PoetPriest

In my house

2011-08-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

In my house
mice and fireflies
get along.

By Kobayashi Issa
(1763 - 1828)
English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto

My Mother's Zinnias

2011-08-17T08:31:00.000-07:00

Standing quietly by the fence,
you smile your wondrous smile.
I am speechless, and my senses are filled
by the sounds of your beautiful song,
beginningless and endless.
I bow deeply to you.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Happy Birthday Mom!
poem by Thich Nhat Hanh, title by me, inspired by my mother's wonder at her zinnias on this her birthday.

Is it true?

2011-08-10T20:54:00.000-07:00

Is it true you
know each bird
that flies and falls,
each backward facing
hallux and frontward
facing toe, each layered
feather on each wing?

This very child,
her gameness gone,
her sweet cheer,
her beak closed not
on seeds, but death –
this very one,
if it's true,
you see and know.

And each and every
newborn's fuzz,
each graying hair,
each sprouting beard,
each rosebud offered,
each and every
offering made –
you see and know?

Is it true you see and
hear each bullet fired,
each vow torn, each victim
and each burn, each
dance, each note, each silent
tear, the sound of every smile?
Then tell me ‘cause
I need to know
how true is it – as I’ve
been told, that
even more than this,
you love and that
eternally?

Linda McConnell

2011-08-09T20:41:00.000-07:00

Somalis starve.
Stocks plunge.
Slight sparrows
at dawn
insistently sing.

Loss cannot be thought

2011-08-08T17:35:00.000-07:00

Loss cannot be thought. It is, quite simply, fallen into
as a hiker in Yosemite might. Loss cannot be thought.
It pours over your head and puddles and rises up past
your calves and groin and breast and stops short
of your mouth and nose, or not.

Too morbid?

Then it is like the sunshine bathing the leggy dandelions and the red
geraniums now already receding into the shade of the house.
It is like the distant highway sounds,carried into the bedroom
on the breeze. One has no say about any of this.

Loss is fallen into. It cannot be thought and it is not personal.
It does not depend upon your agreement or your disagreement.
It does not depend on you. It is independent.
Loss knows it's own way and easily has it's own way and
the river knows and the dandelions and geraniums know
and the packets of sound waves and the breezes know
what I am going to tell you now.

Submit. Submit.

@Linda McConnell

Where did the Sermons Go?

2011-08-08T17:32:00.000-07:00

Linda's Sermons can now be found at: http://goodshepherdcorral.org/category/sermon/

Please visit this site for poetry and prose.

Neither Heaven Nor Hell

2011-07-25T21:34:00.000-07:00

I grew up outside the Episcopal Church – outside the Book of Common Prayer – outside a three year lectionary cycle – outside the church calendar with it's seasons and colors. I knew nothing about the Season after Pentecost, for instance, and that green was the associated color. The idea that there would be formally written prayers for virtually any situation imaginable, was unimaginable.

We made up our prayers – out of our own hearts, out of our own experiences, and out of our own courage and conviction. Instead of Prayers of the People, we prayed our “Joys and Concerns” out loud and spontaneously. That made for some rather simple prayers – but they were, for the most part, deeply heartfelt. They were also, often – too often – centered on family, friends and self. And it's true - our Heavenly Father wants us to tell him what is on our heart and our mind, and to pray deeply and fervently for those we love.

Belonging to a “free” church is a heritage I treasure – But perhaps because of that background, I am even more conscious of the treasury of the Book of Common Prayer, and the lectionary and colors and all the rest that goes along with being a “liturgical” church – because each of those things takes us beyond our personal joys and sorrows and plunks us into the wider sphere of the grand diversity of biblical witness, the depth of church tradition, the heritage of the saints who have lived faithfully in a variety of circumstances, and in the world around us.

The structured format of the prayers of the people causes us to lift our eyes up from only personal needs to also look into the eyes of hungry children around the world. We are compelled by the structure of the prayers themselves to look outward to the needs of creation, to the decimation of species and to political and social needs – to continue begging of God that our leaders would be inclined towards the ways of justice and compassion, rather than self-centered interest.

But the truth is, whether our prayers are inward and silent, or out loud and informal, or out loud and formal – they are nothing but clanging brass if our hearts are not turned in the direction of love and if the Holy Spirit is not present – praying with us and through us and for us. It is an illusion to believe that the powerfulness of our words, or the beauty of our phrasing or the poetry of our position before God can weave any spell that would make God bend his ear in our direction and do as we have asked. God does indeed care – more than you can imagine – and God provides – in ways you cannot fathom. But you cannot command his caring and provision, whether your prayer is homemade or formal. What you can do is ask for a discerning heart that wants what he wills and trusts in his ultimate goodness and never failing love.

This is what Paul was pointing towards - this discerning heart that wants what God wills and trusts in God's goodness and love. He was convinced that all things work together for good for those that love God – not because he’d had a bad time and then things got better – but because he saw everything that happened through the lens of the cross and resurrection of Jesus - this trust that Jesus had towards his Father even as he shouldered the cross down the stone streets of Jerusalem. Paul lived through eight attempts on his life, countless beatings and being jailed, hunger, loneliness, betrayal, being shipwrecked. He was eventually martyred in Rome. So – he is not saying that if you love God enough, with enough fervor, and if you pray just right – everything is going to work out hunky dory.

It may seem odd – but I find that comforting – because it reflects reality. And as I get older, I find that I want truth more than anything else – I find myself more and more attuned to what is authentic and what is not, what is real and what is not. Children are like that as well, I’ve noticed. So I like that Paul tells the truth – sin brings death, following Christ can be difficult, suffering is real – And I like that his vision is very deep and thoroughly grounded in the death and resurrection of Jesus – because it leads to this other truth that Paul is adamant about - this truth that has been tested and lived out by so many saints and believers through the ages - that there is nothing – no dire circumstance, no hardship, no illness, no loneliness, no bad choice, no personal disappointment, no bad business deal, no boss, no public failure, no dark dream, no anxiety, no economic meltdown, no crazy congress, no power on heaven or on earth – that can ever separate us from the love of God through Jesus Christ.

It is easy enough for this truth to get obscured and lost amidst the daily ups and downs of life. It’s easy to forget that God is unequivocally for us, especially when outward appearances don’t easily reflect that depth of divine love. The parables are helpful to restore our vision. Because Jesus tell us that the presence of God’s kingdom is like a tiny mustard seed – almost imperceptible, found in what might seem like insignificant gestures of kindness and goodness, in fragile beginnings of understanding and compassion – in unlikely places of hope. We tend to look for the big and the obvious. But Jesus tells us that the presence of God’s kingdom is more like the 2 tablespoons of yeast that leavens an entire loaf of bread. You must pay attention or you will miss it.

Paradoxically, God’s reign is also large enough and perfect enough to contain the wheat and the weeds, the good and the bad, your prayers and mine, handmade and formal - all are undergirded and empowered and held in the hands of his perfect, unconditional, utterly trustworthy love.

Photo of Dominus Flevit Franciscan church, Mt. of Olives, Jerusalem, by author

Blackberry Bliss

2011-07-15T21:25:00.001-07:00

Ever been to Jamba Juice? My favorite is Blackberry Bliss. And there's all kinds of add-ons – protein powder, vitamins – I usually get one - it's free! - and it makes me think my drink is healthier.

Now, I’m going to make a really awful comparison – so please don’t boo at me too much – but - Jesus is not protein powder – He’s not an add-on to an already full life. He’s the Blackberry Bliss itself.

Because the biggest thing about Jesus is Resurrection. The biggest thing about Jesus is what God can do - The biggest thing about Jesus is that there is nothing that sin can do to us or through us or with us that God cannot redeem and raise up to new life. There is no barrier to new life in the Spirit – and by that I mean, and Paul means, new life through and through – in your body, in your mind, in your spirit, in your soul. God can, and does – all the time - create something out of nothing - create in you and in gatherings of believers, an entirely new order of being. At the baptismal font, an Ontologically new order of being is created – grafted into the eternal vine that is Christ, and indwelt by the Holy Spirit, that never leaves, regardless of what life brings.

This is happening now. It’s happening to you and to me and it’s happening in the world around us. The Lord of Life is free and on the move – and there is no power in hell or on earth, or above the earth or below the earth, or in the halls of the greatest powers of the nations or the multi-nationals or the militaries or the police states or at the heart of gang violence or in war plagued places, where the Son of Man, the Lord of Life, is not raised up by the Eternal and Everlasting and Almighty Power of Life and Love. God claimed Jesus as his own Son and there is nothing that can undo that and no power that can sever that connection and flow of energy and life.

And you and I belong to that same Source. That same Eternal and Everlasting and Almighty Power. The biggest thing about Jesus is Resurrection – and it’s the biggest thing about you and me as well. We are Resurrected and Resurrecting people.

We do not belong to the powers of death and sin – sin being that orientation of mind and life towards self over and above all others, preservation of self over everyone else. Sin destroys community and it eats up soul spirit. And it is a fact of life. You cannot escape it because it is woven into you – there is no moral judgment about that – it just is – it just is as surely as your feet are below your head. When I say there is no judgment about that, I mean that there is no God pointing his finger at you because of it. You are born into it – you cannot help it.

Let me tell you a story about this...

When my daughter was five, she was invited to a birthday party. She knew about birthdays and she was very excited. When her daddy picked her up, she got into the car and burst out crying. When he asked her what happened, she said, between sobs, that there were lots of presents – but none of them were for her. We explained that the presents were for the birthday girl and that when it was her birthday again, she would be the one getting presents. She said, “I don’t want that other girl to get presents. I want all the presents.”

We learn, of course, that it isn’t nice to want all or most of the presents – and that we need to share. But deep down – when we’re not getting presents and other people are – there is that little voice in us all that refuses to believe – believe in the sense of trusting- that we are one body in Christ – and that if you get something good – it is just as good as if I got something good. That when Jesus said to love others as yourself – he surely meant others as yourself – that we are that fundamentally related. This desire to consume more than we need and almost always at someone else’s expense is built into us – until we enter a new way of being – a new order of being.

And that new order of being that we are born into through the action of the Holy Spirit in us – it changes our orientation – it changes our mindset – it changes who we are from the inside out and from the outside in.

We begin to see differently. Not all at once of course …. We still live in a world that sees things as separate and some people as lesser than and others as greater than but gradually we notice that we are more and more content with whatever our lives have brought to us, and more and more at peace with our bodies and our neighbors and our spouses and our lives. More and more at peace.

As we are working through this letter to the Romans, I have to say - it's really growing on me. This letter is a practical working out of the resurrected life in a community of real people who are beginning to come apart over matters of race and class and gender –just like we find ourselves in our own culture. This letter is about the practical working out of what it means to be a forgiven, healed, renewed, restored, resurrected people who belong to God and who are “in” Christ – and our reading today begins with this astonishing amazing truth about this new order of being –

There is, Now, in Christ, No Condemnation. Take that in..... No condemnation for those in Christ....

Yes – you want all the presents - or at least more of the presents. Yes – you lied on your taxes. Yes – you cheated your brother when you were older and were supposed to be taking care of him. Yes – you don’t know what you think about Jesus, and you doubt his resurrection. Yes – you took the shortcut the wrong way down a one way street.

But you can turn yourself in, and feel the full relief of it – you can know intimacy with God again. Even though there most likely are consequences - there is no condemnation - no secret burden that needs to be carried. No torment from which you cannot be free, no corner of guilt or shame that needs to remain in the shadows, sucking away at your energy and your joy.

Now if you can delve down into your mind and into your soul – and find no shade of guilt or shame that you’ve covered over and hoped would just disappear eventually – you are truly an Enlightened Being or just terribly unconscious – but for most of us –well – the news that there is No Condemnation – well, it knocks me over.

It’s more than astounding, really. It is terribly, terribly freeing – and that may be, in fact, why we prefer to run back to imposing rules and breaking rules – because it is a terrifying gift to be really and truly free. It is a huge responsibility. I mean, now what! What are you going to do with this freedom? This awesome freedom that is yours, in Christ.

Mary Oliver asks the question this way – "tell me, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" This one wild and precious life that has been given to you by God, redeemed for you by Jesus – and the central truth about this precious life of unbounded freedom is that the Holy Spirit dwells in you – abides in you. So you don’t have to retreat into fear about making mistakes or not making the perfect choices – God has already forgiven you – you are already free – and you can go down a different road, or continue on the course you are on – either way, and always, you have the Holy Spirit of God within you and within this community to guide you and to listen to you and to love you – eternally.

When you came in - you were given two pieces of paper. One is there to write some hindrance, some burden, some condemnation that you have secreted away, that is in like a thorn in your heart – and destructive to your joy - write it down – and if you’re brave enough to claim your freedom in Christ, you can throw it away in this trash can. During the Confession, during the Absolution – or during the Peace that follows – you can throw it away. There is Now NO Condemnation in Christ – that is the truth - it can be your truth.

The second piece of paper is to imagine what you might do with your one wild and precious life – with your Freedom in Christ . That paper is to keep – put it in your pocket or in your purse and bring it out from time to time – to remind yourself that the biggest thing about you is resurrection and freedom.

And all of this is in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver - one of my favorite poems!
Romans 8: 1 - 11

Commentary on the Human Condition via St. Paul

2011-07-06T16:52:00.001-07:00

If there is a policeman here - I am sorry that you are going to hear this - but I have broken the law – and even when it was pointed out to me, I have continued, on occasion, to do so.

I drive to church very early on Sunday mornings. There is no one else on the road – or barely anyone else, and I have gotten into the bad habit of doing one of those slow rolling stops at one corner. Now the truth is, for a long time, I was not conscious of this. But one day, a friend was with me – and she pointed out to me that I had in fact, not come to a complete and total stop.

Well then, it became a problem. Before my friend pointed out my law breaking nature – I was perfectly at peace on my drive to church. But after she pointed out to me the inexactness of my stop – it became a contested spot on the road. Internal arguments erupted:

My “ought to”: The sign says “STOP” not “SLOW ROLL”
My “want to”: In the two years I’ve been driving here, I have never seen anyone at this corner, ever. No one will get hurt, and I will not get into trouble for this.
My “ought to”: And your point is….?
My “want to”: It wastes gas to come to a complete stop and then step on the pedal again.
My “ought to”: OK, that’s a good argument – but the Law still says “STOP.” *

Not to spoil your view of me - but even living in the grace of Christ, in the reign of God’s kingdom - I don’t always do what is right, I don’t always do what the better part of me wants to do, I often end up doing the very things the larger part of me doesn’t want to do. Anyone with me?

We are, after all, children of Adam and Eve... “There’s an abundance of ripe, juicy, delicious, tasty, inviting fruits all through the garden just for you, I will walk and talk with you every day, you will delight in each other, and you will talk with the animals,” God said, “There’s just one tree that’s not good for you, so don’t touch it.”

Even if you’d never heard the story before, you could guess exactly what was going to happen! Because they did exactly like you or I do - they became obsessed and zeroed in on the one thing that was off limits.

Here is Augustine from the 17th century:

“There was a pear tree near our vineyard, he writes, laden with fruit. One stormy night, we rascally youths set out to rob it and carry our spoils away. We took off a huge load of pears – not to feast upon ourselves, but to throw to the pigs, though we ate just enough to have the pleasure of this forbidden fruit. They were nice pears, but it was not the pears that I coveted because I had plenty better ones at home. I picked them simply in order to do it …. The desire to steal was awakened by the prohibition against stealing. “ *

Sound similar to any of our shoplifting starlets – awash in money and fame? It is certainly not for the junk jewelry they lift, but because there is something about a boundary that is so sorely tempting.

Whether we live in luxury or not – the truth is, it’s not easy to change our nature. We are fortunate in that there are many more resources available to us than Paul had – resources that are beneficial and helpful – psychotherapy, behavior modification, interventions, medicine and drugs, self-help books that sell because they help, a wide array of spiritual practices from all around the world, we have Oprah! – but the truth of the matter remains: trying harder to follow the rules, whatever those rules might be, rarely produces genuine goodness, deep transformation, real peace of mind.

What can reliably produce transformative change is Grace –– letting your guard down and taking in God Love; Blood of Jesus Love; the "I know exactly who you are, everything you have done and not done and everything you have ever thought and every boundary you’ve ever crossed or wanted to cross, I know your weaknesses and your strengths, and your sadness and your grief and your joy and your brokenness – and I love you and I will always catch you in my arms" love - receiving that kind of love transforms us and puts us on the road to re-patterning our lives.

....puts us on the road …. Even Amazing Grace of God Love doesn’t automatically - abracadabra shazamm! – make all temptation go away, or make it easy to be good and to do good and to love and serve in kindness and compassion.

