs me. Because Easter is a love story.

If you were raised “in the church,” you probably remember learning the Apostles’ Creed.
There’s a strange little line in it that says that after Jesus’ death, “he descended into hell.” For a long time, that line was left out of the Episcopal Church’s Prayer Book—they considered it too mythic and just a bit “embarrassing.”
Myth it might be, but descending into hell refers to something quite profound. The story goes that after Adam and Eve sinned, heaven’s gates were shut fast. So until the coming of Christ, Adam and Eve and everyone who came after them went after their deaths to hell—not the hell of fire and brimstone, but a sort of holding area supervised by demons.
The story goes that between Good Friday and Easter morning, Jesus went in swinging and “trampled down the gates of hell,” vanquished the confused and outraged demons, and led those poor, warehoused souls into paradise.

Jesus’ Easter love broke the chains that bound them.
But Jesus’ Easter love didn’t only act that first Holy Saturday. It keeps right on acting, working in the world to liberate us human beings from whatever imprisons us.
This can be on a huge level—Slaves in the American south trusted that God would ultimately liberate them from slavery. Black people in South Africa had faith, had faith against all odds that God would ultimately free them from apartheid. Neither group believed that Christ would personally come with a flaming sword to free them, but they believed with all their hearts and souls that Christ’s saving love was stronger than the chains of oppression and prejudice and would prevail.
We all have personal chains that bind us, chains that can feel like the bonds of hell. getting tighter and tighter, seemingly impossible to break, whether these are “addictions” to alcohol or drugs, or more subtly to consumerism, or hopelessness or cynicism, to chronic sins of meanness, dishonesty, anger, resentment.
Have you seen or felt Christ’s Easter love working? You have if you’ve ever sat in an AA or an NA meeting. Men and women tell how their faith in a “higher power” has set them free from seemingly hopeless addictions. Maybe that power has changed your life. For Christians, the name of this “higher power” is Jesus Christ.

But that’s not the whole of the Easter love story.
In the Gospel we’ve just read, Mary Magdalene stands weeping in the garden next to Jesus’ tomb. As far as she is concerned everything is lost. The tomb’s emptiness mirrors her own.
Because, yes, she had loved Jesus. Not the way a lover loves the beloved, or the way spouses love one another—even though fiction writers like Dan Brown like to play with that idea.
We know from other places in the Gospel that some time before Jesus had healed her, had liberated her “from seven demons,” which we can interpret as out-of-control forces within her. As her healer, Jesus had known her and her demons, had known hergood and her bad, her pain and her joy—her unique self.
And despite or maybe because of, knowing her so completely, he had accepted and loved her. She was able to rest in his love.

If you have been very fortunate in your life, you have had a glimpse of that experience of being utterly transparent to another person. Somehow, even though they knew all your flaws and failings, they loved you anyway.
And if you have experienced that kind of love, you understand what it meant for Mary Magdalene to watch Jesus die. Part of her died with him.

In the garden outside the tomb, she doesn’t recognize Jesus at first. In fact, she mistakes him for the gardener. But then he says her name, “Mary!”
And with that naming of her name, she comes back to life. She realizes that Jesus Christ has risen and will never die again. So she is now firmly, eternally, the precious Mary that Jesus knows and loves. Jesus’ intensely personal knowledge and love can never be taken away from her again.

I don’t know about you but honestly?— for me it is a bit frightening to think of being so completely known by someone, even if that someone is Christ.
Yet just for a moment let yourself imagine it: Imagine Christ delighting in you, yes you! loving you as someone uniquely precious. Calling you by name, your own name.

Easter is a love story, the story of Someone whose love for us would not let him rest in death. Christ’s love for us was so powerful that it pulled him into resurrection life—
This is what we celebrate this morning: Christ’s ongoing love that gives us hope that we may be freed from what holds us in bondage, and even more precious, a love that gazes on us with delight and calls us each by name.

Good Friday April 2nd, 2010

2010-05-10T07:13:00.002-07:00

Good Friday
April 2nd, 2010

“Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’”
Only it wasn’t really a question, was it? It contained its own answer in Pilate’s terms.
Packed in it was a sneer—“there’s no truth, there’s only what feels right, or gets me ahead in the world, or keeps me safe.”
Jesus didn’t answer Pilate’s “what is truth?” fake question.
But his death was an answer. Jesus’ death was gritty, bloody, vicious, and mean. It was true in the grossest meaning of the word—nobody could have made it up.
This Good Friday service is another answer. It confronts us with truths we may not want to face.

Take, for example, this particular Passion Gospel, the Gospel According to John. We need to know some truths about it and the uses that have been made of it through two millennia of Christian history.
Throughout this Gospel, we heard the narrator say, “the Jews” said this, and “the Jews” did that.
When we read the description of Jesus’ death last Sunday from the Gospel according to Luke, we heard something quite different.
That Gospel talks about the Jewish leaders and officials.
It is clear in Luke’s Gospel that the ones who killed Jesus were first, the Romans, who were the only ones in Israel at that time who had the power to put anyone to death, and second, a powerful group of Jewish elite families and individuals who felt themselves threatened by Jesus and who would do anything to get him out of the way.

John’s Gospel was written the last of all the Gospels, around 100 AD.
It was written shortly after a traumatic incident for the young Christian community. For 70 years Jewish Christians had considered themselves just that—both Jewish and Christian.
But just before the Gospel of John was written, the Jewish authorities had thrown the Christians out of the synagogues. So the people John was writing for were insecure, hurt, and, yes, angry about being on their own. Under those circumstances it is not difficult to understand how their anger could result in blaming “the Jews” for what had happened to Jesus.
When the Jews expelled the Christians from the synagogues, they were relatively strong and the Christians were weak. But as Christianity grew to be the dominant religion, terrible things happened.
On the basis of this Gospel particularly, Jews were labeled “Christ killers.” And once that label was available, it justified horrific acts—seizures of land and property, expulsions of Jews from England and Spain and other lands they’d lived in for centuries, and worst of all—repeated slaughter over the centuries of Jewish men women and children.

The point of listening to the story of Jesus’ death on Good Friday is not to find people to blame. The point of listening to the story of Jesus’ death is to face the truth about ourselves.
We can find bits of ourselves in the good people who stood by: like Mary Jesus’ mother, Mary Magdalene, and the other brave women who stood with them. Like John, the youngest apostle and the only one who didn’t run away. Like Nicodemus, a Jewish man of authority, who stood his ground against the Jewish elite and the Romans.
But, alas, we can also recognize bits of ourselves in the cowards, bullies and murderers running free in Jerusalem that terrible not good Friday. We can find bits of ourselves in Judas, Peter, Pilate, the soldiers, the crowds . . . .
Have you been bitter? I have—and it was bitterness that drove Judas to betray his master.
Have you ever been self-righteous? I have—and it was self-righteous Caiphas who argued that “it was better that one person die for the people.”
Have you ever been a coward? I have—and it was cowardice that prompted Peter to deny that he even knew Jesus.
Have your hands ever itched with the desire to hit? Mine have—and it was violent rage that pounded the nails into Jesus’ wrists and feet.
It was not the Jews who killed Jesus. It was not even really the Romans It was human sin, the sins we are all capable of, that killed Jesus. It is our human sin which has kept on blaming and killing down through the ages.

I just finished a fantasy novel, Good Omens, in which the two main characters are an angel and a demon, doing what angels and demons are supposed to do—wandering about the earth tempting and inspiring, etc.
After thousands of years of this, the demon, Crowley, has come to the realization that hell is not the source of all evil and heaven not the source of all good. Rather, he’s discovered, “Where you find the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, is right inside the human mind.”

Pilate asked, “What is truth?”
Today is a day when we’re fortunate enough to be faced with the complicated truth about ourselves: To rejoice in the grace we share with Mary Magdalene and John when we are courageous enough to stand with our friend and master beneath the cross.
And to face too the “heart-stopping evil” whose seeds we all carry within us. Only in facing that appalling truth, truly acknowledging it, admitting it—only then can our hearts break open with sorrow and regret. Only then can the stone roll away and we rise with our Christ into new life.

Lent 3 March 7, 2010

2010-05-10T07:13:00.001-07:00

Lent 3
March 7, 2010
“Dismantling the Robot”

For the past two weeks in this Lenten series on forgiveness, we’ve been looking at different facets of forgiveness. But so far we haven’t taken out a mental magnifying glass and asked ourselves, “Just what does it mean to forgive someone?”
Forgiveness is a process of healing. And it’s a process of healing not so much for the person we’re forgiving, but for our own selves.
When we can’t or don’t or won’t forgive, we become like the fig tree in today’s gospel—dry and stunted and less and less able to bear fruit. When we forgive someone, we become more whole, more human, more truly ourselves.

I don’t know much about fig trees, so I’m going to switch images here.
When we are in a state of un-forgiving, we are a lot like robots. And forgiveness consists in dismantling the robot.
You know what a robot is like. No matter how “intelligent,” the nature of a robot is to respond in the same way to the same conditions. Its job is literally to “stick to the program.” The program may be wildly complex as in the newest models, but still a good robot acts consistently to produce a certain result.
When we are hurt by someone, in response we tend to set up robotic reactions.
Here’s what I mean: When we’re hurt, at first, we feel angry, wounded, diminished. But it’s often not only our feelings that our hurt. If someone has spread gossip about us, for example, we may find that other people who have heard the whispers don’t have the same respect for us.
We may need to set up wise protections: in this case, try to make sure the truth gets heard. But very often we go farther than that. We add a dash of vengeance to our response, a touch of malice.
In this case, for example, when his name comes up, you might retaliate in kind.—perhaps a sardonic “Oh, Pete. . . . you know how reliable he is!” or some juicy bit of gossip about him, maybe true, maybe not.
It’s easy, over time, for that nasty, vindictive response to become habitual, automatic. And—whoops!—you’ve stopped being fully human, you’ve become a robot as far as Pete is concerned. Data in—Pete’s name. Reaction out—badmouthing him.
The extreme of this, of course, is the horrific pattern of offense and vengeance among nations, religions, and ethnic groups. When I’m hurt, I hurt back in a robotic pattern of evil returned for evil.

Forgiving means dismantling our habits of acting maliciously.
It’s not that easy. We need to first become aware of our habitual reactions. We have to figure out what the “program” is and when it is triggered. When Pete’s name is mentioned, we need to become aware of the leap in our pulse and blood pressure, and then hear the sharp words that come out of our mouths.
Then we need to name the truth about these patterns of speech and behavior: the truth that no matter how refined and subtle they may be, they are a form of revenge.
And finally we need to change the program, break the habit. How? By biting our tongue and being silent when Pete’s name comes up, or even deliberately practicing saying something positive about him.

But even when we succeeded in changing the “programs,” we’re still not done dismantling the robot of unforgiveness.
Maybe you’ve watched science programs on robots where someone puts a camera behind a robot’s “eyes” and you can see things the way it “sees” them.
The robot-eye view of things is always limited—maybe there’s no color vision or it just perceives heat and not forms. Robots just can’t see the rich, infinitely complex world our human vision gives us.
When we’re in a robotic state of unforgiving, we don’t see clearly either. Consider that pest Pete: All we see in Pete is his offense, how thoroughly annoying he is.
We can’t see him as a rich and infinitely complex person.
In order to forgive we need to dismantle our limited robotic vision. We need to strip it away so we can see with eyes illumined by grace and see our enemy, the one who has hurt us, as a child of God, our sister or brother in Christ.

Are any of you Star Trek fans? Do you remember the character “Seven of Nine”?
She was a human woman who had been captured as a child by a robot nation and changed into a human slash robot, a “cyborg.” Week after week we watched her slowly break out of her robotic behavior and become the human person she truly was.
She hated it the healing process, she rebelled, she clung fiercely to her comfortable robotic patterns. But finally she emerged, healed.
The process of forgiveness is just that hard. When we forgive another person, when we let go of our robotic patterns of malice and see the person who has hurt us with eyes touched by grace, we are healed. We are healed to be the fully human person God intended us to be.
Our best tool for dismantling the robot of unforgiveness? It is prayer. Prayer for grace, for the strength to forgive.
Sometimes even that may feel too difficult. The first step may sometimes be to ask God to help you to want to forgive.
Yet it is worth it: because the reward of dismantling the robot will be your own healing. In forgiving someone else, you will receive back a great gift----------------your own true self, free from obsession and malice.

Lent 2 February 28th, 2010 Should we always forgive?

2010-02-28T04:47:00.000-08:00

Lent 2
February 28th, 2010
Should we always forgive?

Today is the second installment of our Lenten preaching series on forgiveness.
Last week, we looked at Jesus’ call for us to forgive others, epitomized in the words of Lord’s Prayer: “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”
Today we’ll wrestle with a question inspired by the gospel—Jesus lamenting over Jerusalem, so sacred, so precious, so corrupt.
The question is: “Did Jesus really mean it? Is it true that we should always forgive? What about someone who has done grievous harm to me or to someone I love? To perpetrators of domestic violence? What about someone who rapes a child? What about horrific social violence—Nazis in Germany? Serb and Croat partisans in Bosnia, the terrorists of 9/11—should they be forgiven? Or would forgiveness in any of these cases condone the sin and brush aside the suffering of the victims?”

In her book Forgiveness: Following Jesus into Radical Loving, Paula Huston tells the story of Simon Wiesenthal. He was a Jewish concentration camp survivor who spent his life hunting down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to justice.
One night, as he was working as an orderly in a Red Cross hospital, a nurse came to him and asked him to follow her.
She led him to the bed of an SS soldier who was dying. He wanted to confess a terrible sin: under orders he had gathered scores of Jewish men, women, and children into a house and then set the house on fire.
But the dying soldier didn’t just want to admit what he had done. He wanted someone to forgive him. He begged Wiesenthal to forgive him.
He did not. He turned away. But for the rest of his life, his refusal to forgive that SS soldier haunted him.
It so haunted him that late in his life he asked a group of philosophers and religious people whether they thought he ought to have forgiven him.
The overwhelming majority argued that Wiesenthal was right not to forgive. Huston says, “Their primary reason for rejecting forgiveness as an option is a particularly powerful one, and has to do with fear of perpetuating evil. In order to prevent us from ever again going through a moral catastrophe on the scale of the Holocaust, they say, the blood of the innocent must continue to cry out forever. We must never forget—and forgiving assures that we will” (p.8, my emphasis).
A handful of people disagreed with the majority opinion. While they absolutely agreed with the majority that we must act to prevent anything like the Holocaust happening again, they argued that to answer violence with violence, cruelty with cruelty, unforgiveness with unforgiveness only serves to perpetuate and prepare the ground for more violence. We only have to look at the conflicts between Jews and Palestinians, Shia and Sunni, Christians and Muslims, representing centuries of slaughter where forgiveness is regarded as weakness and revenge is lifted up as strength.
This minority argued that though evil it can only truly be overcome when it is answered with good rather than more evil.

There are no easy answers here. But I want to raise some points that might help us think through the question of whether Christ ever lets us off the hook for forgiveness:
1. Forgiveness is not a warm and fuzzy “it’s ok. It really doesn’t matter” kind of thing. Forgiveness does not mean whitewashing the sin. We need to tell the truth about evil, the way Jesus told the truth about Jerusalem.
2. Forgiveness—and this is important!—forgiveness does not mean that we forget. Forgiveness does not mean that we—personally, nationally, internationally—that we need to make ourselves stupid and allow the evil to happen again.
3. Forgiving someone doesn’t mean they have to be your new best friend. In fact, you can forgive someone and at the same time make it clear that for your protection you do not want to be friends with or even in the presence of that person. This is true, for example, in the case of domestic violence.
And finally, 4, even when we forgive someone who has done grievous harm, that person can, if appropriate, be bound over to the legal system for prosecution and punishment. Forgiveness and justice can go hand in hand.

Forgiveness is a mystery. In some cases it seems unimaginable.
But sometimes reality succeeds in racing ahead of what we can imagine. I want to end with a story of heroic forgiveness. It’s a true story, one that you know:
In 2006 we were all shocked by the murder in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, of five little Amish girls by a non-Amish neighbor, Charles Roberts.
As a mother, I cannot imagine how I would react if my child was murdered. I strongly suspect that forgiving the murderer would not be first on my mind.
But you probably remember how the Amish mothers and fathers, the families and friends of the murdered girls immediately reached out to the killer’s family. They mourned with them over his suicide at the same time they were grieving their own children. They told Charles Roberts’ family that they forgave him.
People around the country were shocked and some were angry. How could these people possibly forgive a man who had brutally murdered their children? Didn’t they have normal human feelings? But in turn the Amish men and women seemed amazed that anyone would question their reactions.
According to Paula Huston, “[In response, they] tried to explain that forgiveness is simply a manifestation (sometimes, as in this particular case, a dramatic one) of a life lived according to Christ’s double commandment of love: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength . . . [and] you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Huston goes on, “The fact that the Amish could forgive when they were so grievously injured does not imply that forgiving is any easier for them than it is for us—only that they are fully convinced that Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness lie at the heart of what it means to be a Christian.” (22-23).

Do you agree with them? Do I? What about Jesus’ prayer: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us”? Do we mean it? Should we mean it? Sometimes? Always? …………………………………………………………………………..Amen

Lent I February 21, 2010 “Forgiveness at the Heart of Lent”

2010-02-21T03:58:00.000-08:00

Lent I
February 21, 2010
“Forgiveness at the Heart of Lent”

What if . . .
What if after we had prayed the Great Litany together, I had walked out there and stood in front of you and said to you, “Please forgive me for anything I have done to hurt you.”
And then you had answered the same to me, and then turned first to one neighbor and then to another, saying, “Please forgive me for anything I have done to hurt you.”
That ritual happens at the beginning of Lent each year in Eastern Orthodox churches around the world on “Forgiveness Sunday.”
Every year at this time we talk about what we’ll give up during Lent, what practices we’ll take up. I suggest that this year we focus on that one practice— forgiveness.

Jesus put forgiveness front and center.
When the disciples begged him, “Lord, teach us to pray,” he included forgiveness in the very center of the prayer he gave them. “Forgive us our trespasses,” we say, or in the balder, more direct newer version, “Forgive us our sins.” Ok that’s all very well, but then Jesus followed that with a very startling next phrase: “forgive us our sins JUST AS we forgive those who sin against us.”
Hear that? “Just as”! That’s pretty clear: Like it or not every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we’re putting ourselves on the line on the forgiveness front. We’re giving God permission to ignore our request for forgiveness, if we refuse to forgive the people who have hurt us, or failed us, or gotten in the way of what we want.
I’ve mentioned to a few of you over the years that I had never really heard that part of the prayer until one day, right here, when we were saying the Lord’s Prayer together. All I could think was, “Uh oh.” I spent the rest of the service listing in my head the names of people I hadn’t forgiven and wondering, where does that put me with God?
To make this forgiveness business even more difficult Jesus didn’t just tell us to forgive others. He also said that that we shouldn’t even bother to come to church if we don’t seek forgiveness from the people whom we’ve hurt.
In Matthew’s Gospel we hear him saying, “. . . if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother or sister has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”
Jesus is clear, then, that we can’t possibly be in right relationship with God unless and until we learn to forgive and to ask for forgiveness.

Yet even Jesus may have needed to learn forgiveness.
Today’s Gospel describes Jesus’ forty days of temptation in the wilderness. The writer only describes three of the temptations. But he says that Jesus was tempted all the time—all the time! Forty days of whispers, suggestions, excuses, vivid pictures of gratifications of all kinds—nothing left out.
Jesus learned over those forty days how hard it is to be human, how many weakness we humans are prey to. How excruciatingly difficult it is not yield to those seductive voices, those “try it—it won’t really matter,” “try it—it’ll be worth it,” “go ahead—you’re more important than those other people.”
And by experiencing what it feels like to be a human being in the grip of a legion of whispers to turn away from God and one another—Jesus became even more truly human and capable of forgiving.
He’d felt the temptation to give up God’s work and go back to live a safe, comfortable life in Galilee, so he was able to forgive Peter when, poor coward, he denied knowing his beloved master. He’d felt the temptation to let fear of the devils overwhelm him, so he was able to forgive his closest friends for running away from the crucifixion. And he’d felt the fatal attraction of greed and power, and so he would have forgiven Judas.
Jesus knew how deep and powerful run the human attractions to cruelty and selfishness and cowardice. And so from his heart he was able to cry out from the cross: “Father, forgive them.” [Point out the heart at the center of the cross in the banner]

This Lent we will spend our sermon time exploring the forgiveness to which we are called as Christians.
Each week we’ll look at a different facet guided by the week’s Gospel.
It won’t be easy. We’ll have to talk about questions like: If I forgive someone who’s doing me harm, does that mean I just have to give in and keep on letting him hurt me? Does Christian forgiveness mean we can’t advocate putting people in prison? How could I ever forgive the murderer of my child—and should I?
Such hard questions! But they are questions we Christians need to ask as we grapple with Jesus’ demand that we put forgiveness at the center of our life.
The writer Paula Huston suggests that we won’t have to struggle alone: “When Christ tells us we must take forgiveness seriously, he also promises to accompany us. We do not seek or offer forgiveness on our own; we cannot. It is only through him that we are able,” able to say: “Please, please, forgive me for anything I have done to hurt you.” Amen.

