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.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Pentecost May 23, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Easter 7 May 16, 2010
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 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
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.
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
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?”
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
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.”
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.”
Monday, May 10, 2010
Easter 2, Year C April 11, 2007
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!
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Lent 2 February 28th, 2010 Should we always forgive?
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
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
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Lent I February 21, 2010 “Forgiveness at the Heart of Lent”
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.
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
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.”
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.”
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Epiphany 5 February 7, 2010
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
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
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Rector’s Report Annual Meeting
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.
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.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Epiphany II January 17, 2010
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.
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
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.
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?”
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.
“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
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.”
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.”
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