It's not automatic that our lives become more integrated and whole – but thanks be to God, we are on the way – being re-patterned by grace so that gradually there are fewer divisions between what we want to do and what we ought to do and more peace of mind and heart because our walk and our talk are more and more closely aligned. And of course, there are still many of those times when we completely lose it and fail miserably.

But here’s the secret at the heart of the Cross. God still claims you, no matter what.

When I was deeply, deeply distressed over becoming a single parent through divorce, one of the persistent thoughts I had to do battle with was the thought that I no longer really had a place in God’s household – that divorce put me outside the circle – especially the circle of church. So while I continued to go to church, I felt foreign – and at the same time, I tried very hard to hide that sense of alienation. I remember like it was yesterday pushing my youngest on the swing, and hearing Jesus say, “Didn’t I come exactly for the people outside the circle? Isn’t that who I loved to spend time with? You are as much in God’s household now as you ever were.” That was the beginning of a real transformation for me in terms of how I related to church and to other people – because I got it really straight in my heart that God claimed me when I was baptized and that nothing could happen to me that would ever lessen that. That is true for me, and it is true for you.

And here’s one more secret at the heart of the Cross – and it has to do with the hardest word in the English language. Can you guess what that it? It’s a tiny word with two letters – No. The Holy No. No, I am not going to stop loving you even when what you are doing is wrong. No, I don’t need to save gas by rolling that stop sign, I could go 55 miles an hour and save even more gas! No, I don’t need to feel less than or act less then because of my gender or sexual orientation or race or class or income or work status or how many Facebook friends I have. No, I’m not going to buy that because I don’t need it and I don’t LOVE it – it’s on sale and it’s fine, but no. Some of the finest cuisine has developed because of limits - as has music and many other artistic forms. Boundaries and limits turn out to be necessary to creativity!

So - No is a very useful and powerful word – and whether God says it, or the Law says it, or you say it, it has transformative power – and I commend it to you – and both saying it and hearing it is made all the more easier knowing that we stand in the solid and trustworthy grip of God’s eternal grace.

Resources:
* In the Grip of Grace, Max Lucado, 1996, Thomas Nelson, Inc
The Courage to Create, Rollo May, 1975, W. Norton & Company
Frugal Confessions - Frugal Living
"No", David Lose, Working Preacher

For The Rev. Christy Laborda and St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, Sebastopol

2011-07-02T12:12:00.000-07:00

A couple disclaimers - I was not Christy’s first choice for offering the homily at her installation. But others couldn’t do it – and the advantage of having another priest in your family is that you can back each other up! Actually, I was delighted that she asked me – thrilled in fact. But then I realized I actually needed to offer something more than testimonies as to how wonderful she is! The other disclaimer – her fiancé is my son – so Christy and I are friends and colleagues and come September we will be related to one another.

The truth is, she and I are already related to one another – in the same way that you and I are related to one another and it is the deepest relationship of all, because it exists eternally in God through the Body of Christ. This is the profound mystery of the Church; that above and beyond human welfare, human likes and dislikes, human attractions and alienations, we draw our life from the common bloodstream that is Christ’s. We have many faces, many races, many personality types, many anxieties and dysfunctions, we like each other, we don’t like each other, some of us drive Prius’s and some of us have no clean drinking water – but in Christ, we are one Body and we given this new common life for one purpose – and that is to Love – to love God and to love one another and to serve the world God loves so dearly.

Is the church particularly good at this - Loving and Serving? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But the truth is, the church, you and I are not the subject of the verb Love. God is. God is the subject of our sentences and our lives. God is the one who loves and who woos and who calls and who engages us and who gifts us with this unique way of life – this life whose purpose and whose life source is one and the same – that is, Love.

Of course, I’m not speaking about warm fuzzy feelings – although that happens more often than you might think when the music is good – as I hear it is! - and the worship has integrity. So, I’m guessing that warm, fuzzy feelings happen fairly often here at St. Stephen’s – as things feel right, things click, and the place feels safe, like a place where you can be who you are and know that you are accepted. I’m guessing that you have already wrapped Christy up in the good arms of this parish, and that you know, already, that she carries you in her heart and in her prayers.

She thinks of you – a lot. I know this. I know she loves you – and besides being young and attractive and intelligent and sunny – she has a heart that is trustworthy, because it is a heart that has long been given to Christ.

I also know she is lucky - mostly because she is organized and she thinks things through. When Christy and Kai were packing for Hawaii, a trip she had won through a Bishop’s raffle, she and I went to REI because she wanted a cold carry case the right size for carrying sushi on a hiking excursion she’d planned for one of their vacation days! Right then, I knew she was perfect for my son – and God knows, the Body of Christ can use such detailed strategic thinking!

I know she wonders about the future of the church – about how to bring the good news of God’s compassion and love to an almost wholly secular culture, one that often sees no real need for the Christian God. I know that she struggles with how to message the Gospel for people in their 20’s and 30’s - she thinks about this, she reads about this, she consults with friends and colleagues who are also trying to figure this out. In other words, she brings her whole self to the church – her frustrations, her longings, her dreams, her hopes, her labor and her heart.

Still, even with all of her gifts and abilities, I’m guessing that it felt slightly risky to call Christy to be your Rector. She does not have years of experience – although the experience she does have would take years out of anyone! She has dealt with many difficulties, with aplomb and grace and humility. But the Spirit led, and you listened, and you made a courageous and visionary choice in calling this young woman to lead you into the challenges of tomorrow.

So my hope and charge is that all of you join her at the cutting edge where she lives - between culture and church and that, along with her, you commit your labor and your heart and your resources to continuing to courageously follow the Spirit in moving God’s dream forward into a future that none of you can predict and for which none of you can adequately prepare.

But take heart! You are the Baptized Body of Christ here in this place, and each of you has a God-gifted function that is essential to the working out of God’s purposes for St. Stephen’s at this moment in time. It is tempting of course, to think of the person in the collar and the ones who are most visible to be most important – but from apostolic times forward it has been the church’s witness that there is no one gift that is more essential or more perfect or more valuable to God and to Christ’s Body than any other gift.

This is another of the profound mysteries of the Church and it is one of the distinguishing marks of a Christian gathering – our functions make some of us more visible and give some of us greater authority, but for the mission of the church – which is to Love and to Serve – for this mission to be fulfilled – all must continue growing into the gifts and callings God has given them. Doing that means being ok with some awkwardness as you learn new ways of doing things together, new ways of reaching out, new ways of telling the old, old story of Jesus and His Love.

So, at this inauguration of a new phase of ministry for all of you – a ministry that now embraces Christy as your pastor, priest and leader – I want to direct myself to Christy for a minute.

You cannot possibly do this on your own. I know that seems obvious, but it is amazing how quickly this simple truth can get lost amidst the dozens of balls that you juggle every day. Your life that is hidden in Christ is the single most valuable resource you have to offer – and it must be protected and fed and trusted to be enough.

That means deciding what is essential to your ministry and what is not essential – and learning to be ok with not doing what is not essential. That is harder than it sounds – but doing this one thing – deciding on the essentials and putting those first and foremost will keep your spirit lively and vivacious, because you will be continuously transformed and renewed by the mind of Christ – you will be a green tree planted by streams of living water.

May this be so, now and long into the future.
With all my love. Amen.

2011-06-19T22:09:00.001-07:00

The weaving of peace by thine
Peace around thy soul entwine
Peace of the Father flowing free
Peace of the Son sitting over thee
Peace of the Spirit for thee and me
Peace of the one
Peace of the Three
A weaving of peace be upon thee

Around thee twine the Three
The One the Trinity
The Father bind his love
The Son tie his salvation
The Spirit wrap his power
Make you a new creation
Around thee twine the Three
The encircling of the Trinity.

(A Weaving Pattern, by David Adam)

Good Questions

2011-05-21T11:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, eight of us from Good Shepherd gathered with Bishop Mary and about a hundred people from around the Diocese to talk with Diana Butler Bass, a historian and sociologist, about religion and spirituality and culture.

The underlying story of everything we talked about what change.

Have you noticed that things in the world are changing? Fast? Will the Arab Spring lapse into Winter or blossom into Summer? Hamas and Fatah have formed a reconciled Palestinian Party and Egypt says it’s going to open the Gaza border, all of which changes things dramatically for Israel as well as for the United States.

I’ve hosted a 34 year old Korean high school science teacher this past week – and learned a bit about education in South Korea. Youth get to school 40 minutes before class in order to study foreign language, class time is a full 8 hours, and then everyone, including teachers, studies, at school, until 10 p.m., at which point, school buses take everyone home. Six days a week. I don’t have to spell out what this means for future American competitiveness.

Did you know that in 2008 1 out of every 10 couples that got married, met online? In 2011, 1 out of every 5 couples have met online. Journalists have no idea what to do, where the future of print lies. After Katrina and 9/11 and ongoing wars and the Wall Street meltdown and on and on….it is growing more and more difficult to turn on the news each morning.

This is all to say out loud, something that we all know in our bones. We are in the midst of epic cultural and economic and political upheaval and disillusionment and change – and faith communities are just as much affected by that as every other institution. People under 30 who believe in God, much less attend church, is at an historical low. The overall decline in people who say they are religious has happened at an astounding rate of change. Every institutional faith community is experiencing declining cultural importance and participation – now most especially the conservative evangelical churches that were, just a short time ago, experiencing explosive growth.

There are a couple of exceptions: Mormons - which I'm not going to deal with; and small communities of people gathering together, sometimes under denominational sponsorship, and sometimes not – communities of people who are more focused on their spiritual formation and growth then they are on institutional maintenance and order. While they would usually describe themselves as both spiritual and religious, they emphasize the spiritual – and by spiritual I mean experience, imagination, trust, relationship.

The questions these people are asking – the questions that drive their growth have to do with belief, behavior and belonging – but in a very different way than in the past.

In the past - the question of what you believed was answered by pointing to creeds and dogmas. Here’s what we believe – read it and sign it. At one point in my life, I began receiving instruction to become Roman Catholic – but when it came to reading and signing – I was very sure that I could not do that. While I could not have articulated the problem at the time – I understand now that the problem had to do with the whole gestalt – I was hungry for trust worthy meaningful relationship and a community rooted in beauty and in tradition. I was not in need of more concepts and dogmas. And I am not uncommon in this. For most people in our world today, the question of belief has much more to do with personal experience, with what someone you trust has told you they’ve experienced, with the stories you’ve heard from sources that you hold in esteem – in other words, our beliefs have much more to do with relationship and experience and trust, than with concepts and doctrines.

The question of behavior has undergone similar change. In the past, once you’d signed on to what you believed, you knew what rules to follow. Christianity, like other religions, is still very much associated, in the popular mind, with moral do’s and don’ts. With rules and regulations. You want to have a drink after work? Change from Baptist to Episcopalian. Both of which come with their own set of behavioral rules. But I’m guessing that you are like most people – in that what you hunger for is not more policing in what is right and what is wrong. What we hunger for is connecting our experience of the divine, of goodness and of beauty, with what we actually practice in the world. With how we live. Telling me over and over that it is right to use my cloth bags rather than plastic bags doesn’t really motivate me – though it is true and I acknowledge that it is how I should behave. What is far more motivating is to have love for animals and the ocean and the earth strengthened – to be in a community that prays for the right use of resources and sings about love for the earth and it’s creator, and talks about intentional practices that heal the earth and humanity – So The question is not so much “How do I behave?” but “What do I do with my life?” What do I do when I learn that plastic is harming the earth? What do I do when I learn that 7/10’s of the world’s population goes to bed hungry at night? The faith communities that are growing pay attention to this kind of context.

And finally, the question of belonging. Ever ask the question, Who am I? A very common question, right? And ultimately, incredibly isolating. We each have our own history that we could recite – family, geography, education, religion. We still ask and answer this question – who are you? But it is not very satisfying. The question of belonging that has much more juice – more potential – more significance – is the question “whose am I?” It’s a baptismal question – You are Christ’s own forever - and it’s a tribal question – We belong to the one who leads us beside still waters and restores our soul and leads us in pathways of justice and guides us through suffering and death and invites us to sit in the presence of enemies without fear or shame. We belong to the One who provides us with the food of compassion and the shelter of eternal love. We belong to the Shepherding God, the one in whom we are brothers and sisters with all of creation and by whom we see the face of Jesus in one another and in the poorest of the poor. The question “Who am I” can lead to anxiety – the question “Whose am I” can lead to freedom and to peace.

So what does all this have to do with the gospel?

Our reading from Acts is a description of this kind of community – I know – we all get a little scared when we read about the communism of this description of the early church in Acts. Clearly, this was not the path the church followed – it’s a utopian vision that was either idealized in this description, or did not work. Either way, we do not need to get hung up on the particular details of combining resources and giving out as people have need – whether this attracts you or scares you or both.

What is central to this passage is that an ordinary, common group of people had an extraordinary experience. In a common life, they gave expression to that experience and calling and became a very uncommon people. They became people who were more interested in service than status, more interested in opportunities than problems, more interested in preference than potential.” AND– their beliefs were based in their experience of the Living Jesus, their answer to “what do we do with our lives” was answered with intentional practices– they studied the apostle’s teachings and scriptures, they prayed, they enjoyed the fellowship of one another’s company, and they broke bread together – in the sacraments and by eating together, and they knew to whom they belonged – they belonged to a relational community in communion with God. A community that operated in the power of God’s Spirit, who understood themselves as united in purpose and identity – not a dispersed collection of individual churchgoers.

I’m guessing that if you look back on your experiences at Good Shepherd that fed you the most – it would have to do with one or more of these things – the joy of belonging to a community that loves one another; practices that made an impact on you – small group study, a party or hike or eating together; prayers and worship, – and that these experiences contribute to your believing.

I’m thinking that we are and can be one of these thriving small communities gathered around the basics, doing God’s work in God’s way, enjoying God’s blessing. As we make our way ever deeper into the 21st century, and change happening at a pace far more rapid than our human hearts and brains can manage to keep up with, we can trust this ancient path laid out for us in the tradition of the early church and we can ask God to make 301 Corral de Tierra a place where some of the questions of our postmodern world are being asked and answered.

Glorious Christ

2011-05-06T08:11:00.000-07:00

Glorious Christ,
you whose divine influence is active at the very heart of matter,
and at the dazzling centre where the innumerable fibres of the multiple meet:
you whose power is as implacable as the world and as warm as life,
you whose forehead is of the whiteness of snow,
whose eyes are of fire, and whose feet are brighter than molten gold;
you whose hands imprison the stars;
you are the first and the last, the living and the dead and the risen again;
it is to you to whom our being cries out a desire as vast as the universe:
In truth you are our Lord and our God! Amen.

—Teilhard de Chardin, The Mass on the World

Already Wondering - the 2nd Sunday of Easter

2011-05-01T16:58:00.000-07:00

Many of you believe whole-heartedly in prayer, as I do. There are also some here this morning who have given up on it after praying for months and years for the sake of a loved one, to no apparent effect. Either way, I want you to know that you're in the right place.

Some of you believe in physical resurrection, as I do, others of you believe in only a spiritual resurrection, but there may be some here this morning who do not believe in an after-life at all. Whatever you believe, I want you to know that you're in the right place.

The truth is, we are uncomfortable with doubt, but when we pretend it doesn’t exist, and when we hide it from each other, we lose out – we lose our ability to be real and we lose our ability to be a healing presence in the world. We don't gain anything by pretending total confidence. As Voltaire said in the 18th century, “doubt is not a pleasant state of mind, but certainty is absurd."

Truthfully, total confidence is not what faith is about. Faith is not so much about believing a certain set of propositions – a list that we can check off – virgin birth, yes. Star in the sky, yes. Walk on water, yes. I happen to believe these things mostly because I find them beautiful – but I know lots of very faithful Christians who don’t believe them at all. A checklist of beliefs is not what make us who we are.

Honest relationship is what makes us a people alive in God’s Spirit.

When we say the Nicene Creed together - to outsiders and maybe to you - it may sound like a set of propositions. You may, in fact, believe every one of these things but that is not the important thing about the Creed. The essential reason this is in our liturgy, week after week, is that it puts us in relationship - in communion - with people around the world now and across time – and we value this relationship above all else. Credere – what we translate as "I believe" - is much more about our heart – it’s about where we put our trust and the weight of our being. Our religion is not so much about believing certain things as it is about what St. Peter calls "a living hope" – a living relationship with the Lord of Life and with each other. Like all relationships, it takes being present and available when we feel close to God and when we do not, when we are in love with God and when we are not, when we totally believe – and when we do not.