Ash Wednesday February 17, 2010

2010-02-21T03:57:00.000-08:00

Ash Wednesday
February 17, 2010

Why are we gathered here today/tonight?
Why the public breast-beating of the confession we’re about to say, naming the seediest of our sins?
Why are we about to allow ourselves to be publicly marked with ashes on our foreheads?

In my spare minutes this week I’ve been watching the Olympics.
You know how the commentators fill in the action with human interest bios on the athletes. I’ve been particularly struck this year by how many of the athletes have come back from serious, serious wounds: the skater whose skate blade cut his other leg to the bone. The skier who raced the men’s downhill a couple of days ago with a cast on the thumb he broke two weeks ago. The woman snowboarder who had been carried off a mountain unconscious at the last Olympics, but who came back to a spectacular win yesterday.
In all the interviews with those athletes, they said much the same thing: “I thought it was all over, but then I decided to do what I needed to do to heal and get back on the mountain or the ice dancing floor.”

We’re here today/tonight because each one of us carries wounds—physical wounds of illness, or—often even more painful—the wounds that others have inflicted on us and the wounds that our sins have made in our lives.
We’re here today/tonight because some part of our minds and hearts long to believe the words we just said in Psalm 103:
God forgives all our sins,
and heals all our infirmities,
There’s only one way that we can get this forgiveness and healing—to bend before the infinite mercy of God.

Practically speaking, how do we do this?
First, trust enough to name before God where we are most wounded. God won’t be shocked. God has heard it all before. But what both you and God need is for you to be honest. Maybe it’s a sin done long ago that still eats away at your peace and confidence. Maybe it’s a person you can’t seem to forgive, no matter how hard you try. Maybe it’s a habit of reacting angrily to other people, or an addiction to alcohol, or food, or drugs.
Don’t bring God a laundry list of things you want to change. Just focus on one. Then actually say to God something like, “Dear God, this Lent help to change just this one thing in my life.”
Next, pray about it, in the morning when you get up and just before bed. Give it to God. None of the wounded athletes I’ve heard this week said, “I just decided to heal it myself.” No, they found the best physician—and the best physician of all is the God who loves us.
In a few minutes we’ll read Psalm 51. It begins with a perfect prayer to God for healing:
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness;
in your great compassion blot out my offences.
Or, in a version I prefer,
In your great tenderness wipe away my sins.

When I hear these words, I always envision a mother wiping the dirt off the skinned knee of her child.

As you are praying during these forty days, giving yourself into the healing hands of God, you also need to do some rehab!
It won’t be easy—those of you who have been through rehab know how painful it can be. But we can’t heal without it.
Rehab means practice, stretching weak muscles, relearning how to do things.
If you’re working on forgiving someone, your rehab program may be simply once a day holding that person up to God’s mercy and grace. Or you may feel God nudging you to reach out toward that person (that is not always the best thing to do).
If you’ve named a habit of anger, say, or envy—try to become aware of just when and how your buttons get pushed. See if you can get a little grace time before you react—perhaps just take a breath before you say those angry words or push send for an e-mail.
If you suspect you’re addicted to something, reach out to someone who knows about these things—they can help you and it is immensely powerful, as AA has proved, to name your addiction to another person.

Why are we here today/tonight?
Like wounded athletes, we all need healing. Otherwise, how can we ever tackle the fogged-over mountain trails and bumpy ice that inevitable comes up in our lives:
We may all give different reasons for being here, but ultimately we came here for one reason alone. In order that, as Jesus says in the Gospel of John: “we might have life, and have it more abundantly.”

Epiphany 5 February 7, 2010

2010-02-07T03:58:00.000-08:00

Epiphany 5
February 7, 2010

Today Luke’s Gospel is a fish story meant to catch you and me!

It takes place along the shore of the Sea of Genesseret otherwise known as the Sea of Galilee, is a fisherman’s paradise.
Commercial fishermen still fish the waters, as Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, and John and his brother John, did 2000 years ago.
It’s a long, deep, freshwater lake, really, rather than a sea, and it still teems with fish just as it did in Simon Peter’s day. Catches of 600 pounds are not uncommon.
And yet you fishermen know how crazy fishing can be. One day you can’t keep them off your hook and the next day—not a bite.

Poor Simon Peter! He’s worked hard all night and caught exactly zero fish.
It’s a tough life, being a commercial fisherman: constant worry about money, risking disaster every single night.
Now to cap it off, this unknown teacher Jesus shows up out of the blue and commandeers his boat. Simon goes along, but really just wants the crowd—and Jesus—to go away.
But Jesus doesn’t go away. Instead he tells Simon, “Go out into the deep waters.” Fed up, Simon answers, “But we’ve just spent the whole night fishing” with the subtext—“we are fishermen, you are just a preacher, go away.”
But Peter finally gives in and against his better judgment picks up his nets, and rows out to the deep water with Jesus in the boat.
He dips in his net----and suddenly the problem shifts from “not enough” to “way too much”!
Flopping fish everywhere, too many to count.
Peter falls on his knees, hides his face from Jesus’ smiling face looking down at him, and cries out—“Go away! This is too much for me. I’m no saint. I’m just a regular guy.”

That’s it! That’s the whole point! Jesus didn’t choose Simon Peter to be his disciple because Peter was in any way at all extraordinary. Exactly the opposite—Jesus chose Peter because he was so completely a “regular guy.”
Look at his “regular guy” credentials: He worked for a living.
He had good days and bad days—presumably they balanced out, but Jesus showed up on a particularly bad day.
He had regular emotions. He lost his temper when Jesus, this carpenter from up north, presumed to tell him how to do his job.
And finally he had enough sense to be bowled over by the miracle of all those fish. He knew God was somehow right there in the boat. And he didn’t know what to do.

For the past few weeks, Joan Bowers has been guiding a small group of us in what’s called “group spiritual direction.”
Here’s how it works: We sit around the table in the CLC in silence, loosening ourselves from the busy-nesses of our day—all those buzzy thoughts about phone calls not made, e-mails not returned, those unwashed dishes at home—we just let them drift.
Then one person takes ten minutes or so to talk about something that’s bothering or concerning him or her, something weighing on them in their daily lives.
After they finish speaking we don’t start talking right away. We go back into silence.
Then for five minutes or so we ask the person questions. The point of these questions isn’t to fix the situation. It’s to provide an opportunity for the person to see more deeply into what is happening. We don’t always use “God” language, but we assume that God working with and calling to that person even in the hardest, most painful situations.

The situations we’ve been bringing to the group the past few weeks haven’t been questions about prayer or about the doctrines of our faith.
No—instead they’ve been gritty, practical, daily issues about family, friends, and work. They arose for us “regular” people in the course of our “regular” lives.
The process is amazing—When I presented, I brought up a painful problem involving a friend. During the question time I was bowled over by the hidden facets, the depths, the insights, revealed by the group’s responses. I had a clearer sense of what I am “called” by God to do in this situation.
At the end of my time, I felt a little like Simon Peter when he realized just who it was smiling down at him as he knelt down in awe in the fishy swill at the bottom of his boat.

That day on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus called Simon Peter and the others to be his disciples. And that’s how it works even today: he calls us regular people to be his disciples right in the middle of the events of our regular lives.
Sometimes the call is to leave those lives behind—as those Galilean fishermen did—and make a radical change—to go do mission work far away, or to seminary, or a monastery.
But most often God calls us to be disciples right where we are, with our families, friends, and communities.
But what does it mean, that odd word, ‘disciple’?
We don’t use it much in ordinary life. But here’s a simple definition: “disciples are people who live the Gospel in their ordinary lives so clearly that the people who come in contact with them can hear it and see it.” Again: “Disciples are people—regular people like you and me—who live the Gospel in their ordinary lives so clearly, so transparently, that people who come in contact with them can hear it and see it.”1
How will they know? What will they see? Here are some of the visible qualities of a disciple life: Kindness, patience. Care for the poor and the sick and the lonely. A passion for justice. Love for the unlovable.
Jesus casts his nets and draws us in: “Come, follow me,” Jesus says to us as he said to those fishermen so long ago, “come, follow me.”

1paraphrased Mary Hinkle

Rector’s Report Annual Meeting

2010-02-04T09:10:00.000-08:00

Rector’s Report
Annual Meeting
Church of the Holy Spirit
January 31, 2010

A few weeks ago we read St. Paul’s description of spiritual gifts in the First Letter to the Corinthians. That same week I had occasion to call a man who comes occasionally to our church, but belongs to another denomination. We talked briefly about Church of the Holy Spirit, and at the end of the conversation he named what he considered to be an outstanding gift of our church: care for each other and for the people who come to us as strangers and often remain here as our brothers and sisters in Christ.
I write this Rector’s Report in a spirit of deep thanksgiving for the privilege of being your priest. I am continually surprised and moved by the depth of your faith and the breadth of your gift of kindness to others both within the church and those outside it.

During this year, I have served as your pastor, priest, and teacher, as specified in my ordination vows.
As pastor: I have visited the homebound and those in hospitals and nursing homes. I’ve also been called to function as a short-term counselor, to help parishioners discern issues including marital and job difficulties. In those cases, the Holy Spirit has been an important part of our conversations!
As priest: We rejoiced in the baptism of Isabelle White (grand niece of Anne Hunnewell), and in the Confirmations last spring of Courtney and Megan Abernathy, Michael and Andrew Buttolph, Simon Smith-Mauchly, and two students from Holderness School. We did not have any funerals of parish members during 2009—a striking change from 2008 when so many of our beloved friends were called home to God. Anyce Noyes died on December 24th and the family has been in contact with me to talk about a committal service in late April.
Early in 2009, Jonathan Ross joined us as choir director. Although not a music major, he has generously given of his time and his experience as a singer to guide our choir. The anthem at the 10:00 Christmas Eve service was a tribute to his gifts.
Julie Formidoni graduated in May leaving us, for the first time in six years, without a Formidoni at the keyboard. We have been incredibly fortunate to have Peggy Johnson as our primary supply organist since Julie left. Joyce Milner joined us briefly as organist, and Rosemary Genarro brought her considerable skills on the organ to us during Christmas week. In this time of musical semi-crisis, Anne Hunnewell, Gwynna Smith, and Will Cabell all rallied to give us music for worship.
The Wednesday Eucharist continues each week at 12:30 at the CLC. Everyone is invited to participate in this meditative celebration of Eucharist and in the discussions we have each week in lieu of a sermon.
We had a terrific series of Wednesday Schools for kids and parents during ski season, 2009, and they have begun again. It is a wonderful way for parents and children to have fun and to worship together.
We have continued our ministry of Eucharist, pastoral care, and Bible study at the Mentally Handicapped Offenders’ Program, now in its fifth year. Pat L’Abbe faithfully attends the Eucharist and always brings flowers to brighten the altar.
As teacher: During Lent we paired contemporary movies and discussions about faith in daily life. Since September we’ve enjoyed a rich series of events under the auspices of the Holy Spirit Center for Spiritual Life, skillfully guided by Joan Bowers: “From Sunday to Monday” on everyday spirituality and a one-day workshop in making Anglican rosaries. In addition, I led a three-session class on the Creed during Advent.
Other: Some of you may not be aware of the extent to which our Highland Street site is being used by members and by the community. Many people, even those who have lived in the area for a long time, have come to know of the existence of Church of the Holy Spirit through coming to an activity at the site.
Griswold Hall is in use every week day, often for more than one program. Church programs regularly held there include education events like the Rosary-making workshop, ECW luncheons, weekly Christian Yoga, our monthly quilting and knitting groups, as well as the weekly Al Anon which was begun and is led by CHS members. In addition, Griswold Hall each week hosts six sessions of AA and one of Narcotics Anonymous. It is also used on a semi-regular basis for watercolor classes and adult literacy tutoring. And that doesn’t include the Farmers’ Market each week during the summer and the ECW book sales!
We are blessed every day by the courage and generosity of those who, beginning in 2002, initiated and carried out the Capital Fund Drive which enabled Church of the Holy Spirit to expand its ministry into the community.

Epiphany II January 17, 2010

2010-01-17T08:33:00.000-08:00

Epiphany II
January 17, 2010

Can’t you just see her?
A little woman, late 40’s, standing with her son and his friends, at the wedding reception.
Having a good time, but suddenly sensing a disturbance. The servant waiters, anxious, whispering to the steward.
She whispers to her son, “They’re just about out of wine.”
Jesus looks at her, startled. “Is that any of our business, Mother—yours or mine?” (The Message)
In the way of mothers, she keeps on looking at him—silently but significantly—you know that look!
Jesus says, “What?! I’m just here as a guest with you and my friends. It’s not the right time. My hour has not yet come.”

Mary knew all about “the right time.”
She knew all about making plans—like getting married to Joseph and having children who would grow up and settle down near her, and give her grandkids.
But she also remembered how one fine day an angel broke roughly into her cherished plans. How he said, “You shall conceive and bear a son.”
How she tried to send him away by answering, “But I’m not married yet.” In other words, “it’s not the right time, “ or, “my hour has not yet come.”
And how suddenly she forgot about “her time,” “her hour”, and said “yes,” and felt all her plans come toppling down around her.
But 30 years later, as she stood there in Cana next to her son, she had no regrets. None. She had exchanged her time for God’s time, her plans for her God’s surprising plans, and she had no regrets.
She called the servants over and told them, “Do whatever he tells you.”

Jesus looked around and saw the bride and groom radiant, talking to friends.
Then he looked at the men around him, his new companions, Peter and Andrew, Philip and Nathaniel.
He knew they were waiting for a sign that God was with him. A miracle. Something big, something memorable—not changing water into wine at a simple wedding reception..
It didn’t matter. His mother was right: “Fill the jars with water.”

So often we insist on waiting for our own “hour” to come.
We’ve got our plans, we’ve got our lives all mapped out. Then –snap!”—God, in the form of the people and situations around us, intervenes, and our plans lie broken on the floor around us.
God’s voice doesn’t usually boom out of the heavens, nor, usually, does God send an angel to dismantle the lives we imagined we would live.
No. Most commonly God calls us through what’s happening around us.

That’s what happened to Martin Luther King.
He was on the trajectory for success. He had his PhD, a wife and kids, and at the age of 26 had just been called a pastor at a Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama.
He had plans. But on Dec. 3rd, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man and was arrested. The African American community gathered to plan their strategy. All the other black leaders had had a contentious history with the city government. Martin Luther King was new in town. No one knew him yet. So King was asked to lead a boycott of city buses.
I suspect he might have been tempted to answer, “Not now. My hour is not yet come.”
But Martin Luther King realized that whatever timetable he himself had in mind, God’s hour had come. In this hour an opportunity was opening for the black community to act and it was his hour to lead it.
He said, “Yes.”

This week we’ve been following the unspeakable events in Haiti.
What is God calling us to do in this hour?
It seems so little that most of us can do. Later on, there may be a call for volunteers, but in the chaos there now it seems better to let the people already there and the international forces get to work. For now, we can give our money to relief efforts and our hearts to prayer.
You see that we have an insert today from Episcopal Relief and Development. ERD is already very active in Haiti. Food and medical relief is already on its way to Haiti through the Dominican Republic.
When Wavell returns from his trip, we will make a significant donation to ERD from the church. In addition, I urge you each to respond to the request in the insert and make a personal contribution to ERD or some other organization.

But beyond financial aid, this hour of the tragedy in Haiti calls us to prayer.
This is the sort of situation where we might very well feel overwhelmed. What difference can our prayers make to all that suffering?
I believe that even though it is a mystery, prayer changes us and changes the situation for which we are praying. I believe that my prayers, your prayers, for the people of Haiti may directly ease a child’s, a man’s, a woman’s physical or psychological suffering, may give a jolt of extra energy to a searcher or relief worker, may bring a moment of consolation to someone whose misery we can’t even imagine
We’ll never know the results of our prayer. That’s ok—we will know that in this hour, we’ve taken time out of our own concerns to hold the people of Haiti up in prayer/
Let us now pray: Quiet your minds. Let yourself be aware of God’s presence. ……… In your hearts, your imaginations, hold up to God the people of Haiti. You may have a particular image in your mind from television or newspaper reports. That’s fine. .. Now see God’s love surrounding, embracing, enveloping those broken people . . . You can imagine God’s love as light, as warmth, as calm. . . .Hold this image in your heart and mind. …….Let God’s love flow through you to them …….. Give them to God. . . Amen.

Christmas 2 January 3rd, 2010

2010-01-17T08:32:00.000-08:00

Christmas 2
January 3rd, 2010

In today’s Gospel we come face to face with the dark side of Christmas.
It is the first instance of many during Jesus’ life when human violence tried to destroy the presence of God in our midst.
The story of Herod and the flight into Egypt is the first hint that the Christmas story leads step by step to the Cross.

Why, after all, did the angel come to Joseph in the first place? Because King Herod, a Jew but a jpuppet ruler bought and paid for by the Romans, has given orders that all the baby boys in and around Bethlehem should be killed, because he wants this baby “king of the Jews” the wise men told him about to be exterminated.
Because of a vicious ruler who is willing to do anything at all to retain his power, Jesus becomes a refugee child. Jesus is the precious bundle of new life his parents will do anything to protect.
When I first read today’s Gospel, I was struck by one phrase, one phrase repeated twice.
When the angel came to him in warning, Joseph, the Gospel says, “got up, took the child and his mother, and went to Egypt.”
And when the dream angel told him he could take his family back home, Joseph “got up, took the child and his mother” and went back to Israel.
He didn’t question, he didn’t argue, he didn’t beg for time He got up and did what he has to do to keep Mary and Jesus safe.

Fleeing in fear for your life isn’t pretty; it’s not the stuff of Christmas cards. A California poet, William Everson, who knows his desert and has seen first hand the plight of economic refugees from Mexico, describes the “flight into the desert” this way:
The last settlement . . .

Cold and acrid and black.

It’s so easy to indulge in the Christmas story as a lovely bit of fantasy, G-rated, suitable for children and a relief for adults. But today’s Gospel takes us by the shoulders and turns us firmly back toward the world as it really is.
Think of all the fathers around the world, even this Christmastide, even this morning, who don’t need an angel to come to them in a dream to know that they too have to “get up,” take their children, and flee across national or territorial borders for safety.
Think of fathers in Afghanistan this morning after the volleyball bombing—wondering, where can they take their families where might they be safe? Fathers in the border regions of Pakistan—where can they be safe? Fathers in Palestine—where can my children grow up safe?
Fathers in all the war zones of the world or in the places where tyranny creates a false peace, telling themselves, “I must get up and take my wife and children and go . . . where?” Somewhere—is there a place?—where bombs don’t fall from the sky or burst out of car or explode from the earth itself.
No angel comes in a dream to tell them, but, like Joseph, they don’t hesitate, they get up, hold their wives hands, wrap their babies in blankets, and go.

Joseph got up and did what he needed to do.
The angel didn’t make him safe. God didn’t make him and his family safe, didn’t throw a cordon of fire or swords around them to protect them.
God needed Joseph’s collaboration. God needed Joseph that night in Bethlehem to spring up out of bed, help Mary throw together what little was absolutely needed for the flight.
Joseph couldn’t just lie there and pray and God would make it all right. In fact, the paradox, the total mystery of Christmas, is that the One Joseph needed to save was the Savior himself.

This is an amazing God we have!
To give himself to us in the pure vulnerability of a child. To deliver himself over to the care of Mary and Joseph, mere humans like ourselves.
To rely on us for food and safety.
To give himself over into a this terrible mixed up world where innocents are killed, where good men and women are targets of violence.
And yet where men and women are willing to say “yes” to God and “get up” and collaborate with God and with each other to make a world in which children aren’t threatened, oppressors don’t win, and families can live together in peace and safety.
Where you can make a difference, and so can I and how we live matters.

Over the campfire the desert moon
Slivers the west, too chaste and cleanly
To mean hard luck. The man rattles the skillet
To take the raw edge off the silence;
The woman lifts up her heart, the Infant
Knuckles the generous breast, and feeds.

Christmas 2009 “What Child is This?”

2010-01-17T08:31:00.000-08:00

Christmas 2009
“What Child is This?”

Will and I hang our Christmas cards on red velvet ribbons hanging from the door frame to our parlor.
I love looking up from the dining room table which tends to be the center of Christmas wrapping and writing and list-making, and spotting the rows of cards, remembering the friends who sent them.
I can happily distract myself from whatever I’m supposed to be doing by focusing on one or two cards, remembering the friends who sent them.
Among them of course are cards made from photos proudly featuring kids and grandkids.
This year in one perusal I spotted a family I didn’t recognize at all. A proud mother and father flanking a gorgeous little guy about six months old. “Who are they?,” I wondered.
They turned out to be friends of my son’s fiancée, people I’d never met.
But what struck me was how they fit right in with all the regular Christmas cards surrounding them, the ones depicting Mary, Joseph, and the baby.

On one level, the Christmas story is so simple, so simple that toddlers can understand it, especially toddlers who have new little brothers or sisters.
Because on one level, the Christmas story is a birth story about a mother, a father, and a new baby.
Our Christmas cards this year featured a painting by Botticelli of Mary and Jesus. Except for the haloes, Mary and her baby are depicted as a healthy, happy mother and a plump little baby staring into his mother’s eyes.
The expression on Mary’s face looks just like the young mother of the family I didn’t recognize.

The Christmas story, the reason we’re all here tonight, draws us into celebration partly because birth itself always calls for celebration.
The fact of birth itself, the coming into being of a new human life—isn’t that holy enough, isn’t that sacred enough, to bring us together tonight in wonder and awe.

Just below the photograph of the familiar unfamiliar family is another very different image.
It’s an ancient depiction of Mary and Jesus from the Eastern Orthodox tradition called “Our Lady of the Sign.”
You may have see it: Mary is facing us, eyes looking at us. She’s holding up her hands like this—in the ancient position of prayer.
Here’s what’s surprising: It’s as if you have x-ray vision. You can see through Mary’s robes right into her body. And there is the Christ Child, sitting with great dignity, looking out right at us.
What you have to squint your eyes to see is that all around Jesus is a velvety darkness and twinkling in that darkness, stars.

Stars. Because of course the story of Christmas is not just about the miracle of all births, but also about one particular extraordinary birth.
And here’s where the Christmas story becomes wild and crazy It’s a story about a human birth, yes, but at the same time it’s bout a God who out of wild explosive love created a universe—stars and galaxies and planetary systems and quarks and black holes— out of nothing, and then stayed around long enough to realize that at least in the vicinity of earth and specifically of human beings, things were quickly going downhill.
It’s a story about a God who grieved for the lost goodness of the earth, whose heart was so pierced by the suffering caused by human resentments, selfishness, cruelty, greed and all the sins you and I know only too well—whose heart was so pierced by alienation from the children who had drifted so far away, that God in the person of Jesus Christ—and this is mystery so I can’t describe it too clearly—chose by an immense creative leap to take a human journey starting in a woman’s womb.
St. Paul tried to express the wonder of God’s crazy self-exile: “[Jesus Christ] had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn't claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless death.”

Can we entertain one wild notion together, just for a moment?:
That God loves us, each single one of us millions and billions of us—so crazily as to want to be with us, to be one of us?
I find it so hard to grasp. I suspect because we’re so used to being loved partially—for the spiffy parts of us, for the things we do well. For what makes us “successful.”
So the greatest miracle of all is when someone knows everything about us, absolutely everything—and still takes delight in us, loves us extravagantly, as if we were the most special person in the universe. When someone will do anything, sacrifice anything, to be with us.

That’s the ultimate Christmas gift, the one that never wears out or gets out of date—God’s wild, exuberant love.
I invite you tonight as we celebrate that first Christmas together, as we sing and pray and receive Communion together, to hold your cares and worries, your frustrations and griefs loosely—they are part of you but not all of you. And then let yourself be loved extravagantly by a God who journeyed to earth to be near us, and who will never let us go.

Advent II December 6, 2009

2010-01-17T08:30:00.001-08:00

Advent II
December 6, 2009

One of the great themes of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, is Exile.
It was a massive historical trauma they could not forget, a nightmare they couldn’t shake.
I’ve described before how in the sixth century BC, the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem.They tore down the precious temple, the great symbol of the presence of God among them.
Then they carried off hostages into exile in Babylon, splitting up families, taking the best and the brightest away into another land.
“Displaced people”—that’s what many of the Hebrew people became.
We hear the lament of those exiles in the poignant lament that is Psalm 137:
By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
When we remembered you, O Zion.
Those who led us away captive asked us for a song,
And our oppressors called for mirth:
[But] How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.

There are so many people in exile in this world of ours!
Literally millions of people displaced by war or so-called “ethnic cleansing.” At the height of the Iraq war, the number of external and internal (ethnic cleansing) exiles was estimated at close to two million men, women, and children. Exiles from Palestine, the Balkans, Congo, Nigeria—try googling the word ‘exile’ sometime. All those millions of people forced to sing their native songs in a foreign land.
Then there are economic exiles, people impelled by conomic conditions in their home countries (including many “illegals” in the US right now) where a father or mother leaves home and children to find work in more affluent countries. Gail’s work with sailors who spend months in exile on the high seas under often harsh conditions—pirates, dangerous weather==in order to support children at home whom they rarely see. They show her dogeared photos—“my child—last year, when I saw him last.”
Last week was World AIDS Day. In some places in the world, HIV positive people are driven out of towns and villages to live apart like lepers.
There are so many reasons for exile. But whatever the reasons, people like these plumb the depths of homesickness and heartache,

Those of us who’ve been around this earth for a while know that exile is not just a geographical fact. We humans can experience spiritual exile as well.
What is spiritual exile?
The symptoms of what I mean by spiritual exile are these: distance from God or a blank spot where once God was, a feeling of being lost or abandoned, a sense that nothing I do means anything, that life is just something to be slogged through.
How do we wind up in spiritual exile? What drags us away from home into an unknown, hostile place?
Terrible suffering can do it, chronic pain or the sudden or dragged out loss of a loved one. A marriage or deep friendship torn apart without warning.
Addiction and sin can drag us into exile. When that happens, Babylon, this new and pleasurable land, looks like the place to be.
For a while the place of giving into the delicious pleasures of out-of-control drink or drugs, or “unfaithful” sex (doesn’t that sound old fashioned?!), or accumulating stuff, stuff, stuff and forgetting about people, people, people—for a while it doesn’t feel like exile at all. It feels like a much-improved homeland.
Remember the old Disney movie Pinocchio? As a child the most scary part was when Pinocchio skips school and winds up with other children in an amusement park. The scary part for me was how fun it all looked, how much I bought into it myself—like Pinocchio I’d love to have lived there forever, and then how mindless and selfish and, yes, sick, it became until Pinocchio and all the other children turned into donkeys. I still feel a little nauseous when I remember that scene.
Addiction and sin can drag us into exile and for a while Babylon looks like the place to be.

But just as geographical exiles keep in their hearts a compass arrow pointing toward their place of origin, so when we’re in spiritual exile something in us keeps on calling us home, assuring us it doesn’t matter how far away we’ve wandered, how lost we are in the distorting and perverted funhouse of sin—God calls us home.
During Advent especially we’re invited out of exile. Advent readings and hymns are filled with images of homecoming.
Today especially: In the first lesson Baruch, a prophet in exile in Babylon, writes home to Jerusalem, “For they went out from you on foot, led away by their enemies; but God will bring them back to you. . . .“ The Gospel quotes the prophet Isaiah, telling the exiles that the journey home will be easy!: “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

Why Advent? Jesus will come in a few weeks—how?
God’s son, “exiled” from heaven, a tiny baby born to a couple forced away by politics from their hometown. Jesus was born in exile.
And we can look ahead in Jesus’ story and see that Jesus’ entire ministry amounted to leading people out of exile: He healed lepers who had by law to live outside the city gates—Jesus’ healing meant they could come inside go home.
A woman who’d been hemorrhaging for twelve years. By law because of her illness she couldn’t live with her husband as man and wife—Jesus’ healing meant she could go home.
The tax collector who’d been shunned as a sinner and a traitor because of his job—Jesus said to him, “Come, follow me,” and then Jesus invited himself to the tax collector’s home.

The prophet of Advent, John the Baptist, had one and only one message: “Repent.”
We often interpret that word as beating our breasts, crawling with guilt.
But that’s wrong: in the most basic way all that that saving, Advent word means is this: “Come home.”

First Sunday of Advent November 29th, 2009

2010-01-17T08:28:00.000-08:00

First Sunday of Advent
November 29th, 2009

Ah the first Sunday of Advent, the first day of the church’s new year. There’s no easing into it== as usual the Gospel is designed to sweep away the cobwebs, to shake us up!
Jesus and his disciples are at the temple. Like good tourists, the disciples are ooing and ahing over the beauties of the temple. They’re almost worshiping the temple building, assuming its solid walls will last forever.
But Jesus squelches their naïve enthusiasm with a scorching prediction that the walls of the temple will tumble to the ground and chaos take over the world.
The disciples look around them, even reach out and touch for reassurance the massive stones of the walls of the temple. But as Jesus speaks fear rises in them, and maybe one or two imagined they could feel a slight trembling in the stone.
Really? Even these stones will crumble? This magnificent temple, the secure center of the entire Jewish culture? But how? But why? Yes, it isn’t perfect: there is corruption, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, yes, there is armed revolt and a brutal occupation. But that’s just the way it is—isn’t it?”

Like the disciples, it’s hard for us to stand back a bit and look objectively at the world we live in.
It’s a good life we live, by and large. It happens that all of us here live somewhere—maybe not where we would choose, but we are sheltered. We have enough to eat.
But we just have to look around us—out into the campgrounds or cars parked in the shadows of lots around Plymouth, and we’ll find people living in tents or vehicles. The demand on our local food pantries right now is intense—and many of the people who receive that food are subsisting on it.
Our neighbors, some of them—some of us—have to choose each month between paying for rent/mortgage, food, and medicine. Hospital bills can force even people working one or two jobs into bankruptcy. And speaking of jobs how many people still cannot find even a part time job to make ends meet?
And that’s here, in small town New Hampshire. Add to this, in other regions of the country, issues of racism and immigration, and we have to admit that even in this great nation people are suffering from problems not of their own making.
But that’s just the way it is for some people in America, isn’t it?

And then there’s the world beyond our world.
In Mabvuku a bag of “mealie meal” can literally mean the difference between life and death. There not enough cash for a school uniform means no school, no education, no way out of the slum. There a violent political system makes political protest life-threatening.
But that’s just the way it is in Zimbabwe—isn’t it?

What is Jesus doing in this gospel? What is his point—just to scare his disciples? Or discourage or depress them?
No—his point is this: that none of this is the way it has to be—in Israel in the first century, in Zimbabwe and in the United States right now. It just doesn’t have to be this way.
Here’s Jesus’ good news: no matter how permanent, how entrenched, how unyielding are the systems of this world, they are not the ultimate reality.
They will all collapse. The only thing in human history that remains firm and unchanging is God’s promise to be with us. The promise that God will judge the structures of this world. That ultimately God will move the world in the direction of justice and mercy. That God, that God!, will have the last word.
“Don’t give up in despair,” Jesus is saying to us this first Sunday of Advent, “Don’t give up in despair at the mess humans have made of this amazing world. Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

Let’s try something, a brief meditation to begin our Advent:
Visualize something that particularly bothers you about the way the world is right now—politically, ecologically, morally. Don’t focus on something in yourself—look outward at the wider world in which we live.
Imagine those circumstances, that structure, of injustice and cruelty cracking, collapsing, going out of focus—whatever way you can best visualize it weakening and disappearing.
Imagine then the hand of God reaching down and recreating that aspect of the world. Tenderly, creatively.
Imagine as clearly and concretely as you can: the new and fresh way God has recreated the world.
See yourself helping, tending the new thing God has made.

Today’s Advent gospel, even though it intends to shake us up, leaves us with a powerful image of hope: “Look at the fig tree,” Jesus says,”tf ytand all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near.”
The people of the Middle East love figs for their sweetness, of course. But they also believe that figs have the power to heal.
Such a surprising and lovely image, isn’t it?—in the midst of change, in the midst of chaos, suddenly appears a fig tree about to bloom.
A sweet image—like God’s promise through the ages that the world doesn’t have to be this way, that the world, tiny bit by tiny bit, tiny piece by tiny piece, can be healed.

ShareThis widget

2009-12-25T12:11:00.000-08:00

You'll see a ShareThis green widget now - by clicking on the ShareThis widget, you can share the sermons to your Facebook, Twitter, etc page.

Lets get Susan's good words out there!

Peace, and Merry Christmas.

Pentecost 19 October 11, 2009

2009-10-21T12:57:00.002-07:00

Pentecost 19
October 11, 2009

When I was a teenager, the poet Archibald Macleish wrote a very popular play in which JB, a corporate executive in the course of a few weeks lost everything that mattered to him—his job, status, wife, children. A few weeks ago the Coen brothers who wrote and produced the movie Fargo, came out with their latest film, A Serious Man, about a Jewish college professor who struggles to cope with the collapse of his life and stay decent and upright at the same time
Both the play and movie were inspired by the Book of Job which we will be reading as our first lesson for the next few weeks. This ancient book, probably written about 500 BC, still has the power to move and challenge writers and readers.

Like a fairy tale the Book of Job begins, “once upon a time”: “There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.”
He was a good and righteous man, with a loving wife, ten healthy children, not a rich man but comfortably well off.
The story moves to a fantastical scene. At a gathering in heaven, the story goes, God brags about Job, how good and righteous he is. Satan, who strangely enough is sitting right there with God , says, “Of course he’s a good man. Why not?—he has everything a human being could want. But, God, what if we were to test him? What will happen if you take everything he possesses away from him? I’ll bet you that he won’t love you then!”
God agrees to the wager. Job’s troubles begin. First all Job’s beasts are killed, then his servants, then tragically, his children.
At first Job bears it. He refuses to complain. Then Satan says to God, “Ah, but what will happen if his body is stricken with disease? Will he still endure in silence?” Satan then inflicts loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.” Job’s response?—he still will not complain “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”

Three friends come to console Job in his misery.
They don’t do a very good job.
Have you ever been in pain of some sort and the pastor or relative or friend drop in and you know they’re good people and they’re just trying to help, but they manage to say all the wrong things?
Job’s friends are like that. Specifically, the friends think they’ve got an explanation. “Job,” they say, “You must have sinned against God. Repent and God will return to you all that has been destroyed.”
Instead of consoling Job, their words prod him into defending himself. He knows himself, knows he has not sinned. “But you must have,” his friends argue.
Job refuses to give in. Almost in a frenzy, he cries out, “I am innocent!,” and he challenges God to listen to his case. He wants to bring God into court.
He’s sure he’ll win: “I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments. . . . he would give heed to me . . . and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.”

Strong words. But then Job’s defiance cracks and he seems to lose his nerve. Job admits that he’s terrified. Because now suddenly the worst thing happens—JJob can’t feel God, can’t hear God, can’t in any way sense God’s presence. When he calls out, God doesn’t answer. For Job—God is utterly hidden.
One of my favorite psalms is Psalm 139. “Where can I go then from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also . . . “ All places on earth and in heaven: “Even there your hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast.” Such confidence in God’s constant presence, no matter what is happening.
But Job reverses those words of confidence and it’s chilling—: “If I go forward, God is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.”

Anyone who has lived to adulthood has walked through those terrifying times when nothing makes sense, when we are stripped of what we love. When someone we love is stricken with a terminal disease, or our wife or husband leaves us, or our adult child rejects us, or we suddenly take a clear eyed look at the world around us crawling with cruelty and injustice.
It’s then that we need to know that it is ok to pray like Job. “Where are you, God?” “I can’t bear this anymore,” “Why, why, why?” It is not only ok, it is Biblical to cry out our indignation, our anger, our sense of abandonment.
It is always ok to pray the truth of ourselves. What is not ok is to lie to God about who we are or what we are feeling.

This is what I most dread in my role as pastor: when I am called to a hospital room or a funeral home, and someone demands that I defend God.
A grieving wife asks me, for example, “Why did my good husband have to die so young when terrible criminals live long lives?”
The worse thing I can do is give her what she wants—an explanation.
If I did, I’d be like one of Job’s “friends,” trying to second guess God. Trying to make sense of what just doesn’t make sense.
The best thing I can do is to walk alongside her and help her to pray Job’s prayers: “Where are you, God?,” “I can’t bear this anymore,” “Why, why, why?”

When you go through a hard time in your life, don’t be afraid to pray with Job’s honesty. Lightening will not strike you, God’s hand will not rise up against you.
Remember that it is not only Job who prayed this way. On the cross, Jesus, God’s Son, bleeding, straining for each breath, cried out in pain and terror the Job-like words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Only once he’d cried out his despair, could he go on to utter words filled with trust: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Pentecost 17 September 27, 2009

2009-10-21T12:57:00.001-07:00

Pentecost 17
September 27, 2009

When I was a girl, whenever my parents left me at my grandparents’ house, I’d take their big black bible off the shelf and settle down with the Book of Esther. Here it is in the Old Testament, only ten chapters wedged between Nehemiah and Job. It was my favorite Bible story.
For good reason: it’s got romance (sort of), humor, suspense, and best of all for a ten year old girl—a poor girl who not only becomes a queen, but also a hero.

During the whole church year we only read the little bit of the Book of Esther in today’s first lesson, so here’s a refresher on the plot:
We travel to Persia, where many Jews made their home after they were released from captivity in Babylon. In Persia, they lived mostly without persecution, easily Integrated with the rest of the population.
One day King Ahasuerus, reveling with his friends, orders his queen, the beautiful Vashti, to display her beauties before the court. She refuses. Irate and pressed by his courtiers who are worried that their wives might learn a lesson from Vashti, deposes her as queen.
In good fairy tale fashion, Ahasuerus orders all the young women of the kingdom to come to the palace so that he might—after they’ve undergone twelve months of spa treatment—choose a new queen.
Esther and her uncle Mordechai are Jews living in the capital. Esther enters the contest for queen and Ahasuerus chooses her. Meanwhile a lowly courtier named Haman is promoted by the King to be his Chief Officer. The honor goes to Haman’s head and he demands public honor by all the citizens, but Mordechai won’t bow down. Haman finds out he’s a Jew and decides to get rid of him by destroying the whole Jewish people.

Mordechai, terrified for their people, tells Esther to go into king and reveal that she’s a Jew. But to go in without an invitation means death. Even though she’s frightened, she takes on the responsibility. She orders Mordechai to ask all the Jews to fast on her behalf; she fasts as well. Meanwhile, Mordechai publicly protests the decree by lying in sackcloth and ashes at the court gate. Haman so infuriated that he builds a gallows 75 feet tall and goes into persuade the king to execute Mordechai on it. But by coincidence the king has a sleepless night and reads in the court annals that Mordechai earlier had foiled a plot to overthrow the king. King wants to reward Mordechai, and is shocked when Esther tells him that Haman is preparing to execute him as well as Esther and all the Jews in Persia. King Ahasuerus sentences Haman to death. After the King leaves Esther’s room, Haman throws himself on her couch to plead for his life. The king thinks he’s attacking her and orders Haman to be executed on the gallows he has built for Mordechai.

It’s a great story!
But over the 2500 years since it was written, it has been controversial.
Martin Luther hated it: “I am so hostile to this book that I wish that it did not exist for it .. . has too much heathen naughtiness.”
Ordinary Jewish people have always loved the Book of Esther, and read it aloud on the annual feast of Purim. But some scholars and authorities disliked it. For one thing, neither Esther nor Mordechai act much like Jews. Even by today’s standards they were not observant Jews.
That means that Esther and Mordechai were apparently living outwardly at least, completely assimilated (in that case, Persian) lives—no kosher, no ritual baths, no peculiarly Jewish dress.
And there was an even more important problem with the Book of Esther. In the entire book, there is no reference to “God.” Not one! A bit surprising for a book of the bible.

Those peculiarities are why now, as a grownup, I still love the Book of Esther.
Because it’s just for those reasons that the story of Esther can speak in a special way to us. We’re Christians trying to live good Christian lives while looking, talking, and acting a whole lot just like everyone else around us. We’re mostly not super-religious and we certainly wouldn’t describe ourselves as holy.
Like Esther and Mordechai, we live our lives in a society which worships many things other than God—wealth, power, beauty, possessions, status
In our lives, as in Esther’s, God does not appear as a burning bush nor does God knock people off a horse with any frquency There are no hugely extraordinary events, there are no stunning miracles.
There’s just—well—life. The situations we find ourselves in, the people and communities we care about.
And as faithful people in a world without God’s direct word and without miracles, how do we live? Like Esther and Mordechi, we make the best choices we can in the circumstances we have. Like Esther and Mordechi, we hope, quietly, that we and God are going in the same direction, and then do our best.