One of the books I keep on my shelf for the title as much as for the content – is called “May I Hate God?” and the Catholic author’s answer is "yes – hating is as much a part of relationship as is loving." When we are deeply disappointed or hurt or feeling abandoned, our love can temporarily turn to hate – but if we continue in relationship, it does not harden there, or remain in that state. It’s only when we refuse to engage, when we don't care, when we refuse to reveal the true state of our heart that we can get stuck and gradually find our love grown cold and our inner life increasingly dead.

The author of this slim little book points to the Psalms as one place among many in the Bible where people reveal the true state of their doubts about God’s loving intentions, their experiences of his abandonment, their laments and their sorrows and yes, even their angers, at their experiences of God’s absence and neglect. And lo and behold, those psalms almost always turn somewhere in the middle or towards the end into praise – because the very act of honesty, the very act of authentic revelation of what is really happening with your heart gives the Holy Spirit room to act and sufficient space to provide refreshment.

In Jesus’ resurrected body, his essential qualities remained. His kindness and compassion were entirely intact. He breathed peace and forgiveness and completely allowed for the very human need to touch and to see for themselves – in other words, through betrayal and abandonment and death and loss, Jesus continued in relationship. And his friends did as well - through their own fears and disappointments and disillusionments, they continued to meet with each other, and to be available for Jesus to come and find them. And out of the gift of that relationship, the gift of that commitment, new life was born, the Holy Spirit was breathed into them, and they were sent out to preach peace and to practice forgiveness.

Do you need to forgive God for not keeping you or your loved ones entirely safe and protected, or for not saving us from ourselves in this oh so broken world? Do you need to forgive your children for not being who you wanted them to be? Do you need to forgive yourself for not being honest with yourself, for not siding with yourself, for anything at all? We are a people whose gift to the world is relationship, peace and forgiveness. And that starts in here, at home, with those around us, and spreads out from there.

I invite you to place your hands on your heart, breathe in the Holy Spirit, and breathe out, saying “Peace be with you.”

Then turn to your neighbor, breathe the Spirit and say “Peace be with you.”

And when you receive the Host, you may want to offer your peace to God and breathe in his holy breath of peace to you.

Resources: The Rev. Buzz Stevens, Ministry Matters, 2010, for the beginning thoughts.
Garrison Keillor, Thinking Weaselish Thoughts at Eastertide, Salon.com, 2008
Voltaire, 1694 - 1778
Pierre Wolfe, May I Hate God, Paulist Press, 1978

Easter Morning

2011-04-30T16:26:00.000-07:00

A detail of Matthew’s account caught my attention this year: There was an earthquake at the tomb – an earthquake that caused the soldiers guarding the tomb to fall to the ground like dead men. An earthquake of sufficient magnitude to cause the huge boulder in front of the stone cave to roll. Can you imagine the noise and the shifting and rolling of the ground under the women’s feet? The heart stopping, adrenaline fear that would come upon any of us?

We Californians can imagine it. Most of us have been in one or more earthquakes – we fasten our water heaters to the wall, and we make sure that we don’t have books or heavy objects above our beds. And this year, the world, but especially the dear people of Japan are living with the horrific consequences of the recent earthquake and tsunami.

Earthquakes literally shift the ground – nothing is the same afterwards.

Matthew’s gospel is very physical. Jesus’ birth was announced by a new hydrogen exploding star in the sky, and his resurrection, this birth of humanity into an entirely new reality is announced by the plates of the earth bumping and grinding into one another, causing the ground beneath their feet to roll and part.

Whether Matthew’s account is metaphorical or actual doesn’t really matter does it? Either way, something tremendously shocking and fear producing and ground shifting happened.

And he doesn’t explain it. None of the gospel writers do. In Matthew, the ground shifting earthquake – the bright beings of golden light – and the message – go and tell. And when they run to do just that - they meet Jesus on the way. By this time, I imagine that they are so discombobulated that they accept seeing him, the one that they’ve just gone to wrap in spices, and just kind of nod.

They hear him tell them also - "Go and tell my brothers to meet me in Galilee."

We gathered here this past Thursday for a very intimate feeling evening, an evening of friendship, of receiving one another’s friendship through our gestures of word and touch, and then of receiving Jesus’ friendship through his gesture of offering his own body and blood to us through the common elements of bread and wine.

We gathered to hear him say to us, "you are no longer just my students. When you act out love and service towards one another, you are my friends."

That was on the eve of his death.

And now, through the grief and trauma of his death and the emptiness of his absence, at the grave, that dark hole in our hearts, something completely outside the laws of nature has happened. Something that shifts the ground so thoroughly that the pieces of the old order cannot be put back together again.

If you are skeptical about this – you’re in good company. None of the gospels record anyone saying – “Wow! I knew it! Just like he said! Hallelujah! Praise God! That’s the way I knew it was going to turn out!”

They record fear, confusion, bewilderment, disbelief, doubt, waiting to see, and running to go and tell. Tell what is not quite spelled out, but telling that something has happened. Something has happened, and the betrayal and denial and the perversion of justice and the sentence of death and the crucifixion of innocence and the burial of hope and love has gone into reverse. The Lord is alive. And you will see him.

Something has happened. The ground has unalterably shifted. Might in fact does not make right. He who dies with the most toys is not necessarily the winner. Despair at the wretched state of the world does not need to be your go to emotion. Peacemaking is not a lost cause. Rejoicing is not foolish. We can, in all sincerity, tell our children that hope and goodness and kindness and creativity and imagination and honesty and integrity, even when these might not get you the big tax breaks, will get you Life and Joy and an incredible group of Forever Friends. Christ is alive. Love wins, on earth as well as in heaven. No matter how bleak and crazy things look.

That’s what the women go and tell – and they initiate a long line of witnesses – go and tell, go and tell – on and on through the generations, on and on through the ages, until we arrive at you and me. The brothers and sisters and friends of Jesus, here, in this place and in this time.

The letter to the Colossians is working out some of what this means – we’re still working out what this means. What difference it makes. But one of the first things that the Christians figured out that it means is that we are entirely safe and secure. Our life is hidden with Christ in God. That’s very mystical and mysterious. And, like the resurrection, it isn’t meant to be picked apart for exactly how this is the case. It is like love and relationship. Can you honestly say how and why it is that you love your husband or wife or children or friends? The truth is, Love goes far beyond explanation. And so it is with our life that hidden with Christ, in God. What we can say for sure though, is that there is nothing on heaven or on earth, no suffering or mishap or economic dislocation or disaster, that can ever separate us from the Source of Life that continues coursing through our hearts for all of time and beyond.

The Acts of the Apostles is also working out what it means to be the community of Jesus, the intimate friends whom he calls his brothers and sisters. And one of the things that they discover it means is that we exist for the sake of the other. That we exist, not solely for our own comfort and joy, but to transform the world – to go and tell that God’s love and life are not just for a few, but for all.

There’s been an earthquake my friends – and the structures of empire and temple and war making and the entire machinery of death, as loud and as imperious and as threatening as it may look – is the old reality that has crumbled and continues to crumble under the weight of the boulder that has rolled away from the grave – that is crumbling in the midst of a new reality that is creating a garden right smack in the graveyard – a flowered cross – a new Eden – a community of friends that holds hands through time with the Risen Lord of Life himself, a community of friends whose life is hidden safely and securely in the very heart of God, and who exist here on earth for the sake of transformation and healing and witnessing – telling wherever and however we see new life arising.

The Lord be with you.
Let us pray.

"O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." *

* Book of Common Prayer, 1979
Resource: Working Preacher

Holding Up Half the Sky

2011-04-02T14:28:00.000-07:00

“So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.”

The story of Jacob and Joseph and this small plot of land is found in the Book of Genesis – This plot of land is now in the Palestinian city of Nablus in the West Bank. There is an Eastern Orthodox church built over the site of what has been known as “Jacob’s well” for millennia. The well was the center of village life – not just because of the water but because that’s where women gathered to catch up on the latest news and gossip. It was at the center of their social lives – it’s where they could find out how to relieve a fever, or how to please a husband, or how to get along with a difficult mother in law. And this all happened in the early morning or the evenings, when it was cool. Nobody came to the well at noon, the hottest, dustiest time of day. That’s when you’d want to be indoors, out of the heat.

“Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.)”

He was thirsty and she was lonely. Coming to the well at the time when she was guaranteed not to have to converse with other women, when her outsider-ness might be less noticeable, because there wasn’t any one there to notice her. Except Jesus and he “spoke to her. The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)”

That's an understatement. Jewish and Samaritan religious leaders both taught that it was wrong to have any contact with the opposite group, and neither was to enter each other’s territories or even to speak to one another. Throughout the first half of the century that this gospel was written, there were violent clashes between Jews and Samaritans.

But there was Jesus, a thirsty Jewish man, and there was the woman, isolated and lonely. He took her seriously. He saw her and engaged her and did not talk down to her.

“Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

Living water was not necessarily a spiritual term, it was used for any water that bubbled up from underground - a well or a spring – living water was the kind of water that kept replenishing itself, water that was ever new, ever fresh. So, “the woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”

Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

You know, this is the longest recorded conversation that Jesus has in any of the gospels. And it is with a woman. In Samaria. At the height of the day. It could hardly be more different than the story from last week – the story of Nicodemus, the ultimate religious insider, a Jew, in Jerusalem, who came to Jesus at night, and who could not wrap his head around Jesus’ image of new birth, spiritual birth, who could not see anything fresh and new with God’s eyes.

But, "the woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Unlike Nicodemus, this outsider woman trusted and moved ever deeper, ever further into that amazing conversation. And so did Jesus.

“Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. “

How many of you think that there is something sinful and loose and Elizabeth Taylor-like about this Samaritan woman – may Elizabeth rest in peace? The truth is, there is nothing of the sort in this story. Jesus sees and respects the reality of her life. Whether she was widowed, divorced or abandoned, the truth was, she had virtually no control over her life, or over who took her in. Her primary reality was sadness, grief, and loneliness, not immorality and sinfulness. I don’t know how many of you have read Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Women Hold Up Half the Sky, but it is a book that opens your eyes to the sickening reality of ongoing world wide treatment of women and girls as commodities – to the economic devastation as well as the moral and psychological and spiritual devastation this oppression wreaks – AND it opens your eyes to the awesome and inspiring power of what the living water of hope and new identity can do in individual lives – that has far ranging ripple effects.

So Jesus, thirsty and tired as he is, saw this woman and respected her and opened his heart to her – and she did the same. She saw him. Seeing is central to John’s gospel. To see with the eyes of one’s heart is to be transformed, it is to be born again. And so, she assumed this new identity as someone worth seeing, and as someone worth having a conversation with and launched directly into the most pressing theological question that had separated her people from the Jews, which was.....

Where is the right place to worship? Gerazim, in the north, or Jerusalem, in the south. An argument that had been going on for centuries. To the Judeans in the south, the northerners were sinful. To the northerners, the Jews in the south were false followers of Moses.

Ah, Jesus said, let’s let all that go. That was then. This is now. “…the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain of Gerazim nor in Jerusalem. The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will know that God is spirit, and those who worship him worship in spirit and truth.”

The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” Jesus said to her, “I am, the one who is speaking to you.” I AM…. The one who is to come is here. I AM. Worship is not about a building or a place. It is about a relationship and a community and the person of Christ.

“Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city.” She dropped her burdens and her subservient identity and stepped into the new identity that Jesus has just offered her. She was now a witness. A Gospel story teller. An Evangelist.

“She said to the people, “Come and see….” Come and see, by the way, is exactly what Jesus told the disciples at the beginning of the gospel when they asked him where he was staying – “Come and see.” Come and See – we might want to begin using that phrase ourselves! Come and see how this church has touched and transformed me. Come and see how, working together, we are making a difference in the world. Come and see how Jesus will show up for you how he will make himself known to you – how it is to be seen and loved.

So, I wonder, as you come and see - where you are in this story? I wonder, if like Jesus, you are thirsty. I wonder if, like the Samaritans and the Jews, there are barriers that have existed for so long in your life that you no longer question them, and if, in Jesus’ company, you might risk crossing over into territory that has been alien to you. I wonder if there is loneliness and sadness in your life that you might let God see and speak to. I wonder if you need another drink of that living water that gushes up into new life. And I wonder if, like the woman dropping her jar, there is something you need to let drop so you too can step into your new identity as God’s beloved and trustworthy witness. I wonder if you will go and tell your story and invite someone else to come and see?

Holy No's

2011-03-17T11:18:00.000-07:00

To turn towards life, you must turn away from what is not life. To grow closer to God, or your partner, or your children, or your church, you must turn away from what takes you further away from God or your partner or your children or your church. Turning towards also involves turning away.

Turning away from is our first act in baptism. The first three questions we answer in the baptismal covenant are these: Do you renounce the Satan and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God? Do you renounce the evil powers of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God? Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?

On this the first Sunday in Lent, we are at the beginning of our yearly retreat that we take to ground ourselves once again in the our goal – that is complete communion with the Divine. We retreat so that we can remember again that what we are about is growing into the full stature of Christ. And so, at the beginning of our 40 day retreat, we return again to the first steps – in order to go towards love and life with God, dwelling in Jeru-shalom – or in the peace of the City of God – we renounce what does not serve the peace of God, what does not serve peace in our own hearts – we renounce whatever takes us away from wholeness.

Saying no is as freeing as saying yes – but this came as revelation to me.

I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s. Even though my family was conservative, the culture was not. It was all about Yes to all kinds of experiences, and foods, and substances, and relationships – Yes! And I love the word Yes! I love e.e.cummings wonderful poem

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

Sister Mary Corita Kent was particularly popular during the social upheavals of that time. If you don’t know of her work, it can be still be seen in almost any retreat center – beautiful silk screens and colorful seriographs of Yes to love and peace and life.

So when I began to read the theologian Karl Barth, I was unprepared for the forcefulness of his No. Unprepared, but immediately grabbed by it because he spoke a truth that was critical to any real ability to say yes.

Barth was a Lutheran pastor and theologian in pre-war Germany who grew increasingly alarmed at the growing militarism of his country and the support for this among his former professors and fellow pastors. This support was a result of what he saw as the moral weakness of liberal theology. That is, a theology that increasingly was focused on making peace with the world, and believed that humans, on their own, were progressing towards greater and greater enlightenment. The concentration camps of WWII, and Hiroshima, and later, the mass graves of Cambodia and Rwanda threw cold water on the idea of humanity’s progressive enlightenment – but at the time the result was churches which accommodated the prevailing politics rather than speaking out the distinctive word of the Lordship of Jesus the Christ.

In an attempt to understand what was happening to his country and his church he began a deep study of the Book of Romans, and he came away with the overwhelming conviction of the victorious reality of Christ’s resurrection – that is, that all the death dealing powers in the world were not able to dismantle and destroy the Irrevocable Intention of God to Love. God is absolutely sovereign – he is not dependent upon us – and he exercises complete freedom in revealing himself through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. At the same time, we can never know God the way we can know a patron saint. God is not our patron saint, and he is certainly not the patron saint of any one country or any one group of people.

Faith, Barth said, is " awe in the presence of the divine incognito; Faith is the love of God that is aware of the qualitative difference between God and human beings and God and the world."

Barth, almost single handedly, brought back the idea of the utter transcendence of God, the apophatic God before whom we bow and are silent, because we essentially do not know and certainly cannot control.

He founded what came to be called The Confessing Church in Germany, the small underground group of pastors and laity, who pitted the revelation of Jesus Christ against the “truth” of Hitler and the death machine of Hitler’s party. For a people immersed in churches that for decades had made peace with militarism and a political system in which classes of people – Jews, Gypsy’s, homosexuals, cripples - were made scapegoats and eventually rounded up and murdered, this thundering No, was an essential if bitter tasting corrective.

The truth is this No is the starting point of any authentic religious life. Any life that desires intimacy with God must begin with understanding that God does not belong to you, that God is not a vending machine, that God does not need to cure your cancer, or provide you with a job, or insure your prevailing in lawsuits, or make your life comfortable or easy.

Real Life, Life with God, begins on our knees. Begins with this recognition that God is beyond our thoughts and our imaginations, beyond our rules and our regulations, beyond our potlucks and our passions. God, in God’s essence, cannot be known – except in the way that God chooses to be known.

So, renunciation is the way that we begin this journey of Lent. Because the Holy Yes to the leaping greenly spirits of trees and the blue true dream of sky requires the Holy No to waste and pollution. The Holy Yes to seeking and serving Christ in all persons requires the Holy No to envy or pointing the finger at Muslims or illegal immigrants. The Holy Yes to healing and abundance requires the Holy No to blindness to human suffering and lack of compassion.