For most of us, as for Esther and Mordechai, the closest we’re going to get to a miracle are coincidences.
Mordechai’s hanging out in the marketplace in just the right place and time to overhear the plot against the king. Chance? God’s prompting? Who knows?
The king’s insomnia—Indigestion? God’s prompting? Who knows?
I suspect we’ve all had those experiences in which we’ve wondered—is this a coincidence? Or the brush of an angel’s hand?
I just had an experience like that. I’m the volunteer chaplain on duty at Speare Hospital this weekend. On Friday, I got to the hospital around quarter of two in the afternoon to begin my shift.
I’d signed in and was heading down the corridor to stash my purse when I heard a voice say, “You’re the lady who did the funeral for my grandmother, aren’t you?” It turned out that yes, I was that lady. I’d deeply loved the grandmother, and through her illness and death, I’d become acquainted with the whole family.
The woman went on: “You’ll never believe this, but my mother-in-law is in intensive care and people are coming from my church to do a healing service in ten minutes.” And at the same instant we spoke together. She said: “Wouldn’t you love to come?” and I said, “I’d love to be part of it, if it’s all right.”
So at 2:00 I was standing at the woman’s bed, in a circle with family members and others, praying for peace and healing for her. And all the time, I was shaky with awe. If I’d come into the hospital in the morning as I’d planned, or even a half an hour later in the afternoon, I would have missed this moment of grace..

The upshot of all this is this:
All we have is our ordinary lives and every once in a while an amazing coincidence. No burning bushes, no miraculous healings—but standing at that bedside that day, it was enough, it was enough

Pentecost 12 August 22, 2009

2009-10-21T12:56:00.002-07:00

Pentecost 12
August 22, 2009

I’ve been edgy all week.
At first I thought it was the weather—in the immortal words of Cole Porter, it’s just been “too darn hot.”
But then I noticed that I’d stopped listening to the news, started ignoring the newspaper. Hmm, I wondered, what’s that about?
Then I realized what’s going on. I’m scared. The health care “debate” has dominated the news and the level of anger and hostility at the town hall meetings has escalated and I’m feeling the threat of violence in the air. Something feels seriously wrong.

I’d like to ignore it and get on with my summer.
But like you in my lifetime I’ve witnessed violence in this country and certain of these incidents changed forever the way I see the world, especially the Vietnam War and the horrific string of assassinations during the 1960’s—John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and others.
September 11th traumatized whole new generations of Americans and undermined their trust that peace and civility will prevail.

What can we Americans Christians do about hostility and violence?
Jesus gives us a clear answer about what we should be doing. In the Sermon on the Mount he says: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” The catechism of the church (in the very back of the BCP) tells us that the basic mission of the church is to make peace: “The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.”
Does that mean that we Christians are called to be wimps? Does God want us to give in and give up our principles and beliefs in order to “keep the peace”?
The writer of the second lesson today certainly doesn’t think so. He tells Christians to suit up (spiritually speaking) like a Roman soldier in full armor complete with the “sword of the Spirit.”
So does that mean, as opposed to being wimps, are Christians supposed to wade into disputes like the Crusaders of old full of self-righteous zeal and the conviction that “God is on our side”?

Nope—neither wimps nor militants. The passage from the Book of Ephesians is clear that the spiritual armor we’re talking about is not ours—not our strength, our “truth,” our righteousness—but God’s, God’s, bestowed upon our powerlessness by God’s grace.
When we try to construct our own armor, to forge our own sword, that’s when we get into trouble. That’s when we’re self-righteous, rather than righteous. When we have faith in our own opinions rather than in the mystery of God’s will. When we fight to the death with the sword of our own self-will.
The passage also says—and this is terribly important— the battle is not against our fellow human beings, our enemies, the bad guys.
No, the battle we’re armed and armored for is a lot scarier than that. It’s against “the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Against, that is, demonic powers, especially those of violence and hatred which can, like the demons in horror movies, take us over and possess us.

How can we become Christ’s peacemakers in a place and time that desperately need them? We need to start small.
First of all—and maybe this is the hardest thing—we’ve got to recognize the hatred and hostility, the rage and wrath we find within ourselves.
I’m slowly learning that if I’m angry a hefty percentage of the time, it’s probably not the other person or people I think I’m angry at that I’m really angry at.
There’s a good chance that the demons are really inside me and not in the other person—resentments from my past, triggering reactions way bigger than they deserve. So I try and remember that wonderful line from the old cartoon “Pogo”: “we have seen the enemy and it is us.” I’m learning that this is a good time to beat a strategic retreat and do a bit of soul-searching and a lot of praying.
Secondly—as Christian peacemakers-in-training we need to look at how we act in the small things, how we are every day with one another in our families or in the church. Can we disagree with someone without hurting or degrading them? Can I admit that I may be wrong and you admit that you may be wrong and can we then stay in that uncomfortable place of disagreement until God’s wisdom and God’s Spirit has had time to work in us?
.
This week I happened to pick up a book on what’s called “the new monasticism,” Christians who choose to live together as communities in the world.
One story has stuck with me: The writer describes two men—one white and one black— who lived and worked together for years in an interracial religious community in the South. They finally admitted to each other and the community that they really didn’t get along very well and the reasons stemmed from race.
They finally went to a counselor. He showed them that they couldn’t make peace when one was always trying to triumph over the other.
The only thing that could help them, they finally realized, was to trust that God’s grace is powerful enough to work through and in them if only they could get their own egos out of the way. One of the men reported, “John [the counselor] taught me what was enough. It is enough to get the love of God into your bones , , , ,. It is enough to care for each other, to forgive each other, and to wash the dishes. The rest of life, he taught me, is details.”

I’m still afraid of the anger seeping through this country right now.
But I know that God’s grace is infinitely stronger than the demonic powers of anger and hostility.
It’s not easy—but each day we can each in our own lives and in our lives together apprentice ourselves to a peace-making God, praying: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” Or, in other words, care for each other, forgive each other, do what needs to be done, and . . yes, wash the dishes.

Pentecost 11 August 16, 2009

2009-10-21T12:56:00.001-07:00

Pentecost 11
August 16, 2009

The last Sunday I preached before my vacation I spoke about Jesus and the feeding of the 5000.
By the following Thursday, preparing a wedding for 175 people felt like feeding 5000. I’d learned something I’d never known before—weddings are all about the food.
From Tuesday before the wedding literally until the wedding bells were sounding, we were slicing and chopping and mixing and baking and frosting.
Of course for a do-it-yourself potluck-style wedding you’re a little closer to the food issues than you might be otherwise.
But no matter who prepares or serves it, for the wedding couple, families and friends eating together comes right up there with the rings in making weddings special. Sharing food is an expression of sweetness, love, and joy, a way to act out generosity and affection. What better way to celebrate two people giving themselves in love to one another!

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is still talking to the same crowd whom he fed with the loaves and fishes. They loved the free food and they think they love him and they’ve followed him back to a synagogue in his home town with one idea in mind: to make him king of Israel so he can keep right on feeding them.
He’s been talking for a while and he suspects they’re not really listening. So he turns to an effective ploy for public speakers—shock.
“Anyone who eats this Bread will live—and forever!” ok. But then the zinger: “The Bread that I present to the world so that it can eat and live is myself, this flesh-and-blood self.”

Whoa! Now they’re paying attention. As one translation says, “At this, the [people] started fighting among themselves: ‘How can this man serve up his flesh for a meal?’”
Jesus knows he on to a good thing, so he keeps pushing it: “Only insofar as you eat and drink flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, do you have life within you.” It gets even weirder: “The one who brings a hearty appetite to this eating and drinking has eternal life . . . My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”
It was shocking to them—especially the mention of “drinking blood” which was forbidden to Jews.
It can be shocking even now.
I’ve mentioned before how a friend brought her two daughters to my ordination. They’d never been to church before. As the bishop said the words you and I probably don’t even hear anymore we’ve heard them so often—”This is my Body” and “This is my Blood.”—they whispered to their mother, “We’re supposed to eat a body?”

When I invite you forward to Communion, I deliberately use the (I hope) slightly shocking words, “to share in the Body and Blood of Christ.”
Because it is a constant temptation to consider sharing in Holy Communion a nice thing to do when it’s convenient.
But Jesus doesn’t want a “nice,” “convenient” relationship with us. In wedding terms, he’s after marriage not just an occasional date.
So he offers himself—himself, his own true whole and holy self to us, to you and to me in Holy Communion.

I’m not going to start an argument about what happens to the bread and wine during the Eucharistic Prayer and Who/What it is exactly that we receive when we come forward to the Communion rail.
I don’t know—nobody does—although there’s a wide range of thoughts about it. But I do claim to know a couple of things from my own experience:
First, Holy Communion feeds real hunger. That’s part of what Jesus was trying to tell the crowd. We hunger physically, yes. We all know what that feels like, although probably few of us here this morning have ever felt the kind of physical hunger women, children, and men experience when they have no idea when they will be able to eat next.
But have you ever felt a hunger for something “more,”? for a life that’s deeper, more meaningful, more grounded in things that really matter? A hunger for what Jesus calls “eternal life”? A hunger for a love that will never desert you?
Those hunger pangs can strike when we’re shopping or watching the Red Sox or getting up and going to work even to a job we love and we suddenly feel empty and say to ourselves, “Isn’t there more to life than this?”

Second, in Holy Communion, Christ gives himself to us to feed that deep hunger. We “become what we eat.”
The Creation story says that God created us, men and women, in God’s own image and likeness. When we spoiled it, when we humans besmirched our godly image by sin, Jesus came to live among us. Jesus became flesh and dwelt among us.
Because he himself was human, Jesus knew from his own experience how weak and easily tempted we are. To become more like Jesus, more like the likeness of God, we humans need something stronger than words.
Jesus’ amazingly creative idea was to offer us the possibility of taking his divine life not just into our heads, not just into our emotions, but into our whole selves, our souls and bodies. And Jesus doesn’t hold back—he gives himself to us without reservations, without boundaries.
When we receive Holy Communion, Jesus promises us, we are eating and drinking Christ’s life. And Christ’s life is the same as God’s life. And more and more, as the sacrament works in us, nourishes us, Christ gives us the power to become what we eat—to become more and more like Christ—more compassionate, more merciful, more patient, more just, more kind.

We seem to have drifted pretty far from a wedding feast.
But I know that one big reason we were all there sharing that marvelous food, was that Hannah and Paul had both felt a deep hunger for a loving companion to walk through their lives with.
And for me, one of the most touching moments at the wedding was when Hannah and Paul fed each other the wedding cake. They were offering to each other without reservation the gift of love.
And when later I invite you to come forward to share in the Body and Blood of Christ that’s what’s on offer here at the altar rail: a full, pure, given-without-reservation gift of Love.

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

2009-07-21T10:36:00.002-07:00

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Doesn’t this sound all too familiar?
You make plans with your spouse or your kids or your best friend you haven’t seen in years. It’s great, you’re just settling in for good conversation or an afternoon of peaceful fun and---------isn’t it inevitable?!—something comes up.
Take, for example, my daughter the actress. Out of the last four auditions she’s had that have led to actual roles, three have occurred when she’s been out of New York, and two of them were when she and her fiancé were up here on vacation. No question: they had to drop everything to rush back to the city.
The last time it happened, her fiancé had a meltdown and accused the universe of conspiring against them. It’s lucky she got the job!

In the Gospel the apostles are aching for Jesus-time. They’ve just returned from their first mission trip out on their own, and they’re bursting with stories about how this healing went and what that demon yelled on his way out, what worked and what didn’t work?
And Jesus wants to hear all the details.
So he invites them to a time apart—a retreat: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”
But—uh oh—people spot their boat and take a shortcut overland and a whole crowd of them is there to greet Jesus and the apostles when they come.
Remember Jesus is human—he’d wanted this time away with his friends as much as they had. Imagine now how his heart must have sunk when he saw the crowd on the shore, voracious for his care.

Yet he doesn’t order them to turn the boat around and head on out for another try farther on down the shore.
Because he’s realized that this is a great teaching moment. After all, these friends and students of his—Peter and Andrew, James and John, and the rest, are “apostles in training.” The word ‘apostle’ is from the Greek. Jesus was preparing his friends and students to be sent out into all the known world.
Jesus as a good teacher sees a way to be present with them and at the same time deepen their sense of what it means to be an apostle.

This may be interesting in a bible-study kind of way. But, you may be asking, what does this have to do with me?.
But consider the end of our Eucharist service. We’re not invited to stay here forever, until the next Eucharist, and so on and so on.
No. In the last prayer we say together, we pray, “Send us out into the world in peace.” And the very last liturgical words are mine: “Let us go forth into the world” and yours, “Thanks be to God.”
So we too are apostles in training. So we too need some basic lessons in apostleship, right along with Peter, James, John, Matthew, and the rest.

The first lesson of apostleship: We’re not living in a controlled environment. We’re living real lives in a real world. Circumstances can change on a dime, expectations get blown out of the water. And being an apostle means dealing with it, rather than yearning for something else. Means understand that this is where you and God have wound up. The places we’re sent are often surprising and often, alas, not at all what we ourselves would choose. And—and this is a wildly unfashionable thing to say—being an apostle often means sacrifice—including the sacrifice of one’s hopes and dreams in the long or short term to the circumstances God puts in front of us.
You may, for example, find yourself grappling with terrible health issues in your family. It is not what you expected, absolutely not what you wanted—but right now it is where you are called to be an apostle, to love and serve God and one another.

Second lesson of apostleship taught by Jesus as the boat heads into shore: Jesus looked at the rabble on the shore with compassion and saw not misfits and undesirables and people one would rather not know, but “sheep without a shepherd.” Being an apostle means getting your heart stretched. Pat L’Abbe and I learned that the first day we walked into the Offenders’ Program and felt our hearts tugged toward men who from the world’s point of view, were absolutely unlovable.

Finally, Jesus takes the apostles to another town, Gennesaret, for lesson #3.
Basically the same thing happens. More crowds, more sick, more “sheep without a shepherd.” So many that people beg just to touch the fringe of Jesus’ cloak.
The third lesson of apostleship lies here: our work is to make the “fringe of Jesus’ garment” available wherever we are.
You and I are called to be Christ-carriers, Christ-bearers. Wherever and whenever we are. It’s not we who console people, or give people new self-respect, or offer God’s care and concern through presence and prayer:
No. What happens is that people can look at us, talk to us, be with us, and through and in that relationship find access to Christ. We can become his healing presence for them, knowing all the time that it’s not we who are doing any of this.

Later, when we pray to be sent forth into the world after the Eucharist, let us say it with all the conviction and humility and trust in God we can muster, remembering the lessons of apostleship Jesus has taught us today:
--opportunities to carry Christ’s healing, loving presence occur in all of our lives, even in (or possibly especially in) those circumstances which surprise us, bushwack us, change all our carefully made plans;
--as apostles we are called to respond to these circumstances with hearts willing to be stretched by Christ’s compassion within us;
--we ask God’s mercy that we may live so that through us others can touch the “fringe of Jesus’ cloak.”

July 12, 2009

2009-07-21T10:36:00.001-07:00

Sixth Sunday of Pentecost
July 12, 2009

Who ever said worship is boring? Today we’re invited to witness unadulterated, boisterous spiritual joy in the person of King David as he dances the Ark of the Covenant into his new capital city of Jerusalem.

Of course we’re not talking about a boat like Noah’s “ark.” The Ark of the Covenant, for those of you who haven’t seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” was a very large chest or trunk. It carried Israel’s greatest treasure, the two stone tablets inscribed with the ten commandments.
Remember that the Israelites at this point in their history were nomads, wandering the desert. So God ordered their craftspeople to build a portable shrine, large enough to hold the tablets, but small enough to be carried moved from place to place.
For nearly 40 years, the Ark with its precious cargo of the ten commandments led the people as they traveled through the desert on their way to the promised land.
Once the Israelites settled into Canaan/Palestine the Ark was placed in a position of honor in one of the main cities.
Many years later, the Philistines invaded Israel. They were eager to get their hands on the Ark because they believed it held the divine power of Yahweh, Israel’s God.
But the Israelites hid it away for 20 years until David defeated the Philistines (remember Goliath?) and was declared King of Israel.
David then took the Ark out of hiding and marched it in ceremonial procession to his new capital city, Jerusalem.

For the people of Israel, the Ark of the Covenant not only held the stone tablets but in some sense was the presence of God among them.
They had good reason for this. The ten commandments confirmed and expressed God’s unfailing care for the chosen people, what in Hebrew is called ‘heset,’ or “steadfast love” because they showed that God cared enough about them to give them rules for living.
So David’s dance that day in Jerusalem expressed pure spiritual joy at the coming of God’s presence into Jerusalem.

Or—maybe not.
There’s that peculiar little scene of Michal, one of David’s wives, observing from the palace window. As everyone else in Jerusalem was partying outside, his wife chose to stay inside and watch the spectacle from there: “Michal, daughter of Saul, looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.”
What’s going on with her? Is she nursing a private grudge? Why can’t she share David’s spiritual fervor? Doesn’t she believe God’s presence is in the Ark of the Covenant?
When she looks out the window and sees David dancing, she doesn’t see joyous spirituality, David ecstatic in the presence of God. She sees a raw (and very effective) display of political power.
Michal is the daughter of the former king, Saul, whom God deposed in favor of David. For Michal, the Ark of the Covenant rolling into Jerusalem cemented David’s claim to the throne. Religious awe?—no way. Political cynicism—that’s all she could feel.

I see Michal as the patron saint of many people today.
People who love spirituality, but distrust religion.
How often have you heard someone say, “I like the teachings of Jesus Christ, but I just can’t bring myself to belong to a church.” And then they may go on to cite, as many recent books have done, sins of the churches over the two millennia since Jesus lived on earth
We all know the scandalous history of Christianity: Catholics murdering Protestants, Protestants murdering Catholics. Executions of so-called witches. Suppression, imprisonment, silencing, or even executions of the scientists of the Renaissance.
Many churches in the United States condoning slavery. Silencing and exclusion of women, people with handicaps, people of differing sexual orientations from worship and certainly from positions of authority. Churches in many nations supporting cruel and repressive regimes.
Even you, even I, may occasionally step back and look at Church from behind a curtain and think, “So what does God have to do with this?” It’s no accident that the fastest growing faith group in the United States right now is “spiritual but not religious.”

This past week and in the week ahead, you might feel a bit like Michal as the drama of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA unfolds.
You might think—all this wrangling, especially about sexuality, it’s just embarrassing.
You might feel like shouting, Church shouldn’t have anything to do with politics or social issues—why don’t we all just worship together? What does all this have to do with God and spirituality?

David’s fervor and Michal’s cynicism both have something to teach us about the reality of church.
Yes, God is present in our worship. God continues to love us with hesed, with steadfast love. Jesus Christ continues to show up in the Eucharist.
But Michal’s clear-eyed appreciation that religion and politics are thoroughly intertwined is also necessary. As soon as you get more than two people gathered together, Christ may be in the midst of them, but so will politics.
In any church, from CHS right up to national and international church bodies, the question is how do we do the necessary politics of the church?
In our vestry recently, we’ve been working hard practicing “spirit-filled listening,” in which we all try to respect the integrity of people we disagree with, and realizing that we individually may not have the truth nailed down. It’s really hard—we all love our own opinions and our own voices, but we’re working at it.
At General Convention this week, the House of Delegates declared an unprecedented one hour pause in Roberts Rules of Order for strangers in pairs to talk to one another about their personal histories around sexuality and spirituality, days before they will all vote on those issues.

A religious organization, a church, is people getting it wrong, struggling over and over to get it at least righter, returning to the well of both personal and communal spirituality, —to what David danced for that long ago day in Jerusalem—God’s unfailing, steadfast love.

July 5th, 2009

2009-07-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

Proper 9
July 5th, 2009

Americans have always sung their faith.
From native American songs, drums, and flutes, through the harmonies of Anglican psalm singing at churches like Old North Church in Boston and Bruton Parish in Virginia, to Roman Catholic Gregorian chant in Spanish Florida and California; to the cries of lament and longings for freedom of African slaves; to the boisterous praise songs of camp meetings and revivals, Hebrew chant and now Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist sacred songs—Americans love to sing their prayers!
Today, mindful of this weekend’s celebration of our country, I want to look at four hymns as lenses to focus on some of the strands that have uniquely formed our spiritual lives as American Christians.

Processional: “The Spacious Firmament on High” Blue hymnal #409.
Not officially an “American” hymn. Joseph Addison was an English poet who never ventured across the Atlantic to the colonies. The poem itself, based on Psalm 19, was published in an English literary newspaper in 1712.
I chose it for this morning because it reveals an important strand of American spirituality in the English colonies and in the first years of kind United States. This strand—we still get this in New England—is a kind of “gentlemanly distance” from God.
Joseph Addison held a point of view very important to Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and other Founding Fathers.
They were “deists”—That means that they believed in God, yes, but not a personal God. In their minds, God was the “great clockmaker,” the creator who had set the world going, but then stepped back and let it work itself out according to laws of nature which were just being discovered by Isaac Newton and others.
This attitude was not un-religious nor un-spiritual. It expresses deep reverence and awe which comes from what one of my professor’s used to call “the size gap” between God and God’s world:
Let’s read aloud together the first verse. As you read the words, try and feel in your imagination the holy awe the writer felt toward the Creator of such a perfectly lawful and orderly uiniverse: . . . .

This “gentlemanly reserve” toward God was quite prevalent in colonial times and in the early days of the United States.
But the 19th century gave rise to two urgent and powerful movements towards a greater intimacy with God.
Gospel: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” LEVAS 175
African slaves, pushed to desperation by captivity, cruelty, disruption of families, had nowhere or no one to turn to beside God. This was the God who had freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and that gave them hope.
But sometimes all they could do was lament: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, Nobody knows but Jesus.”
There’s no size gap here, no, not at all-- no reverent distance,no philosophy or complicated theology—the slave is crying from his or her very bones to the only One who might possibly listen..
Offertory: “In the Garden” LEVAS 69
Meanwhile waves of religious fervor were burning through white communities in the United States during the 19th century in a series of what were called “Great Awakenings.” Women and men sang their hearts out at huge revivals.
The God of the revivals was not at all the distant and disinterested Clockmaker of the Revolutionary War period. On the contrary, God, especially in the person of Jesus, was vividly, emotionally present, saving them right there in the church or tent or open field, healing their bodies and forgiving their sins.
For many individuals the fervor of revivals eventually gave way to a quieter, but maybe even more intimate, sense of God or Jesus as a personal friend. These people felt perfectly comfortable talking with God and confidently asking for help..
“In the Garden,” written in 1912, expresses this radical sense of intimacy. Some of us may love this old hymn. And I suspect that others of us, it’s embarrassing, because it’s so off-the-charts sentimental.
And yet . . . , and yet . . . , isn’t there something gripping in the idea that you and I can walk, like Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection, with Jesus himself beside us? Anywhere? Any time? What if it’s really true that Jesus won’t put up any barriers between us.
I have just read a history of Alcoholics Anonymous which points out that this has been the favorite hymn of many recovered alcoholics over the years Why?. Because only such a sense of intimacy with Jesus/God/their “Higher Power” that allows alcoholics and other addicts to make the leap of faith and surrender their lives to a God who truly cares for them.
Let’s pray this hymn, saying verses one and two with the chorus, and while we’re speaking, imagine that we’re walking with Jesus in a July garden:

Recessional: “America the Beautiful” #719.
Written at the top of Pike’s Peak by a young woman professor from Wellesley College in 1893.
She’d just traveled west by train for the first time. She’s seen the “alabaster city” of Chicago all spruced up for the Columbian Exposition. She’d watched the “amber waves of grain” as the train crossed Kansas on the 4th of July.
On the top of Pike’s Peak, Katherine Lee Bates’s heart burst out in a prayer for her country. I love this hymn: it doesn’t express uncritical admiration nor a jingoistic thanksgiving for a perfect nation. Rather, Bates’ prays that her country’s physical beauty may be matched by moral and ethical beauty.
Each verse concludes with a prayer, one of which is repeated—“America! America! God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea,” and this, which deserves to be prayed before every deliberation of every governmental body in this nation: “America! America! God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost June 21, 2009

2009-07-03T08:41:00.001-07:00

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 21, 2009

It sounds like such a simple thing, the disciples’ saying “yes” to Jesus’ suggestion: “Let us go across to the other side.”
But it was a bigger, riskier “yes” than it appears. Jesus was raising the challenge level of his discipleship training.
First, as professional fishermen, the apostles knew their waterways and this was not an hospitable one. The Sea of Galilee is actually a large freshwater lake like Lake Winnepesaukee. It is shaped like a wind tunnel—12 ½ miles long and 4 to 7 miles wide—and it has a reputation for sudden wild storms which are more likely to kick up at night, just the time they were starting off.
And Jesus was leading them “to the other side,” out of their comfort zone in Jewish Galilee across to the seat of Roman territory. It’s as if Jesus was saying to them: “let’s go touch base with those vicious Roman occupiers who hate us.”

Now there’s nothing wrong with taking risks, is there?
Jesus could have been inviting his disciples on a first century equivalent of an Outward Bound program for guys who were new in the role of disciples.
It could have been a positive adventure out there on the lake, with Jesus like a good teacher instructing them, encouraging them, preparing them for what they’d find on the other side. It could have been an exercise in what people today call “team building.”
But it didn’t happen like that: instead their teacher fell asleep and the mother of all storms blew up.
At first they thought they could handle it themselves. After all, they were fishermen, accustomed to storms. Their teacher Jesus was a carpenter. What help could he possibly be to them anyway?
But the storm got out of control, way out of their control! They could hear the seams of the boat creaking, know from their past experience that they could only take one or two huge waves more before the whole thing was over and the sea sucked them all down into darkness.

Like the disciples, we cannot have a rich, productive, involved life without saying those big “yeses” to invitations that lead into an unknown future.
Some of us have said “yes” to marriage, some to an all-absorbing vocation, some to children . . . knowing that the “yes” carried risks, but confident that we could handle whatever came.
I know from my own experience what fun it is to take off on my own and steer my life straight ahead feeling the rush of my own power!
A little risk, a little challenge—great! I can handle it; I can manage; I’m in control.

When the sailing’s smooth, if I’m Christian, I know Christ is in there somewhere—but honestly, who needs him?
Until things start going very wrong.
It’s so easy to forget about the Christ who promised to abide in the very center of our being until the moment when we realize—O Lord, I’m drowning!, and then we echo the disciples’ cry, “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?” Our cry might be: O Lord, don’t you care that my marriage isn’t working?; O Lord, don’t you care that our kid’s on drugs?; O Lord, don’t you care that the prognosis is unspeakably bad?; O Lord, don’t you care that my husband/wife/son/daughter/mother/father is back in Iraq? O Lord, don’t you care that we’ve worked and worked and worked for justice and nothing’s change?

In the Gospel story, what did Jesus do? He woke up and rebuked the wind, and ordered the sea, “Peace! Be still!” as if the Sea of Galilee was an unruly pet dog. And abruptly the storm stops.
But let’s be honest here. We all know that many times, no matter how hard we pray, marriages break apart, sons or daughters persist using drugs or alcohol, loved ones die.
Christ in our lives is not (usually) a magician. Christ doesn’t (usually) make things all ok. What Christ does, is be there. There right in the boat with us, he takes the rudder from our hands, he invites us to give up the big lie that we are in control of our lives.
Christ stays there with us, powerfully loving us through the most painful, destructive situations. And yes—and this is just about impossible to grasp when you’re in the boat and the waters of pain and loss are crashing over you—Christ does do deeds of power—he gives amazing, impossible gifts of patience and peace and growth and hope and love even in the midst of the tumult.

I see Christ’s loving and powerful presence at death beds. I see Christ’s loving and powerful presence in people wearing themselves out for the sake of others—in, for example, the Untouchable women I met in India who risked their lives every week by gathering clean water for their village from the upper caste wells instead of polluted water from their own.
I see Christ’s loving powerful presence at the Offenders’ Program; I see Christ’s loving powerful presence in your lives as you deal with vicious storms that spring up when you least expect them. Yes, we give up control, or rather, the illusion of control. But what we receive in return is the powerful presence of God.
******
A month or so ago, a woman came up to us at the WalMart table. She held back tears as she told us about a life-threatening illness in her family on top of a heartbreaking marital breakup.
As I groped for some way to respond, she paused, was silent, and then added, as if she were surprised by the realization: “You know, it’s so odd . . . I’ve never felt closer to God.”

Trinity Sunday June 7th, 2009

2009-06-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

Trinity Sunday
June 7th, 2009

In the documentary Into Great Silence, about monks at a very strict monastery in France, one of the young monks decides to fill his time alone (which is a LOT of time alone) by “solving” the mystery of the Trinity.
You know: the Trinity— the Christian doctrine that God is One in Three persons. As one of the ancient creeds of the church puts it, “Unity in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.”
The young monk fills notebook after notebook. Finally, after a long time, he closes the last of the books and puts it aside. His journey has brought him face to face with a mystery, a capital-M Mystery, that simply cannot be solved.
But we’re humans and compelled to try and grasp mystery somehow. So we turn from the left side of the brain to the right: to art and literature and music.
Look at the window above our altar—what’s it about?—Unity in Trinity and Trinity in Unity.
Another artist’s attempt to grasp the Trinity is a famous icon by the Russian artist Andrei Rublov. In it Rublov portrays the Trinity as the three beautiful young men who visited Abraham and Sarah in the Book of Genesis.

A recent attempt is this novel, The Shack. Everybody’s reading it (and that isn’t always a recommendation for a book!).
You may know the story:
Mack’s an ordinary guy who has suffered an extraordinary loss. His little daughter has been murdered. Several years after her death, he receives a mysterious note to return to the place where his daughter was killed. The letter is signed, “Papa,” which is his wife’s name for God.
God, at this point, is not an intellectual or theological issue. He feels utterly abandoned by God, furious at God, not willing to believe any more in God.
But he goes—he can’t help himself. And he does find God.

But NOT God the old white-bearded guy, but three very unexpected personalities:
Here’s Mack’s meeting with God the Creator: “. . . the door flew open, and he was looking directly into the face of a large beaming African-American woman. .. . she crossed the distance between them and engulfed him in her arms, lifting him clear off his feet and spinning him around like a little child all the while she was shouting his name . . . with the ardor of someone seeing a long-lost and deeply-loved relative.” [82]
And here’s the Holy Spirit: “a small distinctively Asian woman . …..he had a difficult time focusing on her; she seemed almost to shimmer in the light and her hair blew in all directions . . . It was almost easier to see her out of the corner of his eye than it was to look at her directly.” [84]
Only Jesus, the Son, is described in familiar way although not the idealized Jesus of much Christian art: “He appeared Middle Eastern, and was dressed like a laborer, complete with tool belt and gloves. . . . His features were pleasant enough, but he was not particularly handsome—not a man who would stick out in a crowd. But his eyes and smile lit up his face and Mack found it difficult to look away.” [84]
As he stood and stared at them, “Mack thought: ‘Was one of these people God? What if they were hallucinations or angels, or God was coming later? . . . Since there were three of them, maybe this was a Trinity sort of thing. But two women and a man and none of them white? Then again, why had he assumed that God would be white? He knew his mind was rambling, so he focused on the one question he most wanted answered. ‘Then,’ Mack struggled to ask, ‘which one of you is God?’ ‘I am,’ said all three in unison.” [87]

It was a “Trinity sort of thing,” Precisely.
The remarkable thing about this book for me was not the images of God as female, etc. Of course God is Spirit and therefore isn’t male or female; black, Asian, or white. Although it is great to break up our stereotypical image of God as looking like a white-bearded Gandolf in the sky.
The remarkable thing for me was how the writer, Wm. Paul Young, brings to life the abstract “doctrine of the Trinity” (three persons in One Godhead—“Unity in Trinity and Trinity in Unity”). How he actually makes the Christian mystery of Unity in Trinity and Trinity and Unity actually matter in Mack’s life.
“Papa” (the African-American woman) begins, “If I were simply One God and only One Person, then you would find yourself in this Creation without something wonderful, without something essential even. . . “ And Mark stumbling, asks, “’we would be without . . . ?” She answers, “Love and relationship. All love and relationship is possible for you only because it already exists within Me, within God myself. I am love” [101]

Think about it: If God is Trinity, then relationship is basic to the universe. Nothing—not even God—exists utterly alone and independent. And it’s not only relationship, it’s a particular kind of relationship—a relationship of love.
The three persons of this Trinity share everything, even the wounds of Jesus: “[Mack’s] eyes followed hers [Papa’s] and for the first time Mack noticed the scars in her wrists, like those he now assumed Jesus also had on his. She allowed him to tenderly touch the scars, outlines of a deep piercing, and he finally looked up again into her eyes. Tears were slowly making their way down her face, little pathways through the flour that dusted her cheeks. ‘Don’t ever think that what my son chose to do didn’t cost us dearly. Love always leaves a significant mark,’ she stated softly and gently. ‘We were there together.’.” [95-96]
Later Mack notices something surprising and says to Jesus, “I love the way you treat each other. It’s certainly not how I expected God to be. . . . I know that you are one and all, and that there are three of you. But you respond with such graciousness to each other. Isn’t one of you more the boss that the other two? I’ve always thought of God the Father as being sort of the boss and Jesus as the one following orders . . . . “ [121]
The persons explain that the Trinity is not a “chain of command” but a “circle of relationship,” a “relationship without any overlay of power. We don’t need power over each other because we are always looking out for the best. [122].
God the Trinity doesn’t want “slaves to my will; I want brothers and sisters who will share life with me.” Mack replies, “And that’s how you want us to love each other, I suppose? I mean between husbands and wives, parents and children. I guess in any relationship?” [146].

The Shack shows beautifully, how, even though we can’t understand it, believing in a Triune can change the way we live our lives.
It can help us realize that like God, we are nothing if we’re not in relationship with others and with God, if we’re not enmeshed in circles of relationship.
And more— the Trinity gives us lenses to critique the relationships we’re in. Are they loving? Are they relationships in which we share one another’s wounds, our joys and sorrows. Do they show mutual respect for one another? Are they characterized by kindness and graciousness toward one another?

The relationship of equals is God’s vision for humanity, because that is the very nature of God. That’s what we should strive for in our own relationships.
It’s hard:. I can hold it for about a minute, until someone threatens my ego, or a bomb kills children, or the State Senate invites slot machines and casinos into my beloved state.
We are fallen away creatures in a fallen away world. But that doesn’t alter the nature of our God. Our God waits and hopes and continues to love us into ways of being together as humans who mirror the exquisite Triune dance of love.

Pentecost Sunday May 31st, 2009

2009-06-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

Pentecost Sunday
May 31st, 2009

In our Confirmation classes for teenagers this year and in years past, here’s one of their favorite exercises:
We stand in a circle, preferably outside. Each person in turn lights a match and as in burns down says whatever comes into their heads about God, Jesus, their faith.
On a windy day outside, you may not have long. It’s amazing what gets blurted out. This year as we stood shivering in a circle in the parking lot up at the CLC, I remember one boy shouting out: “God wants me to make the world better!” before the flame blew out.
The point of the exercise? So that when someone suddenly turns to you and says, “So, why do you believe in God?”, or “Why do you bother to go to church?”, or “What do you Christians believe, anyway?,” you can answer with spontaneity and integrity.
These questions hardly ever arise after you walk out of church fresh from sermon and Communion or as you drive home after a church adult education class.
Nope, in my experience these questions pop up when you least expect them. And since people these days don’t have very long attention spans, you’ve got to whip out some response right then and there. In those situations you don’t usually have a lot of time to compose an answer.
That’s why the match exercise is so helpful. It’s amazing how a “tongue of fire” burning down to your fingers focuses the mind!

The feast of Pentecost—our special feast since we’re the Church of the Holy Spirit—is all about fire.
“Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.”
A tongue: of course that’s a description of the shape of the vision of fire above their heads. But the Holy Spirit knows what She’s doing! Because those “tongue-shaped” flames loosened the apostles’ tongues.
They rushed to the windows and began to shout down the news that had been burning in their hearts for 50 days: “This Jesus we knew and loved has risen from the dead, and we have witnessed it ourselves!”
As if the matches were burning down in their fingers, they couldn’t wait any more. They had to shout out the good news.

Their words sparked answering flames in the strangers in the street who turned up their faces to see what all the fuss was about.
In fact the apostles’ shouts bypassed the listeners’ normal brain circuits and burned right through into their hearts and souls.
The language patterns that divided them, each from another—the diverse languages of Persia and Mesopotamia, Judea and Egypt, Israel and Libya—toppled before the fiery words of these ignorant Galilean fishermen and tax collectors. The Book of Acts quotes the hearers’ wonder: “How is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power!”

God has a flair for the dramatic! And the disciples needed a bit of fire.
Notice that until the Holy Spirit came, Jesus’ friends, men and women, were waiting, isolated in their own safe little community, for whatever Jesus had promised was going to happen.
They prayed together, they told stories of when and where and how Jesus had first looked into their eyes and said, “Come, follow me.”
Each one had a different story of how the presence of God in Jesus Christ had changed their lives—in some cases, like his friend Lazarus, had given them back their lives.
But reveal what God, what Jesus had meant to them to the people outside that house?
No way. Too scary. Look what had happened to Jesus! So they agreed they’d wait until the time was ripe, until they’d practiced more, until they were really ready..
I’ll bet if Jesus’ followers had been left on their own, they would have grown old together in that little house in Jerusalem and never made a peep outside it.
But God had other ideas: One morning tongues of fire licked their heads and the Spirit of God said, “NOW!!”
Because there were just too many other people out there in the scary world outside who needed the fiery words of new life.

The “gift of tongues” on Pentecost means this:
Not the whole foreign language translation-without-dictionaries business, although that’s pretty neat.
But the real gift of tongues happened when Jesus’ friends poured out to other people what his life and death had meant to them, and other people felt a yearning for what Jesus’ life and death could mean to them
Each person who spoke spoke their own truth in the Spirit; each person who heard, felt their own longing for a more meaningful, more abundant, life.

We are living in the age of the Holy Spirit. We are all “Pentecostals”!
And when we speak our truth about our faith to another person, the Holy Spirit speaks through us.
I want to be clear that by “our truth about our faith” I don’t mean doctrines or dogmas. I don’t mean hammering abstract truths into people’s heads.
I mean fire! Our truth about our faith is whatever warms us—sometimes like a gentle fire in the stove on a cool evening, sometimes like a bonfire on the verge of veering out of control.
When you or I speak to someone out of that truth, our truth, they’ll feel the Pentecost fire. If they’re ready—and the readiness is God’s business not ours—an answering spark will spring into flame.

Match, please! [light] “God in Jesus Christ loves me. I am enough. I don’t have to be anything or anyone else”.-----------------Amen.

Ascension Sunday May 24, 2009

2009-05-30T06:17:00.000-07:00

Ascension Sunday
May 24, 2009

Every few years we get a Sunday like this.
By the church calendar today the day we call “Ascension Sunday” and by the national calendar, it’s the Sunday in Memorial Day weekend.
You might think—ah, it’s accidental, just a calendar coincidence. Yet there is something, something important, that ties these two together.

Last Friday afternoon I forgot it was the first day of Memorial Day Weekend and took 93 north from below Concord. Bad idea! You could hardly enter the traffic. Car after car, truck after truck, camper after camper, most loaded to the gills with summer stuff—kids, tubes, tents, bikes, boats, ATVs —you name it.
And what a day it was! Clear, not sweltering but warm enough for a beach barbecue—a day bursting with the promise of summer. Pure fun, yes?
Well, no, not really. Because what gives all those people time to get away for this weekend of summer good times is this nation’s annual honoring of men and women who have died in service to our nation.
So not pure fun: Most of these men and women died young. All left behind people—families, lovers, friends— who lived out the normal spans of their lives pierced by a double-edged set of emotions: grief and pride.
Tomorrow is their day with parades through the center of towns, veterans marching with their hands over their hearts and their minds filled with memories. High school bands marching behind them whose members, unless they have a brother or sister, a mother or father, a boy-or girl-friend in Iraq or Afghanistan—have only the faintest idea of what this is all about.
Memorial Day is a day when poetry comes into its own, because only poetry can begin to weave the mix of feelings together. A day when the simplest gesture is the most meaningful—a family placing a little flag and a bunch of lilacs on a veteran’s grave.

I wonder—maybe one reason the feast of the Ascension gets lost in the great liturgical span between Easter and Pentecost is that like Memorial Day it is emotionally complicated.
Just to remind us what happened, here’s how the Acts of the Apostles tells it:
“When [the disciples] were together for the last time, they asked, ‘Master, are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now? Is this the time?’
“He told them, ‘You don’t get to know the time. Timing is the Father’s business. What you’ll get is the Holy Spirit. And when the Holy Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all over Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world.’
“These were his last words. As they watched, he was taken up and disappeared in a cloud. They stood there, staring into the empty sky. Suddenly two men appeared—in white robes! They said, ‘You Galileans!—why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky? This very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly—and mysteriously—as he left.’”
This is the moment when Jesus’ followers and friends have dreaded. They confronted with the fact that Jesus is really finally gone.
And yet, in the account of the Ascension in the Gospel of Luke, it says, “they returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” Another emotional paradox: sorrow and joy.

In Latin America, there is a custom.
In commemorations of people who have died in the fight for social justice, someone will shout out the name of one of the deceased and the crowd will shout back, “Presente!” “present!” The person may have died, but their inspiration and the difference they have made will live on. Even in their absence, they are vitally present.