The truth is that at times this No is quite costly. It may mean saying no to what we most treasure in order that we may yes to what is more helpful and healthful. It may mean awkward and painful letting go of what does not belong in order that we may say yes to what truly does belong. It may mean asking for help in discerning what is standing in our way of love and accepting help in changing behaviors that are, in the long run, destructive. In other words, this saying no and this saying yes are not one time events, but are questions that we must return to over and over again.

So – the first and most basic question of our Lenten retreat is this: Do you renounce the works of Satan and all the evil powers of this world that would corrupt and destroy the works of creation?

And the response is: I renounce them.

2011-03-06T23:31:00.000-08:00

What happens when your world goes “kaboom!” – the word Donna used when she told me what happened for her when the pieces fell together and she knew her life’s direction and work.

Kaboom! Perfect word for this experience – this free fall kind of experience when everything is unified – everything falls together – and in that moment, in that free fall moment, all structure is temporarily gone, definitions are meaningless, there is no you / me / it / Everything melds into one and you see. You see in a totally different light – you see what has always been there, but is most always hidden.

Mystics of every faith describe these moments – these moments of great light, of shattering light – when it is not necessarily what you see that is transfigured, but your sight that is transfigured.

Listen to Teresa of Avila, the great Carmelite mystic of the 16th century, who wrote about prayer and the exquisite beauty and infinite value of every soul. She writes about herself in the 3rd person – “the Lord revealed himself one day to her, when she had just received Communion, in great splendor and beauty and majesty, as He did after his Resurrection..” He spoke to her and her life, her relationship with God and with everyone around her was permanently altered. This mystic Teresa, by the way, was not withdrawn from the world – she was a businesswoman, an entrepreneur. She established monasteries and convents under difficult conditions, and oversaw administrators of every variety.

Was her experience a flight of fancy? The writer of 2 Peter says, no. “We are not talking to you about clever, sophisticated myths. We are telling you about something we witnessed and a voice that we heard." The vision permanently changed them - even though it took time to live into all that it meant.

And remember Paul- blinded by this great Light, who heard a Voice from Heaven speak directly to him – and whose life changed direction after that experience? The fruitfulness of his life ever afterwards speaks for itself.

Paul did not think that this experience was meant for him alone. It was meant even for the Corinthian Christians, who were an ornery, argumentative, worldly wise congregation. He wrote to them that they and he ‘are being transfigured into Christ’s likeness with ever-increasing glory." (2 Corinthians 3:18)

Paul had this on good authority. Jesus said that those who hear the Word of God and do it will “shine forth like the sun." (Matthew 13:43) In other words – transfiguration is at the heart of what God is doing in our lives, you and me - here and now - “Transfiguring us into Christ’s likeness – with ever-increasing glory - so that we shine forth like the sun.” Kaboom!

It's very hard to take it in. This truth that permeation by Divine Light "is the destiny of our human nature*", and the even greater mystery revealed on the mountain that "the suffering endured on the Cross and the Majestic Glory of God are one." (Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury)

I'm guessing that most of the time, you understand those two things as separate - and that, if you're like me - you are actually more comfortable going down the mountain with Jesus towards the Cross than you are hanging out with him in blinding Glory. After all, we understand violence, scape goating, betrayal, suffering, death. Those things are human, and while we abhor them, we understand them – they fit into our framework.

The Transfiguration does not. The truth is, mostly we don’t know what to do with moments like these – moments of blinding clarity and beauty. I don’t know about you – but I totally get Peter and James and John wanting to erect tents – wanting desperately to make the experience fit into some kind of familiar framework. But God didn’t even wait for Peter to finish his sentence.... “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.”

And of course, Listen, in the Old and the New Testament, is a loaded word. Listen equals Do. Obey. Trust. Follow.

And so, since ancient times, Christians have listened - and they have climbed Mt. Tabor - through imagination and contemplation. They have climbed up the mountain, with Peter and James and John, and have fallen on their faces, overcome with the Glory of God, revealed in Jesus the Christ. Seen it for themselves and been transformed. So, my friends, let us also ... "consider the Mystery of the Transfiguration of the Lord…., and strive to be illumined by this Light ourselves and encourage in ourselves love and striving towards the Unfading Glory and Beauty….” (St. Gregory of Palamas)

They have also learned to listen for those smaller moments, those more individual moments of clarity and transformation that also come from God in which the pieces of their lives fall into place – whether that is vocation, or faith, or relationships, or the desire to co-create with God some part of the kingdom of heaven here on earth. I'm guessing that you too know some of those moment of clarity in which you see in a way that you did not imagine or make up. And if you pay attention, and do not dismiss those moments or ignore them, they have the power to guide you for a very long time – even when the initial flush of beauty and clarity are long gone.

After all, the letter of 2 Peter was written some eighty years after Christ’s death and resurrection - almost an entire generation – and yet this one experience of clarity on the mountain top was still providing sustenance and hope and encouragement for entire communities of Christians – especially, especially in the midst of serious questioning and doubts. It was providing sustenance because they took those moments of clarity seriously and re-presented them over and over again, in telling the story and in re-enacting the power and presence of Christ with them in the moment.

So – contemplate the Glory of Christ – AND reflect back into your own life, or the life of your family, or the life of this community – and re-visit a time in which you KNEW the power and presence of God, in which you SAW things in a new way, in a more unified way, in a way that had the potential to change you, if you let it. Revisit that time, maybe even come out of the closet and tell someone about it – you’re not crazy!

Linger on the mountain – don’t immediately descend into the cross of daily living – the mounds of laundry and the dishes and the office paperwork,– linger in that moment of clarity that was a gift from God. Lean into it and trust it and Listen – as God commanded – so that when you do descend the mountain – you do so as one who is beginning to shine like the sun - in however small or large a way.

Resources:
Top photo from http://inkindle.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/please-let-there-be-light/
Quote from Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, from the Seventh Mansion
Icon Fresco of St. Paul dates back to the 4th Century AD, and was discovered during restoration work at the Catacomb of Saint Thekla in March, 2011
*Michael Ramsey, 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, (1904 – 1988)
*St. Gregory of Palamas, Archbishop of Thessalonica (1296-1359), Sermon on The Transfiguration

Which God?

2011-03-02T18:14:00.000-08:00

So how many of you have been up in the middle of the night this past week because you had something on your mind? I have friends who swear by Ambien - the drug of choice for worriers and middle aged people whose bodies don’t rest well through the whole night.

Anxiety and worry are the new normal – the underlying tone, the background noise that is so omnipresent that we don’t even hear it although we are deeply affected by it.

We don’t worry about our next meal or how we are going to shelter our children – thank God. But we do worry about our weight, about what’s in our food, about the stylishness of our clothing and the solvency of our retirement plans. We do worry about our relationships, about our health, and about really big things over which we have actually very little control – the price of oil, the effect that will have on economic recovery, global warming of our planet, national security.

I may not be talking now exactly to you – you, as a person of faith, might not be deeply worried about these things – but we are steeping in a culture that is – and responds to that free floating worry and anxiety with ideas such as attempting to build a gigantic fence between California and Mexico, or Texas and Mexico, under the impression that this will actually make things better on either side.

Jesus goes to the heart of the issue – an issue that affected people in the 1st century just as much as it affects us in the 21st century.

You worry because you are divided, he says. Your attention is split. You are trying to serve two gods when that is not possible to do. That’s not because of some ethical failing – it’s just not possible. You can’t go two different directions at the same time.

I mean, when you drive to Lake Tahoe, there’s different routes you can take – but you can’t drive to Lake Tahoe and to Los Angeles at the same time. You need to decide – Snow or Oscars. They both might be great – but you can’t do both at the same time.

Likewise, Jesus says that a lot of our worry has to do with indecision – with trying to go in different directions. Will it be Kingdom of God? Or will it be Kingdom of Money?

If you decide Kingdom of God – that does not mean money is evil or scary or unnecessary. It doesn’t mean you can go pick flowers all day. It just means that it’s not your first priority – and it’s not your destination.

But what happens when you make the kingdom of money your destination? It turns out it’s governed by a god who isn’t very reliable, who is fickle and who – in the end – doesn’t take very good care of his people.

The god’s name is Scarcity. The rules? There’s only so much to go around and if you don’t get enough, you’ll suffer – and, it turns out, there’s never really an end to enough. No matter how much you get – it’s not quite enough.

It’s a kingdom of Musical Chairs. Remember the adrenaline of musical chairs? Grown up musical chairs is not any prettier. Even the ones sitting pretty can’t rest -– because conditions can change, sometimes quite rapidly, and then they are out - hungry and cold – either for real, or metaphorically speaking.

We basically live in the kingdom of Money, and the voice of its god, Scarcity, is all around us. We are all of us, every one of us, susceptible, and at one time or another we have all worshipped at its feet. Hoping we will be among the winners, we will be among those not caught on the outside.

It’s a cruel god – but we serve this god because we are trying to make ourselves secure, even when, deep down, we recognize that this god will not take care of us, will abandon us and let us down, and will ultimately make us insecure and increase our worry.

It’s just that it looks so true. It really does look like there’s not quite enough.

And we do not have to look far to see examples of real suffering because of not enough. In our backyard, there are homeless. And then, there are places of deep entrenched poverty, places like Haiti.

Jesus says that the true God – the God of the Kingdom of Heaven – the God of Abundance knows what you have need of and will provide. How?

A friend of mine spent yesterday rounding up blankets and jacket, hats and gloves and taking them out to the homeless men she knows who come to eat Sunday breakfast at her church. The weather forecast was deep cold – and her friends were going to be suffering – and tucked away in the closets of her more fortunate friends, were enough warm things to go around – to be shared.

I’m guessing that her fortunate friends might have wanted some of those coats and blankets. When you live in the Kingdom of Heaven, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have nice things – it just means that you have a different relationship with those things.

They are Not the source of your security or your contentment or your sense of value and worth. They are yours for as long as they are yours – and when the Generous God of Abundance has need of them elsewhere, you offer them, knowing that this God has your welfare in mind just as much as everyone else’s, and that there’s enough to go around – so long as no one hoards. Knowing that the intention in the Kingdom of Heaven is that no one get left out in the cold. That everyone has a chair.

Again - living into this Kingdom does not mean that you don’t plan for the future or that you are not prudent with one’s resources. It doesn’t help the poor to plan poorly.

But it does mean you can unhook yourself from the governing god of scarcity, this fear of not enough, and trust the true God of creation, the God who will not abandon you or turn his back on you.

You can learn to trust the God who has inscribed – tattooed – permanently marked you - onto the palm of his hand – who will not forget you - Ever.

Is this easy to trust? No. It goes counter to everything around us. That’s why we do it in community. That’s why we practice and work at building our muscles of trust by bringing food for the food bank, by making presents at Christmas for strangers, by pledging ever increasing proportions of our income to God’s work in the church and in the world.

It’s not easy. But it gets easier the more we find that it works – the more we find there is enough when everyone shares – and it gets easier when we begin to see examples of God’s provident care everywhere we look.

So choose your kingdom and your god – even if it’s a choice you have to make over and over again –which it is, for most of us.

Leave the kingdom of scarcity and choose the Kingdom of Heaven. Practice giving your undivided attention to the God who cares for you and see if the siren song of worry does not cease to trouble you.

photos: driving to Lake Tahoe, by Kai Harris
Luis Renteria, Monterey Food Bank Warehouse Manager, taken at Good Shepherd, Salinas, CA

Traveling ever Deeper into the Realm of Heaven

2011-02-14T22:39:00.000-08:00

The events in the Middle East, in Egypt particularly have been mesmerizing this past week. We have been transfixed by scenes of determination, togetherness, nonviolent revolution – and then celebration. Those who have been there report that for hours and hours, Egyptians kept pouring into Tahrir: whole families, fathers with small children on their shoulders, throngs and throngs of jubilant young men and boys, committed activists and health and safety volunteers, rich and poor, Muslim and Christian, all floating in a sea of Egyptian flags.

Radical change - and the need to be radically welcoming of such change – even as it alters our relationships and even when we don’t know exactly what it will mean as the balance of power shifts, yet again. As Mitch McConnell, minority leader of the Senate, said, ?We have a big stake in the outcome, but limited ability to affect it."

We are in the midst of sea change in the world. Not just in Egypt. But in India. In China. And here at home.

I do not, as a rule, follow financial news - but my ears perked up this week to hear that a German exchange company, Deutsche Borse, is negotiating to acquire that icon of American capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange.

Change is happening fast. And unpredictably.

It was happening fast in Matthew’s day as well. The central question around which the Gospel of Matthew revolves is – "how do we face change?" The Temple, the icon of Jewish and Christian worship and the central focus of how their society was organized, was completely destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. Razed to the ground. And not just the Temple, but all the priests AND their families. Executed. The Romans had had it with the Jewish propensity for revolt, and so they attacked the very heart of their society, culture, economics and worship.

Christians were mixed up in this as well Jews. The first Christians were a sect within the Jewish faith – they were not a separate religion. They worshipped at the Temple just as their Jewish kin did, just as Jesus did. The Temple was Holy. We, in our secular culture, have little understanding of how significant Holy Place is - but the Temple was where the people came close to God and God came close to them.

Now it was gone. And that meant massive upheaval and change – the cosmic rug pulled from under their feet. With the priests gone, laymen stepped in. We reflexively boo and hiss when Pharisees and Scribes enter the story – but they were lay lawyers, and they stepped in to do the best that they could to hold the people together and to pull them through this tragedy. The Temple, the place of God on earth, was gone. Their sacramental life was no more. But they still had the Law of Moses to serve as the link between them and God and to serve as their identity – and the Pharisees set out to teach it and to uphold it to the utmost of their ability. And so – after the razing of the Temple in 70 A.D., the Jewish community became more home-based and more Law based.

One reason for this was to provide organization. Another was to maintain their identity as a people. And a third was because the lens through which they viewed this disaster was that God was angry with them, and so, in order to appease God, they would study harder and become ever more Law-Abiding. Upright. Righteous. As perfect as possible.

So where did that leave Christian Jews? It left them increasingly at odds with their own community. At some fundamental level, their identity had already shifted. They were followers of what was known simply as “The Way.” They experienced the living Christ in their midst – and they were pretty convinced that God was not angry with them, and that keeping the Law as perfectly as possible was not the way to salvation.

When they continued to experience the living Christ in their midst, independent of any building or indeed of any one place – they were set free, in some incredibly awesome ways. The Gospel of Matthew is birthed out of this radical change – it points backwards repeatedly to the Law and the Prophets, but it does so in order to point forward to this new way. A new way of life based in the deeply held conviction that they were precious human beings, baptized and claimed as Christ’s own forever, and that this Christ lived at the heart and center of their gatherings – gatherings that had no buildings, no parish halls, no organs or pianos. Gatherings that had as their sole focus hearing the Word in community, praying, passing the Peace of the Lord to one another, and blessing, breaking and sharing the Bread of Christ.

So the Gospel of Matthew was written to Jewish Christians undergoing radical change - thrown out of the synagogues and in many cases, alienated from family members.

How to deal with change... Anyone who has undergone deep change knows that it can put a tremendous stress on relationships. Amen?

Today’s passage from the Sermon on the Mount deals with those stresses. How to organize community and relationships in a way that is consistent with the old way – with what is known – Torah Law – but now deepening and widening out into this new Realm known simply as the Kingdom of Heaven. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus leads his followers deep into the Realm of the Living Christ – the Christ who lives within the believers, and within their gathered body. Deep into this Realm, relationships shift – they are no longer simply about abiding by the Law or about lopping off outward manifestations of relational difficulties – but about going inward, to the heart, to attitude, gaining an inward orientation.

Where does murder begin? It begins in anger. Where does treating someone else as an object? It begins in lust. Where does swearing begin? It begins in exaggeration and irreverence. We might think of these things as relatively small on the scale of world affairs. But on the scale of the building blocks of the relationships in which people live their lives – they are not so small – and they can wreak havoc.

The Jewish Christians of the 1st century knew Torah Law for sure. And they were able, in the presence and with the guidance of Jesus, to radicalize the Law, to deepen it, to penetrate its depths and alter it to fit their new realities.

So what about us? I wonder what Law we know for sure and what the Living Christ in our midst is calling us to radicalize to fit today's fast paced changing realities?

One Law we know for sure is that we are all created in the image of the Living God, and that there is no place where God is not. We know for sure that God loves everyone, unconditionally and indiscriminately, and we know for sure that we, as a community of Christ, are not dependent upon buildings or land for our existence. I believe the Living Lord in our midst is challenging us and inviting us to live ever deeper into that Law of Unconditional and Indiscriminate Love and Ever Abiding Presence – away from dependence upon external realities and into the Kingdom of Heaven here, in our midst, on earth. Amen.