This shout of “presente!” is the lesson of both the Feast of the Ascension and Memorial Day: absence can turn into powerful presence.
In all the Memorial Day celebrations around the country tomorrow, the focus will be on this mysterious presence of those who are absent.
Not only in grief—and of course, over years, decades, centuries, personal grief for these deaths disappears—but most especially in the stories of service and acts of heroism. These stories say to us: Look around. They are gone, but their lives and their deaths still matter; this country still stands, we now are here after them, struggling to live out the ideas on which the country was founded.
Likewise, when Jesus’ followers turned their eyes down from the heaven and looked around them, they saw something quite new and totally unexpected:
What they saw was Jesus’ presence all around them, even though his body was utterly and finally gone from the earth.
Jesus’ presence was there in one another—they could gather together and remember what Jesus had said and done.
Jesus’ presence was with them every time they sat at table and took bread and wine, blessed them, and passed them around, remembering Jesus’ words, “This is my body . . . this is my blood . . . that was given for you.”
And Jesus’ presence was with them in their passion to live a completely new way of life of generosity, service, and forgiveness.

I mentioned earlier that perhaps poetry may be the most effective way to express the tangle of emotions that occur when absence becomes presence.
I’ll close with a brilliant example by the American poet Galway Kinnell, in a poem called “Promissory Note”:
If I die before you . . .
then in the moment
before you will see me
become someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting star’s
I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too. . . . .

Easter 4 May 3, 2009

2009-05-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

Easter 4
May 3, 2009
The King of Love My Shepherd Is

In the Gospel according to Mark Jesus goes away in a boat to a quiet place with his disciples. This was to be a break, a much-needed “retreat” from the clamor of the crowd, a time for quiet prayer and reflection. But the crowds get word of it and follow him overland.
Jesus could have asserted his right to a few days off. But he looked at them, and the Gospel says, “he had compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd . . . .”
I don’t know why, but that line always grips my heart.

“Like sheep without a shepherd.”
Many of you know we raised goats for quite awhile. “Goats without a goatherd” doesn’t have the same force, because goats without a goatherd would be just fine. The “queen” goat would gather the herd and troop them off quite happily and efficiently into the woods or into the neighbors’ gardens.
But sheep left alone are—to switch the barnyard simile—like chickens with their heads cut off. They’ll panic, they’ll bolt every which way, even off cliffs
It’s the same for humans, isn’t it? In movies, when King Kong or Godzilla gets loose, the crowd scenes are always great—people running every which way. Unfortunately in real situations—fires, earthquakes, bombings—crowds in panic lose their minds, and push and trample one another in their race to safety.

3. “Like sheep without a shepherd.” The phrase brings up some deep and conflicted longings: on the one hand a desire to be independent, to “run wild” vs. a craving to be cared for, to be guided and directed, to put down my date book and cell phone and lap top and acknowledge that I am not ultimately in control..
Maybe that tension is why the 23rd Psalm is so powerful even today. As a pastor (and—did you know?—the word ‘pastor’ in Latin means “shepherd”) I use it frequently. Except for the Lord’s Prayer, it is the most powerful prayer I know.
At funerals of strangers, at least of a certain age, I know that many of those people gathered in mute sorrow in the funeral home parlor need to say something that touches their deepest selves. Sometimes the funeral director has taken me aside and let me know about conflicts that divide the families or other unhealed sorrows. The people gathered together in that room need to do something, say something together that will join them together, bring down the barriers, at least for a few minutes. What do we say together? The 23rd Psalm.
At our monthly Offenders’ Program Eucharist, we begin with silence, then a hymn, and then our congregation of damaged, socially ostracized men, the lepers of our time, say in unison: “The Lord is my shepherd, I will not want.”
Susan Andrews, a Presbyterian minister, tells a moving story about the pastoral power of the psalm. She writes: “25 years ago, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. was a federal facility with more than 4,000 psychiatric patients, most of the poor and black. As a chaplain intern I was assigned to the cancer ward, where certain death added an extra layer to the human despair. One day I entered an isolation unit to find a wretched shell of a human being—legs and arms chewed up by gangrene, sweat pouring out of a shaking, stinking body. ‘Dear God,’ I thought, ‘what can I possibly say to this man.’
“The answer came intuitively. The words of the 23rd Psalm suddenly welled up within me. As the familiar cadence filled that putrid room, the creature before me changed. He stopped shaking. He looked into my eyes and began to speak the words with me. In that moment, he traveled back home, back into the rooms of a long-lost faith. When this child of [God] died an hour later, he had been welcomed by a loving God who had never left him.”

That family numb with grief and regret, those sex offenders who will never return to freedom, that man dying in the cancer ward of the psychiatric hospital had probably lived his life like a sheep without a shepherd, all open themselves to the grace of God’s transforming love when they breathe these words:
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul.
And: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,
Thou anointest my head with oil,
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Now we’ve got to be aware that there are shepherds and shepherds.
There are, alas, managerial shepherds whose concern is for the bottom line: x number of good fat wooly sheep brought safely through lambing and kept from wolves. The managerial shepherd’s motivation is basically “success.” This sort of shepherd is strong on authority and organizational skills. He/she runs a tight ship. The sheep keep safe, sure, but unfortunately may be tempted to cull the underachievers, the weak, or the misbehavors out of the flock. If you belong to this shepherd’s flock, you probably are a sheep who’s always a little anxious, trying hard to shape up.
The Psalm and the Gospel paint a completely different picture. This shepherd’s passion is to provide for the sheep not just an adequate life, but abundant life! The sheep in the psalm sit down to a meal of oats on a fine tablecloth and lap up clear water from a silver cup while frustrated wolves look on from afar. This is a shepherd who isn’t embarrassed by the weak, the vulnerable, the hungry, the scared in his flock. Instead, this shepherd loves them best!

There two contrasting shepherds portray two very different experiences of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The first can be simplistically described as God as boss. God as boss is the manager, the scorekeeper. The God who keeps performance records on each one of us. A “shape up or ship out” kind of God.
This isn’t the God we meet this morning. The God we meet this morning in the poetry of the psalm and in the person of Jesus?—this God loves each of us extravagantly! This is an outrageous God who cares for each individual precious one of us. Who knows each of us by name—Susan, Paula, Matt, Dan . . . . . Loves us—weak, strong, rich, poor, profound, silly.
This is the image of God as not the boss, but the lover.
Now this is not necessarily the image of God we were raised with! In my tradition, I was not made to feel loved, to feel special in God’s eyes.
But that’s not the truth about God. God is the lover, God is the caring shepherd. As a favorite paraphrase of Psalm 23 expresses it:
The king of love my shepherd is,
Whose goodness faileth never;
I nothing lack if I am his,
And he is mine for every.

Easter 3 April 26th, 2009

2009-05-12T11:42:00.000-07:00

Easter 3
April 26th, 2009

Last week, doing my chaplaincy stint at Speare Hospital, I met an elderly man.
I asked him if he’d like a visit and he said yes. He told me that he had just made a decision for a “Do Not Resuscitate Order” to be put on his chart.
I asked him, since he seemed to want to talk about it, why he had made that decision. He told me his story: Several years ago he was rushed to the hospital with a heart attack. Shortly after he arrived, he “died.”
He “woke up” finally, and he described to me coming slowly aware of the lights in the room and the pain from the paddles, and seeing his son’s face.
But he remembers just as vividly how, before that, he had gone deep into a dark tunnel, feeling only one thing, he told me, “Peace, peace, peace.”
Now he is no longer afraid of death. He knows that he can embrace it as a friend.
I know a middle-aged woman who was poisoned by a toxic mix of chemicals on the job. She drove herself to the hospital. She doesn’t remember getting there, but what she does remember is a sense of flying through a beautiful light, and again, a great sense of peace.
When her husband lay dying of cancer, she was able to calm his fear of death by telling him her story, helping him visualize the joy she was sure lay ahead of him.

When people are around death, going through someone else’s death or one’s own near-death experience, they often bring back gifts to the living.
Jesus brought just such a gift to his disciples out of his own death and the amazing fact of his resurrection. It was the vision of a new human society, based on forgiveness.
After all, the Easter story is a story of forgiveness. The cruelty and malice of Jesus’ death confronted God the Creator with the worst that we humans can do. But God did not wreak vengeance upon us, or turn away from us in disgust.
Instead, God forgave us.

After his resurrection, Jesus appeared in a room full of people in serious need of forgiveness.
First of all, the disciples needed Jesus’ forgiveness. He was not only their teacher, but their friend, and they had totally messed up. They had run away, and in Peter’s case, denied him.
Maybe that was why they were so worried that Jesus might be a ghost. At that time, ghosts had a horror-movie-bad reputation for doing harm to the living. Perhaps Jesus’ “ghost” had come back to punish them!
Peter and Andrew, James, John and the rest knew they deserved Jesus’ anger and condemnation. So they were unprepared for the gift of forgiveness shining through Jesus’ first words to them, “Peace be with you,” or in Hebrew, “Shalom.”
Second, the disciples stood in need of forgiving one another. Can’t you imagine them saying to one another before Jesus’ appearance, “If you hadn’t persuaded me I wouldn’t have run away!,” or “Why didn’t you stop me?”
What’s the first line of defense when you feel lousy about something you’ve done? Blame somebody else for getting you into the mess in the first place. I’m sure there was more than enough blame to go around.
Jesus said, “Hold it. Here’s how you can live and work together from now on. Here’s how you can be my church: Change—work on being more courageous and more faithful, and when your brother or sister hurts you or seems to abandon you, forgive them. Pray for them, keep trying to see them as a beloved child of God and worth your care.”
Third, I’m pretty sure they were having a hard time forgiving themselves.
Imagine what was going through Peter’s mind when Jesus appeared among them: “He told me I’d say I didn’t know him, and I bragged, ‘Never, I’ll never disown you.’ It took, what?, about five hours? As soon as someone asked me, what came out of my mouth—‘Jesus who? I never met the man.’ He might forgive me, but I’ll never forgive myself.”
Forgiving yourself is perhaps the hardest form of forgiveness. I know that I’ve had times when I could not see any goodness in me. That’s the reason I came back to the church after many years. I needed to kneel once a week say the words of the Confession in the Prayer Book and hear someone tell me God forgave me---because there was no way I could forgive myself. Only over time, slowly, slowly, like drips of water wearing away rock, could that forgiveness come.

Christ’s command to his disciples (which includes us!) to forgive and let themselves be forgiven is absolutely countercultural.
We live in a world in which the lust for vengeance passes like DNA from generation to generation among peoples and nations. We live in a litigious society in which someone always has to bear the blame and the blame always carries a price tag. On every level from marriage to international relations, to acknowledge one’s own contribution to a bad situation is a sign of weakness.
And if we dare to mention that as Christians we’re called to a life of forgiveness, someone will come back at us: “Let’s be honest— this idea of mutual forgiveness—it’s fine if we’re indulging in a fantasy about the kingdom of God. But in the short term—otherwise known as our lives— does God really want me to forgive people who have done harm—a negligent or abusive parent, a rapist or pedophile, maybe, or a tyrant like Hitler or Stalin or Idi Amin? Shouldn’t they be brought to justice?”

But Christian forgiveness is not taking everything that happens to us with a sweet smile and a quiet, “Please walk all over me.” Forgiveness in the real world is a lot more muscular than that. Forgiveness means the heavy lifting of looking at a person who has done harm and seeing someone who is still a child of God. It doesn’t ask us to coddle them or set them free from the legal or moral consequences of their actions, but to try, try, try to do the hard work of holding them up in prayer to the justice and mercy of God.
It’s a lifetime of work and struggle, failing and succeeding. But each time we succeed, the world becomes a little different, a little better, a little closer to the vision Jesus brought us back from his death and for which we pray each time we say the Lord’s Prayer: “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.”

Easter Day April 12, 2009

2009-04-15T10:50:00.000-07:00

Easter Day
April 12, 2009

Here we all are, this golden day, celebrating the most glorious of mysteries, Christ’s triumph over death.
It’s a day that’s hard to wrap our heads around. Do we believe in this amazing possibility? Is the resurrection story we just read, the lovely and tender account of Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden historical or symbolic or both? Does it matter? Where are we with our small and ordinary lives in this story?

In the middle of Holy Week, I had an Easter dream.
I was in a big dormitory-like building with some friends. They all had to go off to classes, and as they left the room, each of them put a hand on my head in blessing. Then two of my closest friends said to me, “Why don’t you come and sit in on our class?”
After they’d left, I thought, “why not?” and started off after them.
It was one of those big old buildings—you might remember one like it from high school or college or work—where indistinguishable corridors branch off one after the other. It felt like a maze.
To make it worse, I’d forgotten to ask where the class was meeting.
Finally I spotted a figure at the end of one of the corridors and I scurried toward it, hoping to ask directions. It was a man, a priest, dressed in black with a collar.
When I got close to him I asked what he was doing there, just standing by a window, at the end of a corridor.
He said, “I’m spending time with Jesus.” Whoops!—because I didn’t see any Jesus, real or a statue or a picture or anything.
Then as I came closer I saw that the corridor widened out there to form a tiny open room on the left. Ah hah, I thought, and turned to the wall opposite the priest. But there was nothing there.
Then something on my left caught my eye, on the third wall, opposite the window. There was a portrait of Jesus done in a pale silvery metal. Not a statue, a slightly raised metal sculpture.
The priest smiled and said to me, “He likes to look out of the window.”

“Christ likes to look out of the window.” That’s when I knew it was an Easter dream.
Because on Easter morning Jesus burst out of the tomb. Why?
Because the Christ in my dream can’t bear to be separated from what the world is doing.
Christ sees what is happening. Sees true love blossoming, and babies born. Sees the trials of illness and death.
Right now, sees the pain of people thrown out of work, people who have labored honorably all their lives long.
Sees people scrape to make their rents or mortgages each month.
Sees savings disappear.
Sees economic disaster threaten the poorest and most vulnerable around the world.
On Easter morning he could not bear to be separated from the facts of the world. Not even a cave carved in the rock and blocked in by a boulder was able to hold him in.

In my Easter dream Christ was not where I expected him to be.
I expected him to be centered in a place of honor on the middle wall. I expected him to be the center of attention.
When you walk into a church, your eyes are directed forward, usually toward a cross and the altar. It’s like walking into a throne room or the presidential office—even the furniture arrangement underlines the importance of the queen or the president. They are “front and center.”
. Imagine walking into a church and having to search for the cross or the altar. But in my Easter dream, Christ was off-set. He was ex-centric, which means literally “out of the center.”
That’s what threw Mary Magdalene, wasn’t it? If by some incredible chance Jesus’ prediction had come true and he had risen from the dead, well, Mary might have thought, wouldn’t he be glowing and glorious and center stage, held above the earth by bands of angels singing “Hosannah”?
But Jesus Christ had never taken the place of honor.
Ex-centric throughout his life, most of the time he took back roads, visited obscure villages, took as friends women and men who in everybody else’s eyes were weird, dirty or in bad trouble. Until the very end, he stayed away from Jerusalem, Israel’s absolute center of power.
Jesus was ex-centric even in the triumph of the Resurrection. He revealed himself first not to temple leaders, nor to Peter, the first of his followers, but to a woman, Mary Magdalene. In a place and time when women had little importance, the first word we hear the newly resurrected Christ say is “woman.”

In my Easter dream I first caught a glimpse of the image of Jesus out of the corner of my eye.
That’s how Mary first saw him, wasn’t it, a shadowy, out-of-focus figure glimpsed out of the corner of her eye?
You may come to church each week or just for Christmas and Easter. No matter how often or how rarely you come, I hope you find Christ here.
Yet I suspect that most often you bump into him when you’re not all dressed up on Easter morning! I suspect that most of your close encounters with Christ happen outside of church. You catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of your eye in unexpected acts of kindness that lighten your day. Or in gracious acts of self-sacrifice, large or small. Or in friends who know you all too well and help you be your best self. Or in the mysterious voice that whispers to you when you are strained beyond your power, “Yes, you can go on. Be at peace. I love you.”

Where does Easter glory go, when it’s no longer Easter Day?
It doesn’t go, that’s the mystery. Christ’s Easter glory stays right where it belongs, in the world Christ loves, and watches, and moment by moment saves. We may not see it straight on, but wait! keep looking out of the corner of your eyes for glimpses of our ex-centric Lord leading us down unexpected pathways to a new and resurrected life.

Good Friday April 10, 2009

2009-04-15T10:49:00.000-07:00

Good Friday
April 10, 2009

Good Friday tells an all too human story.
On Wednesday night, some of us prayed the fruits of our meditations on this moment by moment portrayal of Jesus’ suffering.
It was clear from the prayers that we each brought our own lives, our own life experiences, to this exercise. The way of the Cross, the way of pain—that’s deeply understandable to us, because we know what pain is like.
We know what taking up an unbearable burden is like. We know what grief is like, so our hearts ache for Mary; we know what friendship is like, so we cheer for Simon of Cyrene; we know what compassion is like, so we long to be there with Veronica, a piece of torn veil in our hands.
Then, last night, after our commemoration of the Last Supper, we stripped the altar, we covered the gold cross, we even took away the consecrated bread and wine from the aumbry, this little box in the wall. See, it’s empty.
Empty, gone, like the hopes of Jesus’ friends.

But there’s more to Good Friday than the human story. Look at this painting of the second Station, Jesus takes up his cross.
Marcia Santore, the artist, reminds us of another crucial part of the story of Good Friday. Look how, around Jesus’ body, she’s painted flecks of gold.
Because this is not just the all-too-human story repeated every day in Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, of the terror tactics wielded by the state.
The flecks of gold remind us that the story of Good Friday cannot be fully told without talking about God.

The Good Friday story really goes back to the very beginning.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
This Word, of course, is Christ. John’s Gospel goes on: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” That means that when God’s word sounded at the moment of Creation, Christ was in that word. All creation, which God found, “very good,” was made in the image of Christ. How wonderful! What happened?
When I was a little girl, a favorite birthday party game was “Gossip.” You might remember it: one person makes up a sentence and whispers it to the person next to her. That person whispers it to the girl next to her, and on and on round the circle.
The last person gets to say what she heard. Depending on how big the group is, what comes out at the end is a muddled, sometimes barely recognizable, version of the original statement.
In the same way, as creation evolved and especially alas, when humans appeared and human history began, God’s original creative word became distorted, soiled, turned backwards and upside down.
God could have turned away from the mess we made of the world. Christ might have scorned the world created in his image, like a writer who rips up 200 pages of a novel she’s worked on for years because it just isn’t any good.

But no. St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians tells what happened instead: Christ Jesus “though, he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”
The original Greek is perfectly clear—I checked it: Christ was not sent or compelled to come according to some cosmic plan. No, he resolutely, freely emptied himself. He shook off godly privilege and became human, human enough to suffer death on a cross.
And God let him go.
You who are parents, imagine this: watching your beloved child leave home to go into the worst possible danger—to be a human rights worker in the Sudan, an army ranger in Afghanistan, a volunteer “peacemaker” using the fragile barrier of his body to block tanks in Israel/Palestine.
God lets Christ go and Christ feels the loss in his blood and in his bones. Not in John’s Passion Gospel, but in Matthew and Mark’s, Jesus screams into this cosmic void, this total emptiness, his connection with God apparently broken: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

We can’t tell the story of the Crucifixion without realizing that in it, we and God are intertwined.
The human part: Mary his mother, and Mary Magdalen, and John and Joseph of Arimathea catch their beloved Jesus’ body as the soldiers cut him down from the cross. They hold him and then grieve him into the tomb.
The divine part: God catches the dead Son. Catches the Word, the Word of light and life, and holds him, ready for the Resurrection.
But--- When Mary and the others bathe Jesus’ body before his burial, they are washing God’s wounds. And when God reaches out to catch up Christ, God’s arms wind up embracing not only Christ but us—all of humanity, and yes, all of Creation.

What words are left? Good Friday brings us finally to silence, and reverence, and awe.

Lent 5 March 29, 2009

2009-04-05T05:05:00.000-07:00

Lent 5
March 29, 2009

Today Jesus finds himself dealing with perhaps the most subtle temptation he’s ever faced.
The temptation is not obvious. The story seems perfectly straightforward: Some Greeks who’ve arrived in Jerusalem for the Passover ask to see Jesus.
This is good news, isn’t it? It means that Jesus has become a celebrity even among Gentiles and foreigners. “Hey, while you’re in Jerusalem, try and see that Jesus fellow we’re hearing so much about.”
Philip and Andrew go to Jesus and tell him, with some excitement, because this means Jesus’ message and fame are spreading.
Jesus’ response is, on the face of it, bizarre.
He begins talking about seeds and fruit and dying and hating life and loving life and his hour is coming . . . –what in heaven’s name does all this have to do with the good news that a couple of Gentiles, non-Jews, from Greece, want to be introduced?

What’s going on?
I mentioned a temptation. Here it is: Jesus understands that if the Gentiles are coming to him, if his good news is spreading, maybe he won’t need to go through with the persecution and death he knows is coming. Maybe all he needs to do is back off from his message a little bit. Maybe he doesn’t have to challenge the temple authorities with such abandon. Maybe a little compromise—how much difference could that make?
Jesus is tempted. Like any human being, Jesus fears death. And the time is getting closer—it will be a only few more days, he suspects, until the soldiers will seize him and all the diabolical/human forces of evil will spring into action.
“Now my soul is troubled.” That’s as much as he says about it, but that’s enough to reveal that he wasn’t rushing joyfully toward crucifixion. He’s afraid. The arrival of the Greek fans indicates to him a way to get off the hook. This is Jesus’ moment of temptation. It’s so quick—a nanosecond of wanting to say “no—let’s do it another way.”
Jesus feels the excitement, the lure of success in worldly terms, among his disciples—the hope bubbling up that they’ve arrived.
And he dashes that hope, for himself and for them. “Unless a seed falls into the earth and dies,” he says to himself and to them, “it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Seeds. Every seed has a thin coat around it which protects it from taking in oxygen from the air. A seed is for all intents and purposes dead.
But then it lands in soil. It enters into a place of risk, a place of darkness.
Jesus must have felt that he was being cast down into that very same darkness, facing execution. How he must have wanted to be successful, to hold onto his life. But he needed to do as the seed does —go down into risk and uncertainty and death.
But this temptation isn’t just Jesus’. Every Christian, every human, tries to some extent to seek safety rather than new life.
We are seeds who refuse to “die” when we assert that our little selves come before anybody else. We can only break open by dying to the good old American attitude that the purpose of my life is my self fulfillment and “having it all.” We have to die to preoccupation with the big ME and my successes, my failures, and what other people are thinking about me. Die to the idea that I am the center of the universe. Spiritual growth means cracking the tough coating of our self-protectiveness and self-absorption to open up to the real needs of other people.

Inside every seed is an embryo, and in that embryo is a root which goes down into the ground, and a shoot that goes up into the sky. Every embryo has a root and a shoot.
When the dormant seed is planted into the ground and the soil temperature is right, the seed begins to take in water. It begins to expand, the seed coat is broken, embryo begins to mature and produce sugar and protein. Then out come the tiny root and the tiny shoot, and the shoots produce plants which produce more seed which produce more fruit. New life, resurrection.
That’s why Jesus knew he had to go down into death. He trusted that in some unknown way God would burst the seed of his dying forth into new life.
We too need to yield ourselves to be cracked open by the life-giving force of God working within us. It may hurt a little or a lot, but finally it will produce the tiny root, the tiny shoot.

This strange logic of the seed—and the cross—continues today.
Almost exactly 29 years today, Archbishop Oscar Romero preached a sermon in the cathedral in San Salvador. Over his brief time as archbishop, Romero had changed from a careful, conservative official of the church, to an activist mystic in passionate solidarity with the country’s impoverished peasants. He daily put himself at risk.
Romero’s text that morning of the Fifth Sunday of Lent was the same as ours today. Here is part of what he preached: “You have just heard in Christ’s Gospel that one must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and that those who fend off the danger will lose their lives. But whoever out of love for Christ gives themselves to the service of others will live, like the grain of wheat that dies, but only apparently. If it did not die, it would remain alone . . . .Only in dying does it produce the harvest.”
Less than fifteen minutes later, as he prepared the altar for Eucharist, Salvadorean soldiers shot Archbishop Romero dead.
“If it did not die, it would remain alone . . . Only in dying does it produce the harvest.”

Where are your places of darkness, your places of risk?
It wasn’t easy for Jesus, it wasn’t easy for Archbishop Romero, it won’t be easy for each of us to take the leap that propels us down into the “necessary darkness” that leads to the cracking of the shell and the miracles of the little shoots, the little roots, of new life.

Lent 4 March 22nd, 2009

2009-03-28T14:45:00.000-07:00

Lent 4
March 22nd, 2009

For 20 years Will and I toured each winter with the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center doing a show on winter ecology.
My favorite part was at the end, when we’d all stand at the door as the children left, holding strips of fur or pieces of bone for the kids to touch. My job was to hold the live snake who had a feature role in the production. I invited everyone who passed by to touch the snake’s scales to see if they were slimy (they weren’t).
I was amazed how many kids and teachers scooted out in back of the line to avoid me and the snake. No way were they touching that thing!

Fear of snakes lies deep in the human psyche.
The story of humankind’s first sin in the Book of Genesis personifies the voice of temptation as the hiss of a serpent. “Tassssste of the fruit . . . .”
So when the Israelites began to complain of life in the wilderness where God had led them after liberating them from slavery in Egypt, God responded to their constant whining by sending poisonous serpents to harass them.
It seems an appropriate punishment, doesn’t it? A people, miraculously fed with manna in the wilderness, hissing out complaints, being attacked by serpents.

Too often we move quickly to the happy ending, the bronze snake lifted up in the desert, everybody feeling better and temporarily repenting. So let’s pause here a minute in the desert with the snakes hissing at our feet.
The Israelites in the desert rail against Moses: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”
Angry and bitter, they scapegoat poor Moses as if it’s all his fault.
There’s a good description of them and people like them in the second lesson from the Letter to the Ephesians: they are people living in the passions of the flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses.
Now there is nothing wrong with the desires of flesh and senses—after all, God created them— but there is a lot wrong with living as if that is all there is. The Israelites refuse to remember their past, the suffering and slavery. They refuse to appreciate their present even surrounded as they are with God’s constant presence and care. They refuse to have faith in the future God has promised in a land “flowing with milk and honey.”
“Children of wrath,” they’re stuck in their own discomforts and wants, their anger and resentments against God, Moses, and each other.

That lesson from Ephesians reveals that sin is not so much a set of actions we can choose or reject, but a kind of pervasive muck in which we all get stuck, a vicious inheritance in which we all participate, a snake pit of greed and selfishness, hatred and wrath.
Here’s an example: All we have to do is walk out these doors today and go to Hannafords or the diner or café—or coffee hour—and I’m sure somebody will be talking about the AIG bonuses. It’s a colossal economic, political and moral mess. And just about everybody seems to be implicated. Politicians and journalists rail against financial managers for their greed, while at the same time they themselves are seething with wrath and oozing with self-righteousness.
Oops—here’s a good example of what I mean—look at me! I’m seething with wrath and self-righteousness. I’m hissing with anger and whining about how awful others are while conveniently forgetting my own frequent falls into self-righteousness and greed.

We are all “living in sin.”
Usually that’s a quaint expression referring to people living together without benefit of marriage.
But I find “living in sin” a helpful description of much of our lives.
“Living in sin” is living in a nest of vipers, where we poison one another.
I just finished reading Brideshead Revisited by the English writer Evelyn Waugh. Towards the end of the novel, a family incident shocks the main woman character, Julia, into looking, really looking, at her life.
Appalled, she cries out that she is “living in sin: “’Living in sin’ [is] not just doing wrong,” she says. “Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night. . . .”
Julia realizes that “living in sin” poisons and destroys everything, even the God who loves us: “Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot; hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the dark church where only the old charwoman raises the dust and one candle burns; hanging at noon, high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging forever; never the cool sepulcher and the grave cloths spread on the stone slab, never the oil and the spices in the dark cave; always the midday sun and the dice clicking for the seamless coat.”

If that’s all there is to life, “living in sin,” what is the point? If we are all serpents to one another what hope is there?
Lent gives us a gift, a hard gift: the knowledge that as humans we hold two wildly contrary truths together at the same time: Sin is real, it’s all around us and clings to us and we cling to it and it seeks to kill the spark of life within us---that’s the first thing. The second thing is that the God who loves us will do whatever it takes to save us from its venom.
What did Jesus say in the gospel today?: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” And then the clincher—the reason why, the words that make all the difference, that means that the snake pit is not the only life option: What did Jesus say? Why did Jesus come to us? Because “God so loved the world.” God so loved the world.

Let us pray in the words of Guy Tillson’s prayer for the Seventh Station of the Cross:
Holy Lord Jesus, beneath the weight of your cross, you falter again, exhausted and weary from the burden you bear. You took upon yourself our human weakness so that we might enjoy the very holiness of God. In our darkness, may we turn to your light; in our exhaustion, may we find rest in you; in our lack of purpose, reveal your way to us; and, in our failings, may we rise up forgiven. Amen.

Lent 3 March 14, 2009

2009-03-21T13:16:00.000-07:00

Lent 3
March 14, 2009

John 2: 13-22 Jesus overturns the tables in the temple

Who is this Jesus?! During one of the holiest seasons of the Jewish year, Passover, Jesus, a devout Jew, runs amuck in the Temple in Jerusalem, the most sacred place in the world for Jews, the House of God.
“What is he doing?,” people shout, “Stop him!,” as newly freed sacrificial doves wheel around in the air, as overturned tables crash to the floor, as coins roll along the tiles. “Somebody do something!,” they shout as he makes a whip and drives cattle and sheep into the street.
I can see the headlines on the internet news: “Madman Goes on Rampage in Temple; Halts Passover Services for Day.”
It was serious; a very big deal. It was exactly as if, on Easter morning, a stranger ran into this church, poured out the wine onto the floor and tossed the Communion wafers out the window, then ripped the offering envelopes and cash into little bits,. As if a stranger stopped our Easter celebration dead.
After all, this is our sacred place, our sacred time, Christ is present for us here, just as God was present in the Temple and Passover for the Jews.

If I were writing a Gospel, I’d omit this little incident.
It doesn’t make Jesus look good, not at all, especially not in our timid times. We’d rather have a Jesus who’d sit nicely down in the pew and behave.
But this is one of the few stories contained in all four Gospels in the New Testament.
If we assume that an incident contained in all four Gospels is particularly important, the story of Jesus “cleansing” the temple ranks right up there with Jesus’ baptism, the feeding of the 5000, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection.

I want to make something clear: despite what you may have been taught in Sunday School, Jesus did not wreak havoc in the Temple because anything illegal or immoral was going on.
The doves, sheep, and cattle were there because blood sacrifice had been an integral part of the Jewish worship since before Moses.
And there was nothing wrong with money in the Temple. Moneychangers had their little booths there for convenience sake, just as they do in modern airports, to change one kind of currency for another so people could pay the “temple tax.” Jews from foreign lands needed to change their own currency into local coins. And no one could use Greek or Roman coins for the tax because they were printed with the image of the emperor in the form of a god.
No, Jesus that day was following in a long line of Hebrew prophets who’d learned that actions often speak louder than words.
The prophet Isaiah walked naked and barefoot for three years as a sign to Israel not to seek help from anyone but God.
And my personal favorite: the prophet Ezekiel lay on his side for 430 days in the city square, as a symbol of the weakness caused by Israel’s sins.

So then what message was Jesus conveying by turning the temple topsy turvy?
It is puzzling. Why stop worship? Aren’t we called to worship God?
But worship as an end in itself, independent of what’s happening in the world around us, is sin.
Listen to the prophet Isaiah, lashing out at the Jews, especially the well off, for observing a ritual—in this case fasting—while ignoring the plight of people around them:
God speaks through Isaiah’s voice: “Is such the fast I choose . . .to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?”
The answer is a resounding “no!” “Is not this the fast that I choose,” God says, “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them . . .?”
Jesus brought temple worship to a halt for a day to shock people, to shock people then to look around them and see the collusion of the priests and high officials with wicked King Herod, see the temple coffers filled to overflowing while people starved in the countryside around Jerusalem.
Jesus is showing us now by his outrageous act that a church should not be a closed-off place where walls block the world from coming in and block us from seeing the world. The walls of any house of worship must be porous and translucent.

What does that mean for our lives at Church of the Holy Spirit?
It means, for one thing, that bringing food in for the food pantry each Sunday is not just a nice thing or even a good thing to do—it is a sacramental and holy act that breaks down the barrier between world and worship.
Praying for the people of Mabvuku and bringing loose change to put into the jar is not just supporting the Millennium Development Goals. Each time we pray or pay we down the false barrier between worship and world.
Those of you who have taken the names of families to pray for know what I mean by breaking down barriers.
Last week one of you told me that she keeps the card with her family’s name on it folded on her table. Whenever she sits down to eat, she sees the card and remembers to pray that that family in the slums of Zimbabwe will have food to eat today. She told me how that practice had opened her heart and her prayer life in a whole new way.
Another: You’ll see in the insert that we’re going to haul our card table back to WalMart next Saturday morning to offer Free Prayer for anyone who wishes us to pray for themselves or loved ones. Once again, we’re making ourselves step away from the safe walls of the church to plunk ourselves down in the world where many people don’t know the consolation of someone offering to pray for them.

If Jesus walked through our doors today, what would he do? Would he worship with us, smiling as he lifted his voice in the “Holy, holy, holy” to our God? Or would he stride down the center aisle pounding on the pews and reach out his hands to sweep the bread and the wine to the floor? Which? Which? Which?

First Lent March 1, 2008

2009-03-08T09:32:00.000-07:00

First Lent
March 1, 2008

Lent is one of those seasons where you don’t have to guess that something’s going on!
You just have to walk in the church door. The Stations of the Cross so bright and deceptively simple. The baptismal font at the door, open and full of water instead of semi-invisible over in the corner. Bare branches on the altar. The words and music—more solemn, more ancient. A little harder to wrap our lips around.
The Confession, which we don’t say as a body during the Christmas and Epiphany seasons, is back in spades. At the 9:30 service, no music during Communion.
All this is on purpose—the church with her colors, sounds, and rituals is inviting us into the journey of Lent.

Jesus’ Lenten journey started way back at the River Jordan.
When Jesus came up out of the water after being baptized by John the Baptist,“he saw the heavens torn apart and . . . a voice came from heaven saying these incredible words: ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; in you I am well pleased.’”
So what might you expect to happen next? Something pretty great, right? Choirs of angels, an easy life, salvation guaranteed?
Here’s what happened to Jesus,: “Immediately,” Mark’s gospel says, the Spirit drove him into the wilderness. (In the other Gospels, the Spirit “led” him—here the Spirit of God got behind him and pushed!)
One minute he’s the beloved child of God. The next he’s abandoned without food or water in a stripped down landscape of rock and sand.
He’s not quite alone. Wild beasts roam through the desert at night. And day and night, night and day Satan tempts him.

We’ve got to stop and notice something important here: Jesus’ Lenten journey goes in a particular direction. The direction is crucial.
What if Jesus had begun his journey in the desert, fending off Satan, and then on the 41st day emerged and strode triumphantly to the Jordan?
Then, when God called him “Beloved Son,” it would be a reward for his victory over temptation. He’d be like the victorious heroes of Greek myths, crowned by the gods with laurel wreaths.
If that was the direction of our Lenten journey in the Lenten landscape, here’s what we’d have to do: like good Christian soldiers we’d have to put on our armor and do battle with Satan in order to earn God’s love.
I’m afraid many of us think of Lent that way. We try to prove something to God and to ourselves.
Someone just told me of overhearing a pair of church people in an Orthodox church—where they take Lent pretty seriously—at coffee hour on Easter morning. One asked the other how his Lent had gone. “15 pounds,” he answered. “Wow,” the first one said, “I only lost ten. You really had a holy Lent!”

But earning God’s love by resisting temptation is walking the Lenten journey backwards.
Before he faced down Satan in the wilderness, Jesus knew in his blood and in his bones that God loved him. Then and only then was he ready to face temptation. Knowing he was loved made everything else possible.
I had a friend once who was determined to make the best of a bad marriage. For ten years she tried everything she could to make her husband love her. She changed her hair style, she gained weight, she lost weight. She dressed one way, then another way. She read books she didn’t like, she took a job she hated.
For ten years she tried to earn her husband’s love. For ten years she tore herself apart, forgot who she really was—and did it work? No, of course not. And when hard times came, the marriage split apart. It took her years to trust herself again.
But what if her husband had loved her to begin with? What if she had confidence in his love. Then she could have done exactly the same things: played with hair styles, fashions, jobs, she could make mistakes and start all over again—trusting that none of this would change his love for her. When the hard times came, then she could have confidence that he would be there with her and that together they could face them.
And that is human love. How much more confident can we be in God’s love. Like the psalmist we can say, “To you, O Lord, I life up my soul; my God, I put my trust in you.”

Imagine: as you walk out of church today the snow stops in midair and a rip appears in that gray blanket of sky and God says gently to you, to you: “You are my Child, my Beloved; in you I am well pleased.” Wow!
That’s what happens to each of us at our baptism and every time we receive Communion, and every minute of every day, God greets us as beloved children.
And surrounds us with that love, even as we face temptations and hard times every day.

I want to suggest a practice for the week: Begin your Lenten journey where Jesus began. Before you get up in the morning, or before you go to sleep at night, take a little time to hear the voice of God say to you: “You, Paula, Betty, Bill, Russ . . .. , you are my Beloved, my Child. In you I am well pleased.” It will probably feel strange—we’re so used to beating ourselves up before God.
But if we’re to match our Lenten journey to Jesus’, it’s the only place to start.

Ash Wednesday February 25, 2009

2009-03-08T09:31:00.000-07:00

Ash Wednesday
February 25, 2009

Alas--despite my best efforts at motivation, observance of Ash Wednesday is still very much a minority activity at Church of the Holy Spirit.
For many people in the church, it’s just never been part of their tradition. It has a Papist smell to it! And it’s so out there—wouldn’t we feel like hypocrites walking back into work or home dripping ashes from our foreheads?
We New Englanders tend to keep our religion private. “Don’t ask, don’t tell”—and oh dear what if someone asks us explain the ashes. What would we tell?

The ashes, we might answer, are a mark of acknowledgment that we are basically animated dust.
The Hebrew word ‘ad-am’ means just that—soil or dust. We are not gods, we are not angels. Dust walking.
And we might add to anyone who questions us that this once a year, the ashes remind us of what most of us don’t believe, not really: that we are going to die and sooner (with cremation) or later (with burial) we will become “ad-am.” On Ash Wednesday we bear this stark truth physically on our foreheads.

But there’s more to tell, isn’t there? The ashes aren’t just a blob. I inscribe them on you in a particular pattern: the shape of a cross.
A cross—that could be another grim sign. Beyond the fact that we’re all hurtling towards death, now we’re marked with the sign that we’re sinners. Even more depressing.
At this point, the person who asked the question is probably itching to get away.
So what must we quickly tell before he hightails it down the street? That the cross is not so much a sign of the bad news that we’ve sinned against God and one another, as of the good news that God has taken us back. God offers each one of us the gift of reconciliation.
Jesus on the cross didn’t add up the horrific offenses done against him that dreadful first Good Friday.
No. He cried out, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing!”
God does and will forgive. The psalm we all just said together says that over and over: “[God] forgives all your sins and heals all your infirmities.” “The LORD is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness.” And “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us.”

Reconciliation, though, is a two-way street.
Paul writes to the Corinthians in today’s second lesson, “We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”
So God is not the problem in this reconciliation business. We are the problem. The downside of God’s gift to us of free will is that we can choose not to be reconciled back to God.
We have options: We can turn our backs on Christ, and God, and the cross. Or we can accept God’s loving gift of forgiveness. Today an ashen cross will be a sign of your acceptance and mine. A pledge between us and the God of reconciliation.

We wonder each year, “What am I going to do for Lent?”
Will I give something up (old-fashioned, but not a bad idea—sort of like committing to an exercise program)? Or will I add a loving practice to my days: writing letters to old friends, volunteering at Meals for Many, . . .
I know I often simply pick my choice out of the air. What I choose to do or not do for Lent is not particularly connected to where I am with God at the time.
Yet isn’t that just the point and the opportunity of Lent? To begin today and really reflect on the question, “what keeps me right now, at this time in my life, from being reconciled with God?” or “What’s more important to me than God right now?” or, quoting St. Paul in the Letter to the Romans, “what is separating me right now from the love of God?”
The obstacles to reconciliation, right relationship, and mutual love with God aren’t with God! God has forgiven us. Humanity has done its worst, it has murdered God’s Son, God’s own self, and God still forgives. That’s it, that’s the guarantee.
The obstacles to reconciliation, right relationship, and mutual love with God are right here, in our own hearts and minds and bodies; in our ways of life; in what we choose to love more than God.

So the right question for today is not: “What am I going to do for Lent?”
It’s “what can I do over the next 40 days to turn myself around so that I’m faced back to God?”
Maybe it’s tearing away time from some of the way-too-many things most of us do in a day and use that time to “waste time with God,” my favorite definition of prayer. Maybe it’s finally getting up the nerve to admit you’re powerless in the face of food or drink and join Overeaters or Alcoholics Anonymous. Maybe it’s cutting up the credit card and facing shopper withdrawal.