Photograph: Reuters, from The Guardian, Feb. 12, 2011
Photograph: Mark Lennihan, AP, from NPR, Feb. 10, 2011

Who you are - 1st Sunday after Epiphany

2011-01-13T06:24:00.000-08:00

A colleague of mine took a college group spelunking into caves that began as a small tunnel into the mountain, then opened into a small bedroom sized space, and then opened out into quite a large sanctuary like space - where it was completely dark and completely silent. There was room for everyone to sit in a circle with about ten feet of distance between each other. After settling in, everyone turned off their flashlights and sat in that complete darkness. My friend said fear and anxiety were palpable. Even for him – even after having done this several times – the question would rise up in his mind – was he alone? The fear was often broken by laughter or some other outburst by the group.

But one time, there was complete silence. After awhile, out of the darkness and silence a young voice quivered: "is anyone here?" “Yes,yes, we’re here!” everyone burst out. After quieting down and absorbing more of the silence and darkness, my friend lit one small kitchen match – and that one small little light was brilliant! It lit up the darkness, and immediately brought warmth and security.
light.

The account of creation and our life with God begins with light. Out of darkness, on the very first day God gave us the gift of light.

"So there is not just darkness, but there is light and dark. Now I don’t mean just the light in the light bulb or in the car lights at night. I don’t mean just this or that light, but I mean all of the light that is light. God gave us the gift of light that all light comes from.

When God saw the light, God said, “It is good.”

Now much, much later, after the waters of creation, and the dangerous waters of the flood, much, much later ….

Someone came. Someone came who said such wonderful things and did such amazing things that people couldn’t help it. They just had to ask him who he was. One time, when they asked him who he was, he said, “I am the Light.”"

This same one – the one who said, “I am Light” was baptized in the waters of the Jordan, and God said to him – “You are my beloved, my Child in whom I am well pleased.”

Those of us who follow Jesus are joined to his life and mission through the waters of creation, the waters of the flood, the waters that parted, the waters of the Jordan, the blessed waters – the water we use at baptism. We become related to Christ, and through Christ, to God. More even than that, we enter into mystical communion with Christ and through Christ with the Creator of all that is, the blood of deep eternal forever life flows in our veins, in our hearts, in our soul.

And so our life is a new life, a different life, because it is no longer we that live, but Christ that lives in us – and paradoxically, we become our brightest and best selves, the selves that are our most unique and beautiful. Our troubles do not cease, we are not promised a bed of roses – that is not the Gospel. But we are grounded and stabilized in this firm unshakeable identity – that of God’s beloved children. Jesus heard these words from God before he entered into mission and ministry – and we must hear them and take them in deeply as well before we undertake any major project – especially now at the beginning of this new year.

Martin Luther regularly remembered his identity as a Child of God each and every time he splashed water on his face – every time Martin washed his face in the morning, he would say, “Remember, I am baptized.” He wasn’t trying to remember his baptism as a baby, he wasn’t trying to remember that certain event. When he splashed water on his face, he was remembering who he was – his fundamental identity as a beloved child of God. And this made all the difference to the rest of his days.

Now you also are baptized in the name of the Trinity – the Holy Three – Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And you are sealed with the Oil of Chrism, sealed by the Holy Spirit as Christ’s own forever.

"The Holy Spirit goes where it will. It rides the invisible wind like a dove and gives you comfort and power and guidance. It is invisible, like the scent of the oil. After you were bathed in the water and christened with the oil, a candle was given on your behalf to your parents, lit from the light of the Christ Candle." If you were fortunate to be baptized as an adult – that light was given directly to you. You were named as God’s child and given the Light of Christ at your Baptism.

Deep within you is this Light, the image of God. Sin may distort and obscure that image but it cannot erase it, or put it out. Your creation is good. You are an expression of God.

Because you and I are an expression of God, we hunger for God…. Sometimes we meet people who do not seem to hunger for God, who are not aware of any thirst for the life giving waters of communion with the Creator, who reject the body of Christ manifest in the Church – but do not despair because of this. Do not despair if at the beginning of this year, we seem small and insignificant, or our faith seems small and insignificant. We are God’s – and it is God who awakens hunger and thirst for Himself.

Those of us who are here are here because God stirred some longing, some desire, in our hearts – maybe it was only a desire to be with some friendly people, or maybe it was because you wanted to hear something about Jesus, or something about hope in the world. Whatever desire, whatever longing, God stirred in you, give thanks, because that hunger and thirst, that longing, is grace itself. It is gift. It is even the answer you are seeking – that is odd, isn’t it? Hunger and thirst is itself the answer – but in the paradoxical nature of faith, that is true.

We cannot long for the light of Christ, for communion with Christ, without God causing that longing within us – so even if that longing is very tiny, even if it just a small flickering match stick of desire for the Light, gather up your heart and pour it into your longing.

And God will stir up greater faith, will gift you with greater faith – which may be, for you, an experience simply of greater and greater longing to enter with Christ into whatever baptism he is undergoing. That may be the joyful baptism of the revelation of God’s love and affirmation and gift of Identity. It may be the sorrowful baptism of death on the cross - that is the death of your ego and your own will. It may be the joyful baptism of easy fellowship with other believers. It may be the mystery of the baptism of the cross, of entering into the mystery of poverty and illness. Whichever baptism that life brings– whether it is that of sorrow or that of joy – or both – either way, may you, like the Magi of Epiphany be on the lookout for what new thing God is doing, what new Light God is revealing in the world and within your soul.

This morning we renew the baptismal vows that we made at the beginning of our Christian journey – or that our parents made for us, when we were very young – too young to object. This morning, as we remember Jesus’ baptism by his cousin John, we remember that God says to each one of us as we baptized into the Body of Christ – you are my beloved child. Nothing in heaven or on earth can ever separate you from my love. You are permanently and always my beloved child. And as the first of many gifts to come - I give you my Spirit to live within you and to guide you.

May the light of God illumine the heart of your soul. May the flame of Christ kindle in you great hunger, great thirst…. And may the fire of the Spirit free you to be Light in the world. Amen.

*Resource: Jerome Berryman, Godly Play.

Peace for All.... It's Christmas

2010-12-26T22:43:00.000-08:00

I collect Nativity sets – though I did not set out to do so. It just kind of happened.

I have one from Honduras, a sweet set, very petite, with figures about 3” high. My daughter gave it to me when she spent a year working with Honduran Episcopalians setting up micro-financed co-operatives.

Another is from Mexico – from the Veracruz region. The brown figures are trimmed in pink – the angel’s wings are pink; the Kings wear pink headdresses; even baby Jesus is wrapped in pink swaddling cloth.

One is from Bethlehem, carved in olive wood – When I visited Palestinian refugee camps there, I met Christians who made their living carving olive wood doves and Nativities, praying for peace as they carved.

Another set is from Ecuador. That one is the largest, and the faces of the figures are a wonderful kind of earthy rich red brown. Joseph sits by the manger playing what looks like an accordion.

A friend has santons from France. Santons are traditional nativity figures, dressed in clothing of the middle ages – but it’s not just the wise men and shepherds gathered around the Holy Family; so are the notables of the village, the mayor and the parish priest; and the craftsmen, like the baker, the butcher, the cheese vendor. There might be a winegrower, a fisherman, a basket weaver and a potter. There are musicians and dancers who dance with joined hands. And joining the ox and ass, are sheepdogs with bells under their necks, sheep, goats, rabbits, pigeons on the roof. And don’t forget the ravi. This is a man or woman throwing up their arms in delight, either a simpleton or a very happy person!

When my son worked in Xalapa, we visited him one Christmas and saw Nativities that took up entire hillsides, large figures of all varieties and conditions of people and animals coming to see the Baby Jesus. They carried gifts, like chickens, to the Holy Family. And it wasn’t just the hillsides and parks – post offices, stories, government buildings – all had cleared large areas of space for Nativities, it was a culture that wanted very much to bring to life the wonder of the Christ Child’s birth and to honor that birth with all the materials they had at hand.

I love seeing the Christmas story depicted through the eyes of those of different cultures, with the characters appearing in a way that challenge and stir my imagination. An American artist, Jan Richardson, drew my attention to the artist Garcia Moia, a Nicaraguan artist whose painting Gift of the Magi depicts a Nicaraguan scene in which the wise men offer an armadillo, a rabbit, and what looks like an iguana!

It’s what I loved about the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth with life sized depictions of Mary and the baby Jesus from all over the world. From Japan, there is a stunning Mary in a pearl studded kimono, and the Baby Jesus swathed in oriental robes. From Nigeria, Mary looks particularly energetic and stunning and her baby boy is about to leap from her arms.

We all know that our culture is not the only one – we know this – and yet it is helpful to experience the very familiar stories of our faith – and what more familiar story is there than the birth of the baby Jesus in a manger – to experience this through different eyes and to really and truly honor and respect and wonder over what is Other – what is Familiar and yet Not Familiar.

One of the gifts that we have as children of God is an unbroken communion with those who are not familiar to us because they lived so long ago – and yet their voices echo over the centuries to us who live now among ipods and ipads and nuclear weapons. Hear the beautiful reflection of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a Cistercian monk of the early 12 century.

“Let your goodness Lord appear to us, that we, made in your image, may conform ourselves to it. In our own strength we cannot imitate your majesty, power, and wonder nor is it fitting for us to try. But your mercy reaches from the heavens through the clouds to the earth below. You have come to us as a small child, but you have brought us the greatest of all gifts, the gift of eternal love. Caress us with your tiny hands, embrace us with your tiny arms and pierce our hearts with your soft, sweet cries.”

As God, under the vulnerable cover of human flesh and blood comes among us, whether in ways familiar or strange, let us be always ready to welcome his coming. He may come as a newcomer, bearing the good news of her great joy in finding a church that is “everything she could have wanted in a church.” He may come in desperate need of hospitality, as did the homeless men who spent the night here last Sunday, or the impoverished children and their families for whom you have so generously provided bedding, and clothing and toys. Or he may come as you have, each of you, tonight, offering the gift that only you can offer – your heart.

May we, with the angels and shepherds, sing of the glory of the Christ Child and bend our Godly will and works towards peace on earth for all peoples.

Resources: The Advent Door, Jan Richardson

Answering John .... 3rd Sunday of Advent

2010-12-26T22:07:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday, after church, Jane Barker went to the hospital with what turned out to be pneumonia with complications. With her daughter Beverly, her son Andy and her granddaughter Caroline by her side, she passed away peacefully early Friday morning. The memorial service for her will be this Tuesday, at 11 a.m.

Jane had been unable to come to church for about the past six months – so the church went to her. She was a vital member of the knitting group – and when she could no longer attend their gatherings, that group went to her.

Whenever I visited, there was some new book by her side that she was reading – and I was usually surprised by the titles – any of you with young women in your lives will recognize the Twilight series! She enjoyed all kinds of music – from Bruce Springsteen to Bach.

One time, on a Wednesday morning Eucharist, she and I were the only ones that made it that morning – so we shared Eucharist together – the whole service. It was one of the most intimate and joyous occasions of Eucharist – when I said, The _____ of God for the People of God – there we were – the two of us - people of God - and I knew in my bones, what the communion of saints meant – a blood knowing, a soul knowing, and Jane, with her eyes sparkling and a smile on her face, knew it as well. In the months to come, all we needed to do was to hold hands and that knowing was present all over again.

I will miss her. And I know that I am not the only one who will.

In the relatively short time that she was here, she made deep friendships and became a vital part of this church – not because she sat on committees or did a lot – in her day, she had been a very active participant in her large church in Florida, but in her elderly years, the ones she shared with Good Shepherd, and let me tell you, she made it clear that she LOVED Good Shepherd - she was a vital part of this church simply because of who she was - because she was so affirming, so generous with her encouragement and her expressions of gladness to see you, so full of faith … and so / well / Joyous.

I’m sure there must have been moments, especially in the last few months, when that was not the case, when the people who cared for her day in and day out saw discouragement and despair at the confinement she so disliked. She must have known some discouragement over this, over her loss of the ability to knit, or to read, but the truth at the center of her life was that, in the wilderness of great age and infirmity and diminished abilities, she allowed the Grace of God to carry her into Joy, allowed the Grace of God to tend so deeply to her soul and her spirit that she bloomed into a thousand blossoms.

That Grace of God that Jane knew is the same Grace of God that Isaiah so poetically calls upon. They will rejoice, he says! Isaiah doesn’t say when the wilderness will blossom and the dry land run with water – he only says where that will happen – and he says that clearly and repeatedly. Isaiah locates God’s promise within the wilderness –within every human grief, every human lack and loneliness, and every earthly desolation.

For Isaiah’s people, wilderness had many meanings. It is a place that you ran to when you were in trouble – and it was a place of freedom. Deadly animals lived in the wilderness. Water was hard to find and crops did not grow there. It smacked of danger. Wilderness for Isaiah’s people was a wide place where it was easy to get lost. (Genesis 16, 21; Exodus 3, 13). (Deuteronomy 8:15). (Exodus 15, 17), (Exodus 14:3). (Deuteronomy 1:19). (Num 32; Psalm 107:4).

Wilderness was also the place where God’s people learned to trust their God. In the wilderness, God carried them, and fed them, and gave them water. In the wilderness God found his people and guarded them and cared for them and lifted them up.
(Deut 1:31), (Exodus 16), (Exodus 17) (Deuteronomy 32).

This is the wilderness that sings – that shouts with joy and blossoms like the crocuses in spring. This dry land, this desert, this wilderness will shout with joy because it will bloom with shoots of new growth that bud and bear fruit.

Do you believe this happens? Did happen? Will happen ever? John did. Even from the beginning in Elizabeth’s womb – remember how Elizabeth said to Mary – my child leapt in my womb because he recognized the One who is Coming whom you carry in your womb!” And many years later, when the grown up Jesus came to the grown up John at the River Jordan, John recognized him - You are the One who is Coming – sent by God. I am not worthy even to tie your sandals – you are the Mighty One of God.

And to prepare people for this Mighty One of God, John preached fire and brimstone from the wilderness – "prepare for the Coming One – he will separate the wheat from the chaff and burn the chaff with unquenchable fire" – but finally his preaching got him into hot water and he found himself in the real wilderness of Herod’s prison, in the wilderness of a small cell with only one way out – his head on a platter.

And quite understandably, John began to wonder – Are you the Coming One? These works, these relatively minor miracles? Really? Is this what God has in mind? Where are the fires of Justice? Where is the Brimstone of Righteousness? Where is Salvation? From prison? From Rome? From oppression?

Let’s be honest. Who among us has not wondered something of the same thing. Really? Is this the salvation God has in mind? Where is it? I’m having trouble finding work. After months and months of resumes.   Really? Is this the leaping joy thing that God has in mind? I don’t really have the joy joy joy down in my heart. I don’t really know the peace that passes understanding down in my heart. Sometimes I do. But definitely not all the time. And heavens to betsy – the world is really in a tailspin. Where are the shoots of new growth that will bud and bear fruit. Maybe you don’t think these things. Maybe you don’t. And if you don’t – blessings, all blessings upon you. But I do. I understand John’s question. Are you the Coming One? Are you the Savior of the World? And if you are - What does that mean? It’s a common enough observation that the world really does not appear to be a whole lot better off than it was 2000 years ago.

It is so ironic and poetic and poignant that Jesus does not really ever answer John. He affirms John – he recognizes John and lifts him up as greater than all the prophets who came before him. But then he simply sends word to John that there’s this blind man who could not see, who now sees. And there is a lame girl who could not walk, but now she’s cavorting about. And that person who was as good as dead, is now awake and alive. And the ones who cringe and beg by the roadside are having the good news of God’s love and liberation preached to them. All these images come from the prophet of way back when, Isaiah. And Jesus sends word about the real deeds that bring those old words to life –back to John in his dark, dank prison cell. The wilderness isn’t being torched – it’s blooming.

But it’s in small ways. In individual lives. Rome is still Rome. Prison is still prison. The hungry are still, for the most part, hungry. And 99% of the lame are still lame. It’s Not anything like what John had in mind for the Mighty One of God. But Jesus – from his birth onward, he just does not conform to expectation. His truth is the truth that the miracles – the works of God in Christ – are all around us.

I am one of them…..and, like John, it has taken me an amazingly long time to comprehend that God really and truly does work in small, insignificant lives. I was laid low, crippled, hobbled, and left for dead by a divorce that I had not seen coming – and while I am not singing arias from the rooftops – I am more than alive, by the Grace of God, more fully and resiliently alive in Christ – than ever before. Is this miraculous? Well, for me it is. Is it world changing? No. The wars go on. The economy is in tatters. The poor are getting poorer.

But it is Jesus’ answer to John. The wilderness blooms close at hand, so close at hand it is so easy to overlook. God is at work in the delicious delight of the tartness of the mustard against the ham and cheese of your sandwich. God is at work in the smile your secretary gave you when you came in last Monday morning. God is at work in the hand your child casually laid on your shoulder last night. God is at work in the shy thank you of the family to whom you delivered a mattress so they would have a place to sleep off the floor. God is at work in the gentle hand squeeze of a dear Christian nearing death.

Will Jesus come in any way different than he arrived the first time? I don’t know. But given everything that I do know – from scripture and from real life – I would say that we would do well to listen to the answer John received – and to look close around us for the places in the wilderness where the lame begin to leap, even when the leaps are hesitant and awkward because they are so new.

Sources: Working Preacher; Anathea Portier-Young, Assistant Professor, Old Testament, Duke Divinity

Ants on the First Sunday of Advent

2010-11-29T22:14:00.000-08:00

Traveling to Ecuador recently with my 25 year old daughter woke me up to many things – the first of which is that she is her own person – that she conducts herself in the world with amazing grace – and that she really, truly knows Spanish, the street kind as well as the more cultured variety. She knows a lot of things that I did not have a hand in teaching her. And she is brilliant and beautiful – well those traits I knew as soon as she was born!

She is at ease among foreigners. But in this respect, she is not unique among her peers. For younger generations, the world is really and truly small. Children of the Information Age do not focus on just on their own personal world – their focus extends well beyond their personal lives; they are 365/24/7 connected to the rest of the world through the Internet and this informs these generations in anything toward which they might turn their gaze— well, more precisely, their browsers.

The truth is, if you talk to most any young American, 25 years or younger, you will likely hear an emphasis on volunteerism, teamwork and good citizenship. And it turns out that this acute social awareness correlates with demanding a sense of purpose in their careers. According to a recent Harris Poll, 97% of college seniors seek work that will allow them to have an impact for good on the world.

My daughter, for instance, started a nonprofit two years ago to advance education and health care among the very poor in a barrio outside Quito, Ecuador. As amazing as this is to me, she is, again, not unique among her peers. While we were visiting the families who benefit from her nonprofit, we met two other young women, one from Germany, the other from Australia, who, independently of each other, were studying the efficacy of international aid. All three of these young women – from three different continents – had come to the same conclusion - that large scale aid often does more damage than good, whereas smaller projects, built on actual and mutual relationships between the people involved, are able to leverage small amounts of money and know-how into positive and lasting change.

On one of those nights I was trying to sleep in a room not my own, I asked Ella what made her so desirous of doing international work. I would never have predicted her answer – but it was this. “Because when I’m in the United States for too long at a time, I kind of go to sleep. I work better under the stress of the moment.” I asked what the stress of the moment meant; she said it means that when she works with children who have rotting teeth because of not having enough of the right kind of food to eat, time is of the essence – each day counts, slacking is not an option. She meant that an abundance of energy is released when you combine your soul force with others to save lives and make change happen – not ethereal, spiritualized change – but real, on the ground, difference. Loving others, especially those who suffer hardship, by being in real relationship with them is energizing, she was saying, and living too easy of a life is enervating, it dissipates energy and a lethargy of spirit is the result.

Though this waking up kind of energy could happen here as well – for now, she finds it easier to wake up when she spends time outside the country. And she has a point. After all, there are more obese, medicated and addicted Americans than ever before.

It is a good Advent question to wonder what we are numbing ourselves to? What makes it so difficult to really and truly wake up – to be alive and energized?

My guess is that pain is what we numb ourselves to – and it’s also what makes waking up hard. We’ve all had the experience of having an arm or leg go to sleep. And we all know what it feels like when the blood starts to circulate again. It hurts! It’s painful! Still – it’s better than having your arm or leg hang there like a dead weight. Usually you don’t notice when your arm is going to sleep – it’s only when you try to move your arm and you can’t that you’re aware of your condition. So you do something about it – you shake your arm a bit, rub it, pinch it – anything to start the circulation flowing again. And the more you wake your arm up – the more it feels like there are ants biting you everywhere – but you keep doing it until you’ve got your arm working again. That’s a bit what it is like to be in another country where you can’t drink the water without boiling it – even in rich homes – and there is no heat – even in upper middle class homes – and real hunger and want is right outside your door. It’s also a bit what Advent is like – this strange waking up time before the celebration of Christ’s birth.

The truth is, of all the countercultural things the church does – I think Advent is the most countercultural. You come to church after Thanksgiving and family and food and good feelings, and maybe you’ve hung your Christmas lights and been to some early sales and you’re starting to enjoy the jingle bells of this good and lovely season - and you come here with cozy holiday festive feelings and then you hear these biblical texts about thieves in the night and people being snatched away and the clang of the hammer on the anvil as swords are pounded into ploughshares – Bang! Bang! And it’s hardly the sweet Bang of Bethlehem either but the clanging Bang of the Cosmic Christ coming in judgment, to judge the nations and put wrongs to right.

Cyril, the Bishop of Jerusalem in 386 wrote a catechetical instruction for those about to be baptized. “We do not preach only one coming of Christ,” Cyril wrote, “but a second as well….His first coming was to fulfill his plan of love, to teach us by gentle persuasion. This time, whether we like it or not, we will be subjects of his kingdom by necessity. Malachi the prophet speaks of the two comings. “And the Lord whom you seek will come suddenly to his temple”, that is one coming – (the one we celebrate at Christmas.) Again Malachi says of another coming: “Look, the Lord almighty will come, and who will endure the day of his entry, or who will stand in his sight. Because he comes like a refiner’s fire, a fuller’s herb, and he will sit refining and cleansing.” That is why the faith we profess has been handed on to you in these words: “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” Our Lord Jesus Christ will come at the end of the world, in glory, at the last day. For there will be an end to this world, and the created world will be made new.” Catechesis 15, 1 – 3

That was written in 386. It’s now 2010. A lot of time has passed – and it’s kind of hard to get excited about this Second Coming. But it is the church’s witness that this age will pass suddenly – and a new age will arise – suddenly. There will be a reversal – and what was right side up, will be down, and what was down will be up. Perhaps the child whose belly was bloated with hunger will be sitting on Christ’s lap as the nations and communities of the world stand before his throne, their deeds and non-deeds writ plain for all to see.

And perhaps the second coming will not be all that dramatic – perhaps it will happen for each of us in a second, in the flash of an eye. Maybe it will happen in a conversation or travel with someone much younger – or much older than yourself – and suddenly, you will see the world differently, and yourself differently, and the possibilities of being the church in God’s beloved world differently.

However it happens for you, may you have the joy of feeling ants biting all over as the blood of the Body of Christ begins to circulate again wherever you have been numbed to sleep – and you begin to rouse from slumber and dead weight and wake up – more fully than ever before. May your Advent be a happy one – a joyful waking up in the first light of the appearance of the Son of God,

A Thanksgiving Alphabet a la The Rev. David Ruhe*

2010-10-31T17:20:00.000-07:00

A Thanksgiving of ABC's
(Idea for the sermon from David Ruhe, Feasting on the Word)

The appointed Psalm for today is a portion of the 119th Psalm – the longest psalm in the Bible. It is composed of 22 sets of 8 verses, one set for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Within each set of verses, each verse begins with the same letter. “The structure can be like a mind-numbing march – but that may, in fact, be the point – more like a labyrinth or a mantra, than a theological treatise – it seems designed to draw you beyond into a state of being bathed in blessedness.” There is a tradition that King David used this psalm to teach his young son Solomon the alphabet – but not just the alphabet for writing letters: the alphabet of the spiritual life. It figures prominently in Orthodox worship – in monasteries it is chanted daily at the midnight service. Among the Germans, it was known as the Christian’s Golden Alphabet, the ABC’s of the praise, love, power and use of the Word of God. The clergyman, Rev. Venn, echoed the experience of many when he wrote, “This is the psalm I have often had recourse to, when I could find no spirit of prayer in my own heart, and at length the fire was kindled and I could pray.”

So I commend Psalm 119 to you – but I also commend to you the practice of creating your own psalms, your own miniature ABC’s of wonder, love and praise – I’ve done that for this morning – and I offer it with the caveat that it does not in any way compare with the Golden Alphabet of Psalm 119 in literary style or in spiritual wisdom.

A is for again and again –The poet Hafiz expressed it best: “In the morning, When I began to wake, It happened again – That feeling that You, Beloved, Had stood over me all night, Keeping watch, That feeling That as soon as I began to stir, You put Your lips on my forehead And lit a Holy Lamp Inside my heart.” “

*B is for balderdash - a word I think our Deacon would love! Synonyms are fiddle-faddle, and piffle – try them – they’re all fun for the mouth! Wading through the morass of political ads - it’s tempting to say “Balderdash!”

C has to be chocolate, the darker the better – a gift from the Aztecs, who considered it a gift from their god. And even richer and deeper and darker and sweeter is the C for the Christ, in whom we live - our way, our truth, our life, our wisdom, our bright morning star.

D is for David’s Psalms, the first songbook of faith. It’s also for daring to dream that God has a mission for you and for me and for the Good Shepherd community.

E is for Energy – that elixir of life of which we always want more – advice? sleep soundly, eat well, exercise faithfully, surround yourself with grateful people who see blessings all around.

F is for my Friends – my true estate, as Emily Dickenson so aptly wrote.

G is for Gratitude - the taproot of joy. Listen to Brother David Steindl-Rast: “If you have all the good luck in the world but take it for granted, it will not make you joyful. Yet even bad luck will give joy to those who manage to be grateful for it. We hold the key to lasting happiness in our own hands. For it is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.”

H is for heaven – the heaven on earth that comes from knowing I belong, from knowing that everyone belongs, and from acting in accord with that knowledge.

I is for increasing – from the morning’s epistle: “ because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing.” (2 Thessalonians 1:4)

J is for judgment and justice – words that I fear until I remember that Jesus died to show for ever and ever that love, gift and grace are the ultimate reality. “Strange,” wrote St. Catherine of Sienna, “that so much suffering is caused because of the misunderstanding of God’s true nature. God’s heart is more gentle than the Virgin’s first kiss upon the Christ. And God’s forgiveness to all, to any thought or act, is more certain than our own being.”

K is for kindness. Need I say more?

L is for love and laughter. “Here is a relationship booster that is guaranteed to work,” the Persian Poet Rumi wrote: “Every time your spouse or lover says something stupid make your eyes light up as if you just heard something brilliant!.”

M is for meandering – what life often feels like – and yet, it is a most meaningful meandering because my hand is held by God, and God forbid He should ever let it go– “because then I would weep so loudly and petition with all my might and cause so much trouble – that God would have to come to his senses, and never do that again!” (paraphrase of Meister Eckart)

N is for nice. It’s good to be nice – but too much nice is not so!

O is for the delicious O antiphons of Advent that lead us to the Christ child:
O wisdom, coming forth from the Most High, filling all creation and reigning to the ends of the earth; come and teach us the way of truth.
O root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the nations; kings will keep silence before you for whom the nations long; come and save us and delay no longer.
O morning star, splendour of the light eternal and bright sun of righteousness: come and bring light to those who dwell in darkness and walk in the shadow of death.
O king of the nations, you alone can fulfil their desires: cornerstone, binding all together: come and save the creature you fashioned from the dust of the earth.
O Emmanuel, hope of the nations and their saviour: come and save us, O Lord our God

P is for play and we all know that play does not need purpose – dancing round and round – how fun it is! Pachelbel’s Canon is not needed for life to go on – but isn’t it one of the most magnificent superfluities of life - providing meaning and rest. And of course, P is for pledging – making the life and the work and the play of the church possible.

Q is for all of my queer friends and all that they add to my life and to the life of the world. Q is for all the vast varieties of humankind and the delightful variations of creation.

R is for rest. St. Augustine said it best – "our hearts are restless Lord, until they rest in thee."

S is saints, the whole beloved community of believers, Jane and Gerrie and Stan and Joe and Tim and Susie and Uncle Bill and Grandad and me and you – and the rarified heroes and heroines of our faith – St. Paul and St. Mary and St. Margaret and St. Nick.

T is for trust. I, for instance, trust you to receive this unorthodox homily with forbearance, if not with enlightenment.

U is for unknowing – that cloud which obscures our senses from the Mystery we call God - God, who can only be known by the heart’s desperate yearning and the ripening of love.

V is for victory – which I hope for the Giants!

W is wonder – When people do things that put me into a judgmental frame of mind – I’m often saved by the simple phrase, “I wonder….” “I wonder what it feels like to think about things that way?” “I wonder what led to that course of action?” It helps me too, to go easier on myself – because believe me, I give myself much cause for wondering.

X marks the spot that is somewhere between nowhere and now here – or as t.s. eliot wrote: “The point of intersection of the timeless with time.... the still point of the turning world." We fall into that still point by grace, and we receive it with gratitude.

Y is for Yes – letting myself be carried away like a kite on the wind – flinging everything away in one gigantic unconditional Yes.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened) e.e.cummings

Z is for Zami and Zacchaeus– my dog, who is a true and faithful companion – and Zacchaeus, featured in our morning’s gospel, (Luke 19: 1 - 10) who found salvation when the Lord said, “Make haste to come down from your perch –for today I am abiding with you in your home.” Our name is not Zacchaeus, nevertheless the Lord says the same to you and to me – “come down - put your feet on the ground – because today I am here to dwell with you – to abide with you – to remain with you.”

Maranatha, come Lord Jesus, and be our guest.

*David Ruhe, Senior Minister, Plymouth, United Church of Christ

Lift up your hearts

2010-10-11T12:57:00.000-07:00

Have any of you worshipped at what are known as praise churches? You know – words on the screen – hands in the air – joyous, contagious singing – Praise music! Musicians are normally driven crazy by it! It’s not complicated music, and it’s not usually of the genre that will become classic – it’s a more in the moment style, a lift up your heads and your hands and your hearts and say thank you! Praise you! Bless you!

It’s not the kind of music we Episcopalian normally sing! Or the kind of worship we usually go in for. But I have seen it’s effect for the good.

On mission trips into Mexico during Easter week, the teams that I led spent Holy Saturday at an Episcopal church in Fullerton. We slept on the floor of their parish hall, and worshipped at the early Easter service the next morning – before driving the rest of the way across the border into Tijuana.

Fullerton was a praise church – a praise Episcopal church – and the teens had usually never experienced anything like it. Some were deeply deeply moved – and on those mornings, dedicated their lives to Christ – some out of the emotional moment – but others in ways that opened up their lives in surprising ways. Two went into the Peace Corps to countries that I’d never heard of before - and even now, years later, are working in Africa in public health and community development. One is the senior warden of his Vestry and offers technical support to several nonprofits, several went into the military to serve their country.

I’m not suggesting that our choir suddenly break into clapping – and that we wave our hands in the air – but it has been my experience that giving free reign to our joy, to externalizing our joy at our salvation in Christ, gives spaciousness and extra room for God to create something new in our lives and in the life of our community. The truth is - there is something about out loud praise and joy that moves us – that saves us – that makes us whole and healthy inside and outside.

Our Eucharistic prayer begins with praise: Lift up your hearts. We lift them up to the Lord. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right to give him thanks and praise. It is right and a good and joyful thing always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.

The core of our lifestyle as Christians is enshrined in the prayer that is the high point of our worship. Thanksgiving is at the heart of a life of faith and love. And it’s not just for the highpoint of worship, or for that lofty feeling we sometimes get on Sunday morning –it is for every part of our mundane, ordinary, trivial, everyday lives.

So how do you lift up your heart? How do you give God thanks and praise not only as your duty – it is right – but as a joyful thing – always and everywhere?

I don’t know about you - but there are many days when I wake up, and the first thing I’m aware of is not a lifted up heart, but a cast down heart. One that is already burdened before the day has even begun! That’s partly the personality I’ve been blessed with ☺, and partly because I am very aware of the needs of the world and this community and my own needs. We live in a time of rather extreme dislocation – a stubbornly high unemployment rate, veterans arriving home from Iraq and Afghanistan in very bad shape - traumatized emotionally as well as physically. I’m aware that every time I get in my car to drive here – I’m contributing carbon to the atmosphere. I’m aware that my retirement investments are most likely earning money from corporations that profit from sales of weapons around the world or in other ways that do not coincide with the gospel of Christ. And the list can go on. I’m aware that we’re sitting on top of a lawsuit that could go any number of ways. You see – there are plenty of reasons to be cast down. I’m guessing that if we all pooled our troubles – the list would be long and discouraging.

But the scriptures over and over remind us to lift up our hearts. They do not say – when things are going well, lift up your heart. Or when things have all worked themselves out, lift up your heart. They just say – Lift up your heart – now. Wherever you find yourself and in whatever circumstance.