Christ says to us, even in the dark days and nights of Lent: “Don’t be afraid, I am Resurrection and I am Life.”
God’s love and life and saving power are not in question. The problem is with you and with me. As Pogo said in the old cartoon, “We have seen the enemy and it is us.” “Turn around,” Lent calls to us, “turn back into the light of God’s shining face.”

Last Epiphany February 22nd, 2009

2009-03-08T09:28:00.000-07:00

Last Epiphany
February 22nd, 2009
Last Epiphany

This Sunday, the Last Sunday of Epiphany, is a hinge swinging between the two most holy seasons of the church year: Christmas-Epiphany and Lent-Eastertide.
And what are we given?: a story of glory, fear, and transformation

On that mountain Jesus became transfigured, transformed. His “face changed and his clothes became dazzling white.”
Jesus was not changed from one kind of a being into another—like the “transformer” toys of my son’s childhood. The transfigured Jesus revealed something new to the three apostles shell-shocked on the ground in front of him—Jesus’ glory shining around and out of him—the glory of his divinity. Jesus revealed to his friends as much of his holiness as they could bear.
And scared them just about to death.

So much of our faith centers around transformation—or better, transfiguration. Transfiguration occurs when things aren’t just changed, but rather become more truly what they really are. Or, another way of saying it, transfiguration is when heaven and earth are revealed as parts of one whole reality.
Think of what happens when we come together for Eucharist. It’s all about transfiguration
A simple coming together of people on Sunday morning—you and me here at 170 North Main Street in Plymouth—is transfigured into a heavenly feast, a foretaste of heaven, in which we all participate.
The wafers and the tawny port, these ordinary things, are transfigured into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, shared freely with us in an outpouring of his love.
We, this motley crew of us, each of us perfectly ordinary people, are transfigured each time we come together for Eucharist, into very special people, the People of God.
I remind us of that every Sunday when, just before Communion, I lift the broken host and the chalice of wine and say to you: “The gifts of God for the People of God.”
Does it ever strike you how outrageous that is! I am claiming on behalf of all of us, that participating in Eucharist has changed us, has transfigured us into the people God yearns for us to be.

I sometimes think that it’s unfortunate we’re the opposite of Peter, James, and John. We Episcopalians don’t tend to get knocked to the ground.
But maybe we should be! Why aren’t we “slain by the Spirit”—like the Pentecostal folks are—in front of the altar as we all swallow the bread and the wine (how unEpiscopalian that would be!). One of my favorite hymns at the Orthodox monastery I go to begins “Come, let us worship and fall down.” What if, one day, we let ourselves go and just succumbed, right here, to the wonder of it. How embarrassing! How could we hold up our heads at coffee hour!
The writer Annie Dillard gives a great description of our refusal to admit the reality of what we say is happening:
“Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? .. . Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should last us to their pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.” (from Teaching a Stone to Talk)

Crash helmets or not, what do we do next, we transformed people fed with heavenly bread and heavenly wine?
We leave, we get out. “Go forth!,” I shout from the back of the church. “Let’s get out of here! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!” And we gather our coats and scarves and gloves (and at 9:30 a cup of coffee and a bit of cake) and brave the snow and wind.
We probably look pretty ordinary at that point. We’re probably not glowing so’s anyone could notice. Often we don’t feel a bit different.
But in this holy ritual of Eucharist, God is working in us in a place deeper than feeling. It doesn’t really matter whether we feel it or not. As we participate in the Eucharist, is transforming us, transfiguring us, little by little.
When we leave the church, we may think we’re the same as we were when we came in, but that scary glory that shown around and through Christ that day on the mountain?—we carry our own bit of that glory out of the church doors, down the stairs right into the world.

Fifth Sunday in Epiphany February 8, 2009

2009-02-18T05:54:00.000-08:00

Epiphany 5
February 8th, 2009

There’s a danger lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce. A major threat to our mental and spiritual health-----------Shame.
In the catalogue of awful feelings, shame is right up there in the top two or three. I don’t know about you, but for me shame feels like little worms crawling over my skin.
The hard part about shame is that it’s often so vague. Sometimes I know why I feel ashamed, but more often shame descends on me like a cloud and I don’t really know why.
Or I find myself in a situation where I sense something’s wrong, but I don’t know what. And of course I assume whatever it is is my fault and I’m ashamed, even though I’ve no idea what went wrong.
I prefer good healthy guilt, when I know I’ve done something wrong. I can do something about it—I can own up to what I’ve done, and often I’m able to say I’m sorry and do what I can to mend the situation.
Shame, though—what can you do about that? It’s so indefinite, so shadowy, so vague.

Imagine Peter waking up in his own house early in the morning after Jesus had cured the sick and demon-wracked people of Capernaum.
Once Jesus had healed Peter’s mother-in-law of course he became a family hero, and they invited him to spend the night with them.
But at the first crow of the family rooster, Peter opened his eyes and Jesus was gone.
Peter searched the house—probably doesn’t take long—probably it’s only two or three rooms—and outside.
He saw the grass trampled down by last night’s crowds, but no Jesus.
And he feels shame.
Because Jesus was gone—this man who wasn’t like anyone else Peter had ever met.
Jesus, the man who’d looked at Peter as if he was the only person on earth and said, “Come, follow me.”
Peter had fixed it up with his wife and fishing partners and was supposed to leave today with Jesus, traveling who knows where.
But now Jesus was gone.
Suffused with shame, Peter tried to guess why: Maybe Jesus had been watching Peter all that day before and decided he wasn’t up to the job. Maybe Jesus regretted calling him to follow him. Maybe, basically, he just wasn’t good enough.

That’s the trouble with shame—it shrinks us into ourselves.
When I’m feeling ashamed I assume it’s obvious to everybody around me that I’ve got some awful flaw, even though I don’t know quite what it is.
At its worst, shame can spiral us down into real depression where we can’t do anything at all. We stop trying, stop hoping, isolate ourselves, even from people who love us.

In the world we live in, one of the most powerful sources of shame is failure because Americans worship success!
For the last three or four months in the Styles and Business sections of the NY Times I’ve been reading articles about how hard the current economic free fall is for high-power executives who suddenly find themselves out of work.
For years they’ve been “Masters of the Universe,” with seemingly infinite power, money, and perks. Now they sit at home, unemployed, wondering what hit them.
Whether or not some of them feel (sometimes appropriate!) guilt about things they may have done to get all that power and money, the articles describe in vivid detail the shame they feel at being out of a job. Sometimes they get dressed up and go out in the mornings so that the neighbors won’t guess that they really have no where to go. They’re terrified others will see them as they see themselves—as failures.

Alas, that sort of shame deriving from a sense of failure can haunt church members and church communities as well.
If we’ve come here from elsewhere, we’ve probably brought with us our vision of a “successful church”: What is a successful church? A full time priest—maybe more than one!, big Sunday School, active youth group, variety of education programs, big choir, a hefty endowment as a financial cushion . . . .
When that vision (even though maybe only semi-conscious) gets laid over the reality of the church one is actually in, shame can creep in. We can feel like failures.

But that denies the deepest truest thing about the church—that Christ has called every one of us here, just as truly as he called Peter.
When Peter finally cast off the shadow of shame and depression and went looking for the Master who had called him, he’d stopped thinking in terms of success or failure.
He remembered how Jesus had looked at him that day on the beach—scruffy, smelling of fish and sweat, not all that bright—and still chose him.
Jesus could work through him, just as he was.
And in the same way. God works with what we have, what we are, both as individuals and a church.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t grow and change and submit to God’s transforming love. Of course not. A friend of mine has a tag at the bottom of all his e-mails which says “God loves me just as I am, and God loves me too much to let me stay that way!”
But God doesn’t do shame. God doesn’t worship “success.” God just calls us to follow him and that should be quite enough for us.
Through God’s eyes, you are enough, each one of you; I am enough; we are enough. That’s all we need to know . . . . the rest is up to God.

Fourth Epiphany February 1st, 2009

2009-02-03T08:50:00.000-08:00

Fourth Epiphany
February 1st, 2009
1 Corinthians 8:1-13

“To our dear brother in Christ, Paul,” the first letter began.
“We need your help. Some people among us say that it is wrong for us Christians to eat meat that has been sacrificed to one of the pagan idols. We know that those idols are just stories represented by bits of plaster and cloth. We know that our God is the one and true God, and that Christ is of God. So we know there is no harm in eating meat killed in the name of a mere myth. We buy the meat from our neighbors, and sometimes go to one of the big temple suppers. What’s the problem as long as we know that we worship the one true God? We’ve told the others that, but they still think eating the meat is wrong. How can we explain it to them?---------------Yours in Christ Jesus”—followed by a list of familiar names.
The second letter began in the same way, “To our dear brother in Christ, Paul,” but then went on:
“You have always been kind to us and helped us grow in our faith. We are confused. The leaders say that we can eat sacrificed meat, no problem, but we don’t feel good about it. It feels like we are still worshiping those other gods by eating sacred meat. And sometime when we eat the meat, our neighbors or wives or husbands who still worship the gods say, “I thought you worshiped the Christian God. What are you doing eating meat sacrificed to Zeus? Are you only a Christian when you’re not hungry?!” Shouldn’t we Christians act differently from other people?------------Yours in Christ Jesus,” followed by another list of names, including a few Paul didn’t know—they must have been newish members..

St Paul thought and prayed and sent back one letter to the whole community.

He’s saying to the first group: “You’re theologically right on. There is only one true God, so the meat is just meat. It’s not sacred meat, because the gods it’s sacrificed to don’t exist.
“But guess what? You’ve grabbed onto the wrong fork in this argument! Because all your sophisticated knowledge—and your pride in it—are causing suffering to some of your brothers and sisters, newer in the faith, maybe holding onto this dangerous faith by their fingertips.
“What’s most important here? Food or faith? Claiming your right to get what you want or giving it up for the sake of your brothers and sisters in Christ?”
“Remember this little maxim: ‘Knowledge puffs up; love builds up.’”

This is an exotic dispute, hard for us to get into our 21st century heads. But the same sorts of controversies arise today.
For example, the other day a new member asked about our alcohol policy.
I explained the history—that the diocese a few years ago asked that all the parishes consider the issue of alcohol at church functions.
Of course in our discussion at Church of the Holy Spirit the issue of insurance came up early and often. We know that ours is a litigious society and we need to prudently consider the possibility of being sued if someone who’s been drinking gets in an accident on the way home.. But we found out that our insurance has good coverage for that sort of thing. So, no problem, right?
Well . . . . no. We went on to ask ourselves whether as a church we are called to care in a special way for those who might be harmed by the availability of alcohol. In the end we decided to sacrifice our freedom to drink alcohol on church property for the sake of our brothers and sisters for whom alcohol is poison.
We opted, just as St. Paul advised the Corinthians, to “build up” each other in love.

President Obama has frequently mentioned the idea of a “beloved community,” a community joined together by mutual concern, respect, and love. It is a deeply Christian concept.
Yet it’s so easy for us church members to forget that we’re in this Christianity business not primarily for what each of us personally gets out of it, but for how we can build up and strengthen the whole body of Christ, the truly beloved community.
This week I’ve been thinking hard about something that happened last week at the Annual Meeting. I heard—and I confess I participated in—quite a lot of criticism of “the diocese.” Finally a hand went up at the back of the room and new member of the church said quietly: “But aren’t we the diocese?”
She was absolutely right. Her statement certainly pricked my conscience. The diocese is not a back room cabal out to get us. The diocese is us and all the other parishes and missions and Episcopal schools—all of us, a bigger realization of the Body of Christ. And our responsibility toward it?—to build it up in love.
And what about others around us? What about the people outside our church whom God loves as much as God loves us? We reach out to the world around us—to Salem Children’s Village, to local people in financial distress, to the Offenders’ Program and the Mabvuku project in Zimbabwe which is just beginning-------not as just a nice thing to do if we have some extra money, not because we’re going to get back something concrete from them—but because we’re simply not a church if we don’t imitate our Christ in his life of giving himself to others, especially to those suffering and in need. To build them up, to help them become more whole, through our loving actions, no strings attached.

“. . . love builds up.”
Another way to say it is: “Stretch!” The “I” needs to be stretched out more and more, whether it’s each of our individual selves or our little church.
If it feels like a sacrifice, fine. Look what Jesus sacrificed for love of our poor little selves—his own body and his own blood!
Another name for “sacrifice” is “generosity.” God’s generosity has given us so much: our lives, God’s own self!
I recently found a little prayer that I use each day to remind me to “stretch!” It’s simple: “May I, O Giver of Life, live as graciously and generously to others as you have lived toward me.” It works just as well as a prayer for our lives together as Church of the Holy Spirit: “May we, O Giver of Life, live as graciously and generously to others as you have lived toward us. . . . --------Amen.”

Third Epiphany, January 25th, 2009

2009-01-31T11:04:00.000-08:00

Third Epiphany
January 25th, 2009

Poor Jonah!
He’s come down in song and story as the guy in the Hebrew Scriptures who was swallowed by the whale.
Do you remember why Jonah was swallowed by the whale?
It’s pretty simple: “Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah, son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’ But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board.”
Not a good move. On the way to Tarshish, God gave Jonah a little time out—in the smelly belly of a whale.

To give Jonah credit, Nineveh was a tough assignment.
It lay far off to the northeast of Israel in what is now the northern part of Iraq.
It was a huge city full of people who had never heard of Israel’s God (in fact had probably never heard of Israel). Jonah could only reach it by trekking across miles of barren salt flats.
Not a plum job. . . .
. . . . . Ah, but Tarshish, Tarshish . . .
A far-off land across the sea, so far-off that it had taken on the glow of legend. It was a land of riches and easy life, a Shangri-La. When King Solomon sent off ships to Tarshish,, people said, they sailed back laden with gold, silver, ivory, monkeys, and peacocks.
Jonah succumbs to a completely understandable temptation. He wants to be the prophet for fantasyland Tarshish, not all-too-real Ninevah.

Nineveh--------Tarshish—which would you choose?
Hot dusty city or Mediterranean beaches?
Daily struggle or streets paved with gold?
Risk of failure vs. guarantee of success?
And the bottom line----reality vs. fantasy?

A priest friend of mine recently had to make a Jonah decision.
He’s in a small rural parish contending with the usual problems of not enough money, too few members. This year things have gotten a bit tense, especially about money.
Online he found a job listing for a church in another diocese. The membership is about the same size as his present church, but they have—get this!—a two million dollar endowment.
Because of that the church can pay a full-time rector and music director, choir section leaders, a full-time custodian, etc., etc.
My friend’s foot poised to skip up the gangplank for a sea voyage to Fantasyland. But then, luckily, he perused the Parish Profile more closely.
Between the lines he read that members don’t reach out to the neighborhood or the large and troubled city surrounding them. They’re nicely settled into their own comfy nest, thank you very much.
And they weren’t particularly interested in some other things. Working together, for example— Why bother when you can pay a professional to do anything you need done? Why bother with stewardship, giving one’s own back to the Source of all gifts, when the church has everything it needs?
With a little sigh, my friend changed his mind and headed back to Nineveh,.

And what’s is so wrong with Nineveh after all?
Sure. it isn’t perfect—it’s a little gritty, a little stressful, a lot of hard work, but it has some great things going for it.
Look what happened when Jonah began his preaching tour through the city. After only one day, the people repented.
They changed their ways! They weren’t so stuck in their old ways of doing things that they couldn’t hear a life-changing challenge from a stranger’s God.
The second thing great about Nineveh: the people all worked together. Regular folks, king—they all did what they needed to do to save their city.
The third thing great about Nineveh?—God cherished it. That’s why God sent Jonah there in the first place.

Today is our Annual Meeting. We’ll take stock of the place God has called us to—this Church of the Holy Spirit.
During the meeting, I’d like us to remain firmly in Nineveh mode. I mean this in three senses: First, let us look as clearly and honestly as we can at our real situation. What’s going on with us? Where are the growing, lively areas and which are the places that are looking a bit wilted? No fantasy, just the honest truth as well as we can tell it.
Second, let us openly discuss where we might need to make changes in the way we do things.
And third, let’s figure out how we can help each other do what needs to be done. How can we get our way-too-hardworking Jr. Warden more help? How can we support and expand the choir? Do you like to sing?—try it out! How can we more fully support the life of the diocese? Can something exciting and new come out of the reduction in the rector’s hours? With God’s help could it inspire every person in the congregation to figure out what God is calling them to do in this place?

In Nineveh mode, most of all, let us trust that God cherishes us. Cherishes us.
Listen to this. At the end of the story, Jonah is still in a sulk. God says to him, “And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals.”
As we gather in the Undercroft, God will be saying, “And should I not be concerned about the Church of the Holy Spirit, that great little church, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty persons . . . ?”

ED NOTE: to respond to the sermon, please click on the [really little] Comment button below.

Christmas Eve 2008 Hungry Love

2009-01-23T16:15:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve 2008
Hungry Love

There’s a Russian icon, a portrait of Mary and Jesus—maybe you’ve seen it. It’s called “The Virgin of Loving Kindness.”
Mary is holding Jesus in her arms. He is pressed against her shoulder. Her hands hold him firmly. Mary’s cheek rests on his cheek. Her face is—indescribable. Glowing, tender, amazed—all these.
One morning, passing by the icon, I saw something I’d never noticed before:
In this image, little Jesus is not passive. His little hands are gripping Mary’s robe tight and he is pushing his cheek hard against hers.

What a picture of God this gives us!
We tend to think of God as far removed from the turmoil and simple joys of ordinary human life. God’s just out there somewhere.
If we dare at all to come closer to the Divine Presence we can find ourselves overwhelmed by what a professor of mine called “the size gap.” God is so big and we are so small. God is so—out there, and we’re so—here. God is so perfect and we are so often such a mess. What sort of communication can exist between God and us?
Often we just give up. Why bother?
But Christmas tells us a completely different story. God came to us as a baby. A regular baby who grew in Mary’s womb for nine months. A regular baby delivered by Mary and Joseph alone, or maybe by a couple of midwives a frantic Joseph was able to scare up at the last minute in a strange town. A regular baby lying not in a crib but a food trough for animals, tucked into sweet-smelling hay.
A baby whom Mary could not resist picking up, a baby who gripped her clothes, stared into her eyes in that uncanny way of newborns, and pressed hard into her.

This is a God hungry to love us. Not a distant God, but one who presses into us with exuberant, unembarrassed yearning.
Yikes! This is maybe too much! Maybe the size gap between me and God is fine. This “God leaning into us” feels too close, too messy, yes—too intimate.
There are times when we definitely don’t want to be interrupted by a God longing to be close to us.
But that’s the God we’re shown tonight, Christmas night. A God of hungry love.

The idea of God yearning for us is a shining if slender cord through the Jewish and Christian tradition:
Jewish mysticism has a lovely image of the divine glory or presence, the Shekkinah, wandering the earth as a homeless beggar, searching for souls who will recognize her.
Jesus when he grows up will tell stories about God’s yearning for us:
Remember the story about the shepherd who leaves ninety-nine good sheep behind to go out in the wilderness to search for the one sheep who has strayed?
Or the story of a housewife who loses a coin and turns her house topsy turvy until she finds it—and then spends the coin on a party to celebrate finding it!
And of course the story of the Prodigal Son, whose father lingers at the window for months, years, longing longing for his wayward son to come to his senses and come home.
The Victorian poet Francis Thompson wrote a poem about God’s yearning for us, “The Hound of Heaven.” It begins:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him . . . .

But at the end of the poem the one who has spent years running away from his pursuer hears these words:
“Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”
The poet asks: “Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?”
And God’s voice replies: “Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!”
God’s longing has pursued and won.

Hmm—these are some pretty undignified images of God!
An irresponsible shepherd, an improvident housewife, a father obsessed with his wayward son, a bloodhound—and most of all, a baby snuggling in his mother’s arms. But God doesn’t seem to care about dignity!.
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has said it well: “God . . does not care in the least if his love makes him look as if he is dependent on us, as if he needs us: that is our problem, not his.”

The only problem is that God’s longing for us, God’s “hungry love” for each one of us, will not leave us untouched.
Like any new baby this Baby Jesus Christ will turn our lives upside down.
God in the person of Christ will press into us and point, point us to things and people we may well not want to see. “Look, look,” his point will say, “Over there—those people living in cars on freezing winter nights. Over there, neighbors who can’t afford oil to heat their house. Over there—victims of warfare and terror.” And he’ll then stay right there with us as we begin to change our lives.

Here then is the Christmas message: Let God love you. Let God’s loving presence lean into you. Let God’s compassionate presence turn you in love toward others. Let God’s intimate presence assure you that you will never be alone.