Paul wrote some of his most comforting and challenging letters to the churches while he was in chains in prison. Jesus lifted his heart in the Garden of Gethsamene as he was about to be arrested. The first Deacon, Stephen, lifted up his heart as he was being stoned for his faith. Our first reading from Jeremiah was from a letter he wrote as he and a few others were left behind in Jerusalem, and all of the scholars, and artists, and builders and stonemasons and carpenters and anyone of means had been carted off in chains to Babylon by the Persian emperor. Exiled. And what did he say – in essence, lift up your hearts, and live fully – even in your very reduced and circumscribed change of fortune.

In the slums of Tijuana, we were invited into circles of worship - outside without any altar or piano or vestments or candles – only pure voices lifted up in praise and thanksgiving by Christians living in circumstances that I cannot adequately convey - no clean water, no kind of sanitation other than terrible outhouses, no comfortable places to sit or sleep, substandard shacks for shelter.

I KNOW that joy and praise and thanksgiving are entirely a matter of an orientation to God like the sunflower to the sun and not dependent upon the world going your way. And when it’s not the way you wake up, or the way that you feel throughout the day - you can still, through intention, turn towards hope in God and find something for which to thank Him.

King David knew this as well. Psalm 43 verse 5: Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope in God: for I shall yet praise him, [who is] the health of my countenance, and my God.

This is precisely what the lepers are doing. They cry out to Jesus – they don’t give up in shame and embarrassment at their condition, they don’t give in to despondency or apathy. They cry out – they lift up their hearts to the one whom they’ve heard can help them. And their hope is not in vain.

And for the one who pauses long enough to not only recognize that his leprosy is healed – but to really see what has happened and by whose word it has happened? He received an even deeper healing – a salvation kind of healing when he stopped long enough to reflect and turn around and lift up his heart, this time – not in a cry for help, but in worship. There was salvation healing for the one who gave thanks to God – not just in the prescribed, ritualistic way that the others had gone off to the temple to do – but right there, in the open air, he lifted up his heart in praise and thanksgiving –seeing both himself and Jesus in a new light. In the new light of spiritual sight that does not take anything for granted.

The truth is – all ten lepers were healed. As they lifted up their hearts and cried out in their need, Jesus saw them and had compassion upon them. Their healing is not dependent upon their worship of God through the word of Jesus. His word is faithful and it cannot be chained – and it is powerful.

This is the foundation of our praise and thanksgiving – that whether we see God at work or not - God sees us – sees us in our lightest places and in our darkest places – sees us thriving in community and sees us hunkering down in isolation, in secret self abuse and lack of caring – God sees us and is infinitely compassionate towards us –He accompanies us, rescues us, saves us – this is the ground we stand on – not our faithfulness towards God, but God’s never failing faithfulness towards us – this it the ground we stand on as we lift up our hearts, cry out our need and offer our joyful thanksgiving – always and everywhere.

All your possessing - give it up!

2010-09-15T06:33:00.000-07:00

This long weekend signals the end of summer. I’m celebrating with the gift of all my children visiting! Right on the Sunday that Jesus says to hate your family and take up your cross and follow…. And Paul asks Philemon to forego his rights of possession, and refrain from making a sound business decision and instead act as a disciple of Jesus the Christ – and from Jeremiah, a story about clay and potters and judgment. The lectionary is often like that – juxtaposing the way of God with whatever is happening in our lives, whether that is convenient or not!

So – family is what is happening for me. And I think it has been for many of you throughout this summer. Summer is often a time for families to re-connect, could be vacations or reunions or just barbeques in the back yard. And as we leave summer and move into Fall – some of you are saying good bye to children heading off to college. Some of you are saying good bye for a few hours at the kindergarten door. I’ve watched parents all this past couple weeks bringing their three and four year olds to preschool – and waving at them as they disappear around the corner and into a new world. Some of you said goodbye to children long ago, and now are thrilled – like me – when they come back for a brief visit.

So – whether are children are at home, or grown and gone, our job as parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and family friends, is to let go – whether it is that traumatic first day of kindergarten, or seeing them off on the plane that will take them to Europe or Africa or Latin America. Parenting means giving everything you have, but giving it with a completely open hand. And none of us do that perfectly.

Neither did our parents. We all want to have had parents who gave us roots to ground us and wings to fly with. But the truth is, we are all grounded with roots that are a bit shallow in some places, and we all fly with wings that were clipped here and there. That’s how therapists make their living.

So, the love we give and the love we receive is an imperfect mixture of altruism and selfishness. But it’s good. And it provides us with meaning and shelter in the world. There’s a book with a great title, “I only say this because I love you”. In it, Deborah Tannen writes, “Family represents a sense of belonging – a foundation for everything else we are or do. It feels that if we can fit into our families, we can fit into the world. And if our families can see us for who we really are, we can be who we are not only in the family but also in the world. But the coin has another side: If members of our family are critical, if those who, presumably, know us best and care the most find us wanting, then who will love us?”…But regardless of whether our experience of family is mostly positive or not the majority of us “continue to keep calling – by telephone, email, or in our hearts-because we want the connection that family affords.” So we read with horror this gospel passage about hating one’s family. It goes against the human grain. It’s distasteful.

It was also distasteful to the people to whom Jesus said it. It was a guaranteed crowd thinner.

Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. He knew what awaited him there but the people around him did not. Still when there was a large crowd following him, you might think he’d say: “Glad you’re here!” But instead he said: “Whoever comes after me and doesn’t hate their father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sister, even life itself….don’t bother. You can’t be my disciple. If you want to follow me, you need to carry a cross and give up all your possessions.” It wasn’t the first time that Luke reports Jesus saying things like this. Earlier he’d said, “I come to bring division. A family of five will be divided two against three.”

Traditional biblical scholarship says that this is oriental hyperbole. That’s true. It’s also the way that prophetic biblical language re-balanced the people’s priorities. It’s a big and dramatic kind of language. For example, Jesus called the religious leaders to account because they were so focused on the letter of the law regarding tithing, but neglecting the higher order of kindness and compassion. You are straining for fleas, he said, but swallowing camels. That’s hyperbole to make a point!

Hate is hyperbole that gets our attention. And if we are students of Jesus and not inclined to simply dismiss what the gospels report of him, then it makes us wonder what he might have been driving at with such forceful language. I believe he was pointing our need to re-balance our priorities. If we make our children or our spouse or our parents or our jobs or our church into our gods – then we are not only out of whack spiritually, but we are endangering the very connections that we desire so deeply.

My guess is that, like me, what is most dear to you is your mom and your dad, your children, your husband, your wife, your partner, your life. We are deeply inclined to want to cling to these people. We are deeply inclined to want to possess our life as something we’ve earned. But our life, and the people who are the nearest and dearest to us are gifts. If we try to grasp them, hang on to them, make them be who and how we want them to be, we suffocate them or we alienate them – and either way we end up lonely and unfulfilled.

So the key to having fulfilling relationships is in the final, “therefore” of this passage. “Therefore, none of you can become my disciples if you do not give up your possessions.” Actually, from the Greek, we could also say "all your possessing." "So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessing."

What is Jesus getting at? I think this: our human problem boils down to one of possessing. We don't simply desire the things that are of value to us, the things we "love." We also want to possess them. We love each other to death. It's our possessing things that turns love to hate and life to death. When we give up trying to claim our children and our lovers and our positions and possess them for our very own, we are able to receive them in a way that offers everyone spaciousness and freedom and the experience of true love. How do we do that?

It helps to look to Jesus because Jesus came and did it. Jesus became human like one of us and was able to love in a way that didn’t love us to death. The key mark of Jesus as the form of God in human flesh was that he did not grasp at equality with God but became obedient. God’s love is not a possessing love; it’s a gifting love. It’s a love not bent on possessing, but one that gives, even in the face of death.

God, as revealed by Jesus, is the creator who does not grasp. Who gives us life and breath and being – freely. Who sends rain and sun on the just and the unjust, on the lovely and the unlovely alike, without regard for return gratitude. This God that Jesus revealed, initiated a way of life and a people that that seeks to practice a gracious kind of freedom towards others that lets them be exactly who and what they are, without withdrawing love and respect and value - just as God does for every one of us.

As we learn through the Spirit to live our lives with open hands – remembering always that the people we love, and life itself is sheer gift – as we do this more and more, we are choosing life, not death, blessing not curse. To truly let go, to pry our fingers off the wheel of life and off our children and our spouses and friends and jobs and church and anything and everything that is not God – it can feel like death. It can feel like we are flinging ourselves off into the sheer unknown – and we are. That’s why life lived under the sign of the cross is not meant to be done solo. The Christ life can only be lived in community – as flawed and fragile as community is. We do this letting go looking to the witness of others who live this way as well – and above all to the assurance of Jesus that it is the way to life – abundant life. Abundant love. Abundant wealth – true wealth.

These past couple of weeks, I’ve been watching and hearing the children and teachers of the preschool get acquainted. I think I can sing the bathroom hand washing song in my sleep! I’ve watched the children unknowingly follow Jesus’ command as they turned their backs on their parents and step out into a new corner of the world. And I’ve watched their parent help them to do so – being encouraging and available and trustworthy – without attempting to hold their children back. They were all growing in the image of God, whether they knew it or not.

Hatched Open Hearts

2010-09-01T10:52:00.000-07:00

During vacation a couple weeks ago, my mother and I looked through old family photo albums. I have this ongoing project to rescue old photos by scanning them into my Macbook Pro and then creating individualized books with them. I’ve discovered that looking through old albums unlocks forgotten stories. When I ask Mom, “tell me what was happening here and who these people were,” I have to be ready to type fast as I get the story of my great uncle’s kidnapping in Hawaii, and my great grandmother's mincemeat pie recipe. The stories, just like the photos, are loosely organized – but they are all about memories, connections and meaning.

Parishes stories are like that too. Over the last year – I have heard a lot of stories. About the tree dedicated to Michael Agliano in the front. Now accompanied by the tree dedicated to three year old Sebastian Balch. The watering system and the work that Charlie Haberkorn put into it. The BBQ area and how Bill Deming decided it should be cleared and then organized the people who came together to do the work and how Bill then built the big picnic table that we still sit around on Wednesday evenings. The kneelers – and how the women searched for designs from all over the world – and finally decided upon their own design featuring the birds and animals and flowers of this area. The windows – and how Carol replaced one of them with shower door glass when her daughter was going to be married here, and she wanted the windows to match, at least somewhat! And I’ve heard about shenanigans as well. Something about abandoned cars down the creek, and boys going off on adventures to bring various parts back to build forts… I think Mike could probably provide the details! Just like old family photo albums - the stories fit together – sometimes quite loosely, and sometimes we’re only able to recognize the thread that binds them all together after a long time has passed. But the thread is there – and almost always the thread that binds families and parishes together, as well as individual lives, has to do with love and loyalty, faithfulness and forgiveness.

Today’s epistle is like looking through a congregational photo album. The letter to the Hebrews gives what appear to be random snapshots – of hospitality, prison, marriage, adultery, finance, but they are bound together under the banner of love. “Let mutual love continue,” the writer begins, echoing Jesus’ commandment to “Love one another.”

But how did that congregation turn a broad injunction to love others into actual behavior that led to a measurably, demonstrably different way of life? How did they “let mutual love continue”? How do we?

The letter writer began with hospitality, first with those closest to you and then widening the circle wider and wider until you are including the stranger, the exile, the one who has no one else. So your first stop in this practice of graciousness is with the person with whom you share your tube of toothpaste. Then it widens to your parish partner with whom you put on coffee hour. The truth is, this parish lives on mutual love. We have several elderly who are no longer able to come to church and they thrive on visits – the thing is, as I hear over and over from you and as I know from my own visits – it’s you, the visitor, that gets the greatest blessing! Mutual love is just that – it’s mutual –everyone gets blessed! Then the circle widens and includes our greater church family. There are pictures and thank you notes on the Outreach table in the back from Iglesia Episcopal San Pablo Apostol, an Episcopal mission church in Seaside, with whom we partnered to provide back packs for children in need. The children’s smiles tell it all!

The next photo shot in the Hebrews album is about showing hospitality to strangers. Actually “hospitality” is philaxenia – which means phila, as in Philadelphia – brotherly love – and xena- as in xenophobia. Xenaphobia means fear of the stranger. You’ve heard that in the news recently about border immigration and the building of an Islamic Center in the blocks around Ground Zero. But this photo from the Book of Hebrews is about just the opposite – right after mutual love for other believers – is philaxenia – showing brotherly love for the stranger. Maybe you start small – with the new clerk in the check out line at the grocery store who doesn’t know what he is doing, and you are running late. You smile at him – from your feet, to your liver, to your heart, to your mind, to your face – the whole of you graciously smiling. Try it. You will get a blessing for sure – he may or may not be an angel in disguise, but you will be.

But the clerk in the grocery store isn’t where we stop. This morning’s gospel gives us a clear and discomforting picture of hospitality to strangers, especially to the desperately poor and those on the margins of society. Jesus didn’t talk about handouts. He talked about the more costly path of relationship, of real conversation, and of kindness that is vulnerable to the realities of being human together.

I read recently in the NYTimes about the death of Judith Peabody. Anyone know that name? I didn’t either – she’s a New Yorker! – but I’m glad I do know. Judith grew up in a world of privilege. She attended Miss Hewitt’s Classes in New York City and graduated form the Ethel Walker School in Connecticut. Her coming out party was held at the Piping Rock Club on Long Island. Her name and countless photographs appeared in Women’s Wear Daily and New York Social Diary and in fashion and social columns in Vogue and The New York Times. And yet, this was not her whole world. Her whole world included Hispanic gang members in East Harlem, as well as recovering drug addicts from the tenements of Harlem. In the mid-1980’s, she showed up at a home for gay men dying of a new, dreaded disease, called AIDS. She showed up, without fail, every other Friday for years – doing the work of physically caring for men who were social pariahs. At a time when people thought that just being in the same room could cause you to catch the illness.

The truth is, there are many such angels here this morning. This letter to the Hebrews encourages you to continue letting your light shine at home, with other believers, and with all the complications and blessings of widening your circle further and further to include real relationships with real people who are real different.

And these final double sided snapshots – “keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have.” I love how the scriptures zing right to the heart in such a few words – like all worthwhile pictures do.

The good news is that Jesus stepped in to save us from the death trap of preoccupation with self. To help us become content with exactly who we are, at rest, in God. To set us free from having to buy the next best self-help book that promises freedom and happiness.

But what a way Jesus opened to us! Open your life and your heart to those who don’t matter; to those who don’t count; to those who are overlooked, to those who cannot pay you back with social invitations or with anything resembling the currency of prestige. Jesus pointed us towards Life by pushing us to the edge of our very human, fundamental fears about not mattering, about being nobody, ultimately really about death.

That is why Christianity is dangerous and why the Pharisees were “watching him closely”, not in a friendly sort of way at all. Because the pulsating generative truth at the heart of the gospel is that you must lose your life in order to save it. Or as the modern theologian, Marcus Borg puts it; “your heart must be hatched open.”

The snapshots contained in the letter to the Hebrew’ show us what a hatched open heart looks like. It is an awakened heart filled with gratitude and wonder and the mystery of joining hands with our spouses and our fellow believers and with the prisoners and the poor. It is a lively heart that imitates Christ who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a servant.

This is our family album, bound together by love and faithfulness. It is a series of snapshots of each one of us, out in the world, practicing our religion, letting the Holy Spirit work through the sacraments and the scriptures and our daily encounters with others to break our hearts open so that we do, in truth, let mutual love continue and we are known for our brotherly love toward the stranger.

Resources:
The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg
The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz
Peace, Walter Brueggemann
Christian Century, 8/24/04, Living by the Word, Bruce Wollenberg
New York Times, July 27, 2010, Obituaries

Faith Stories

2010-08-10T07:52:00.000-07:00

"Faith is the assurance of things hoped for / the conviction of things unseen."

The verse lends itself to being on a plaque, don’t you think? It’s easy to memorize and it’s comforting because we know in our bones, that it is true. Who among us has not experienced being assured of something that hasn’t happened yet – but that you know will happen? Or been absolutely convinced of things you can’t see or feel or touch?

But also just as surely – who among us has not doubted, not questioned, not had those wondering/wandering thoughts? It’s a popular misconception that if you have faith – you don’t have doubt. But that is not the case. Doubts and questions are not the opposite of faith. They are often the indicators of a faith that is pulsing with life and that is strong enough to welcome questions and wonderings and dark doubts as members of the family with secure places at the table. So don’t let doubt scare you. Don’t let questions frighten you. They are part and parcel of mature faith.

Mature faith is also filled with paradox. The author of this letter to the Hebrews isn’t shy about that. He holds in creative tension to very different directions that faith takes. The first direction is into the past / faith holds fast to that which has been received and experienced. The past is how we get our bearings. How we know who we are. Active, mature faith is grounded in tradition and in experience. And that tradition and experience is passed on – mostly through stories.

In my family – a hold fast story is about my great grandfather who was a banker in the Midwest and lost everything. He sold all his possessions to try to make his depositors whole, and then, penniless, brought his family to California. He never recovered from that disaster, his sons did somewhat, and succeeding generations have even more – but the story is carried forward in the McConnell clan, to say, this is what faithful people do – they hold fast to integrity, regardless of personal cost, and they move forward, regardless of fear.

The author of Hebrews immediately follows the verse that defines faith with stories about the ancestors – Abel, Enoch, Noah, and Abraham. And interestingly, he re-interprets the story of Abraham – smoothing out the rough edges of that mixed bag of an Old Testament man and making him into the epitome of New Testament faithfulness. Kind of like I just did with my great grandfather’s story!

So, the first movement of faith is for the past to be made useful – for definition and direction- and the second movement is into freedom of action. I am not speaking about linear or hierarchical movements. In God’s realm, in the realm of active faith – these can happen simultaneously as well as in a back and forth sort of way. The important things is that as you listen with one ear to your life and to the life of your community and world - as you listen with one ear to the actual circumstances and times in which you live – and with the other ear tuned to the Living God – as you listen this way – the way Noah listened, and Abraham listened, and the people who built this parish listened - you are summoned into a new way of being, into an open future of possibilities you could not have imagined on your own.

I’m guessing that as my great grandfather and great grandmother drove their rickety car across the Rockies and into Los Angeles, they had absolutely no idea what to expect. From a grand home with a grand piano and parties and horse racing across the plains of the Midwest, to a small, dark home in a crowded California city – they had no way of knowing how things would turn out. What they did know, just as Abraham knew, and countless people of faith have known, is that God not abandon his people, AND he calls them forward, even through the terrors of the unknown.

It is true – what the author of Hebrews reports – that some of these died before they reached the promised Land – the promised hope. Moses acted out of the assurance of God’s dream of freedom for slaves, but he died before he entered the promised Land. Martin Luther King lived in the conviction and assurance of the hope that God’s dream of justice and righteousness could be realized in the United States of America, but he did not live to experience it.

And back to Abraham – he too died before God’s promise of starry descendents and a promised land had been realized. The point is – the life of faith is not necessarily about the full realization in your lifetime of the hopes that God has planted in your heart – the life of faith is about faithful action in response to God’s call. God called Abraham out of his ease and into the unknown – and Abraham obeyed. He took care of all the practical details– and then … then …. He waited, because there was a long gap of many years – over a decade – before he ever heard from God again.

As if no time had elapsed, God appeared to him in a dream with the preposterous statement that Abraham’s descendants would be as numerous as the starry heavens….at which point, Abraham talked back. “Not sure if you’ve noticed, God – but I’m an old man, and my wife Sarah, is WAY past the time when it would be possible for her to have children.. It’s ok and all….I don’t regret having followed your call / but let’s get real here.”

And then, lo and behold, Isaac happened. Isaac – meaning Laughter! They named their son that because Abraham and Sarah had laughed so hard they cried when the angels came and let them know that they were going to have a baby. Can’t you just hear those two old people having the time of their lives – “Laughter, come here, your mom wants you.” “Laughter, stop that right now!” “Laughter, dinner’s ready!”

And then, without any smile in his heart….“Laughter, come, we’re going to the mountains to sacrifice.” “But dad, I see the wood and the knife – where’s the lamb?” “God will provide, Laughter, let’s just keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

This is faith. When there is no joy, when there is no peace, when there is no reasonable explanation – there is still trust. Because ultimately Faith is not a noun. It is not something we can possess and patent. It isn’t something we can conjure up. It is a gift. It is God’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. To pour it out for you – this is God’s desire and God’s pleasure. What is your part? Well – how do you receive joy? You open yourself up as much as you can – and receive it and it creates a state of being that makes things possible for you that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

It was all gift. Abraham and Sarah’s wealth was a gift, as was their journey, as was their trust in the God who promised descendants more numerous than the stars, as was their continued trust when their one son, “Laughter” was almost snatched away from them.

Can you receive your life this way - as pure and total gift - your resources, your bank account, your home, your spouse, your children, your employment, your lack of employment, your situation, whatever it is – happy or sad – whatever it is? This is the groundwork of faith. This is the substance of things hoped for - to participate in in the Great Thanksgiving, the Great Eucharist of thanksgiving for the brokenness that is our wholeness. This is the life of faith – lived in both directions – re-interpreting the past and moving with freedom into the future – offering thanksgiving for life, and bread, and wine, and water, and the shelter of companions – thanksgiving for the very life of God that is with us and in us.

Pray Like Jesus

2010-07-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

During my rotation at Novato Community hospital, I was called to the bedside of a twenty five year old man with a painful and incurable disease that would not kill him. It would only leave him more and more disabled and in pain that could not be completely addressed by opiates. He’d been in and out of hospitals for years, and here he was once again. He let me know that before now, he had always been able to talk himself back into believing in the goodness of God, but this time he said he’d just hit a wall and couldn’t get past the bleakness of his situation. Why?” he asked. “Why doesn’t God hear me? Why doesn’t God answer me? I am Christian. I have many people around the world praying for me. But things only get worse, with no end in sight. I’m not even praying for healing any more, just that I would find purpose and meaning – but I don’t hear God. Still, I am not done praying.”

When we enter into prayer – we enter into deep mystery and there are often not very satisfying answers to our questions. Because when there is a disparity – as there often is – between our expectations and the results – there are basically two options we have to explain this: The first option is about me – I’m not good enough. I’m not praying the right way. I don’t have enough faith. And the second option is about God: God doesn’t care. God doesn’t listen. Or finally, God doesn’t exist. Because most of us are pious, we usually take the first option and think that there is something wrong with us. But I’m guessing that some of you know people who have taken the other option – and given up on God.

What was remarkable about this young man who had suffered for most of his life, and could only see further suffering into the future – was that, as far as I could tell, he hadn’t taken either option. He clearly did not believe there was something wrong with him or with his faith or with the purity of his prayers. And he had not given up on God. What he had done instead was enter into deep relationship, into deep struggle with God, into conversation with Mystery where most of us would hesitate to step. But it is the kind of conversation that Jesus had in mind for his disciples. It is the kind of relationship into which the Christ invites you and me. Because basically, “a Christian is someone who is engaged in lifelong training in how to pray like Jesus.” Will Willimon

The first think I notice about this prayer is that it is not sentimental, or pious, or particularly devotional. It is a prayer for people on the road – a prayer for people who are figuring out, step by step, how to live with God in Christ.

So this prayer just starts - "Father." Not as someone who has to beg for a hearing, or for forgiveness, or for anything for that matter. Father. Almost like a teenage son asking for the car keys so he can take his girlfriend out. There’s an incredible presumption of familiarity and trust.

When my son was about three years old, he would make the rounds of the dinner table, looking to see what was on everyone else’s plate and asking for a share in whatever looked good. Somehow the zucchini on my plate looked better than the same thing on his plate. He was completely shameless in his asking.

And I say shameless for a reason – our translation uses the word “persistent” - the friend is persistent in his knocking and so gets a response of the three loaves of bread - it is easy to think that wearing out your knees in prayer is one way to get God to answer – but the word does not mean "persistent" so much as it means "shameless." Be shameless in your asking - it has a different flavor than persistent doesn’t it.

On the Good Shepherd camping trip last year, one of the young children, much like my son, quite shamelessly made the rounds asking each of us what our snack was. Someone had an orange, someone else a cookie, someone else a sandwich. Whatever she liked, she simply asked for a bite of it – or the whole thing if it was especially tasty to her. This is the kind of shameless asking that Jesus is recommending. The same kind of boldness. The same kind of familiarity and trust in our status as beloved children of God. By the way, my son grew up to have excellent table manners and is socially quite competent – so our parental indulgence did not spoil him! And I’m quite sure our young parishioner will have excellent manners as well! Jesus however, isn’t interested in our manners when it comes to prayer. He didn’t teach a formula - 2+2=4, pray this way and get this result. No, he taught boldness, confidence, trust and surrender. Above all, he taught childlike receptivity.

I was at the Kodet household earlier this week, and watched Todd carry his baby granddaughter, Charlotte, off to bed, wrapped up in a towel after her mommy had bathed her – Charlotte was completely relaxed and cooing in his arms – a picture of trust and happiness. Even when she began crying, her trust in the solidity of his arms did not diminish.

Jesus trusted - and when the soldiers were on the way to arrest him, he prayed: “Father, if it is your will take this cup away from me.” He asked, he pleaded, he wept– and he did not get what he wanted. Nevertheless, his trust remained, through the absence of any positive response from his Father to his prayer.

This is what I was privileged to be a part of in the hospital room of the young man hooked up to a morphine drip that barely masked his pain. A conversation that did not, from any human point of view, look satisfactory. A man willing to have deep relationship with God and not turn aside. In truth, I was the one tempted to turn aside by offering pat answers. But when you are face to face with the cross, with suffering, any glib response crumble to ash in one’s mouth. All I could do was to stay with him, listen to his questions and his struggle, and not turn away.

So the disciples asked Jesus what you and I would want to ask him – how to pray. And at one level, his answer is not very satisfying. He gives no mathematical formula, and he doesn’t give any assurances of outcome. In fact, if his life is any indication, there are certainly no assurances of the things we often pray for: ease, prosperity, health, lack of suffering. Quite the opposite, in fact.

On the other hand, what we are offered is of immensely greater value – and that is a living, amazing relationship of familiarity and boldness with God, an invitation to shamelessness on our part, in what we ask for and how we are invited to approach our God. This section on prayer ends with the assurance that God readily desires and is ready at any time to give us the gift of the Holy Spirit – of God with us – the Lord, the Giver of Life – the one who will sustain us in all trials and temptations and who will deliver us from all evil. The Holy Spirit is ours for the asking – our challenge is to receive. Receive. Receive. When we lift up our hearts before God, our hands open in prayer, it is this that we are truly praying for, asking for – and which we can, without any hesitation, affirm that God pours down upon us.

In this context, asking publically and in common, that God gift us with the presence and guidance and courage of the Holy Spirit, I turn to a vexing issue. As many of you know, Good Shepherd has been challenged for some time with the Gordian knot of a gift of twenty acres that entailed a bank loan, in that the guarantor of the loan became unable to follow through. We have an excellent negotiating team which has been working hard to resolve this for the past year – however, in this past week, Rabobank filed a complaint against the church for nonpayment of this loan. The Vestry has referred the lawsuit to our attorneys to evaluate our options and to advise us in responding to the bank’s lawsuit. The Vestry has asked the land committee to continue to work on solutions – and we will keep you informed of all material developments. Because matters like this requires that all communications between an attorney and client be kept confidential, however, we cannot respond to specific questions. What I can say is that, while the person who guaranteed the loan has also been sued, we don’t know of any basis by which anyone else – parishioner or Vestry member or priest, could be found responsible for this loan which was taken out in the name of the parish.

I know that this announcement kind of takes the wind out of the room – and that it most likely raises lots of questions and emotions. And my guess is that everything I’ve just preached about has likely flown out of your minds. The truth is, however, that this is precisely the type of situation in which disciples of Jesus flees to God, to pestering God shamelessly for what? For relief? For guidance? For bad things to go away? For solutions? Yes – for all that. But even more – for the Holy Spirit to descend, to cover, to encourage, to enable us to bear witness to the ways of the Kingdom. And as we run to God in prayer for the Parish, we will not just pray for ourselves, but for all those who are affected by economic downturns. We will pray for all those who need word of God’s Love – the Word which is the reason for our being and the wellspring of our life.

While the Land committee and Vestry are taking care of the legal issues, I would like to invite anyone who would like to form a weekly prayer group to see me after the service in the side chapel.

We pray, just as we live, just as we move and have our being, In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

Content and Contingent

2010-07-07T21:55:00.000-07:00

Anyone know what the acronym KISS stands for?

Right! Keep it simple stupid!

It’s a principle used in software development, in mathematics, in scientific theory, and in AA. It can be traced back and back - through the Franciscan logician of the 14th century – William of Ockham, and before him, to the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas, and before him to Aristotle – and before him – to Commander’s Naaman’s servant in the 2nd book of Kings.

“If he told you something difficult to do, wouldn’t you go all out trying it? How much more, since he gave you very simple instructions.”

How we love to complicate things! Especially when it comes to things that are important to us – like love, like relationship, like healing, like God. And most of the time, it’s the complications of our head – of our thinking – that trips us up and creates problems. Thus - the relevance of KISS wisdom – the servant’s wisdom in this story about the Commander and Elisha.

Don’t you just love his question! “If he’d told you something really difficult to do – wouldn’t you go all out doing it?” It reminds me of fairy tales – you know the fairy tale drill: before you get to marry the princess, you have to steal the golden harp from the closet in the dragon’s cave, but first you have to ask the mythical bird that nests on the highest mountain peak to find out where the dragon’s cave is, and then you have to cross the barren desert to get to the dragon’s cave…and on your travels you will fight giants. And of course, the hero always says – “YES! Let me go on the quest and I will come back triumphant or die trying.”

But Elisha didn’t ask the war hero to go on a complicated quest. He simply told him to go immerse himself seven times in the Jordan River – the quentissential River of Israel – the River of the Hebrews, the same River in which John would later baptize Jesus.

It wasn’t physically difficult to do this; but it did mean swallowing his pride in several ways:

1. The Jordan River is not known now, and was not known then, for being a beautiful river. It’s muddy. It’s not impressive.

2. There were much nicer rivers in the Commander’s homeland.

3. Why should his healing happen in Hebrew river water, when his own people’s river water was clearly better?

4. Why was he even talking to this slightly insane medicine man out in the desert who wouldn’t even come out of his shack to personally greet him, the General of all the King’s men?

So - Elisha’s instructions were simple – but following them was not. It meant that Commander Naaman had to break all his patterns of habitual behaviour. He was the right hand man of the King, the Commander of the Empire’s armies - accustomed to giving orders. Accustomed to being obeyed. Accustomed to luxury. In other words, he felt entitled. At the very least, Elisha should do something showy and complicated – a shaman dance, wave his arms around, perform magic – something to compliment and confirm his importance. Instead Elisha gave him the one thing necessary for his healing.

I’m guessing that this is, in fact, why this scientific principle has been adopted by recovery groups. Because we are all at least a little bit addicted to our own sense of importance – to our own sense of entitlement. And the truth is, we cannot become truly sober, truly in tune with reality, until we get a truer perspective on where we actually stand in the order of things – until we lay down, let go of a sense of inflated importance.

For some of us, that sense of importance isn’t always on the positive side of things. We can also become inflated with our sense of being terrible sinners – so terrible that God couldn’t possibly really forgive or love us. My friends – the conviction that somehow you are much worse than your neighbor – is just as inflated as the sense that you are much better than your neighbor. We all carry shame of one kind or another. We all carry hurts of one kind or another. We all carry weaknesses, and we all carry strengths. We all bleed. And we all breathe.

William of Ockam, was a logician and Franciscan monk in the 14th century. His theorem popularized the idea that the best explanation is usually the simplest explanation. For Ockham, the only truly necessary entity was God; everything else, the whole of creation, is radically contingent through and through. That means that you and I and everything we see and know is not eternal – we cannot generate our own existence. In other words, God can make something out of nothing. We cannot.

The corollary to that is that, in reality, no one person is more important or less important any other person.

Elisha’s simple instructions sent Commander Naaman colliding with this truth – and he went into a rage – a tantrum really. A few Sundays ago – also in the book of Kings - we heard about another tantrum – remember? King Ahab crawled into his bed, and cried and wouldn’t eat anything, when he didn’t get his way with the small landowner, Naboth. He wanted Naboth’s vineyard, and Naboth said no.

It’s obvious from these stories in the Book of Kings, that entitlement leads to a kind of psychological and spiritual fragility, a lack of resilience and actual illness. Would you agree with me that it is much more difficult for those in positions of privilege to accept this core truth of universal dependency on God and absolute equality with every other person?

When Jesus taught, “Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth.” “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God,” I’m guessing that at least one aspect of what he had in mind was that blessedness lies in contentment with our dependency on God and our equality with others. Content and contingent. Simple, yes?

There is healing for you and for me – let’s not hesitate to wash in whatever our version of the Jordan River is.

Amen.

Tell Somebody

2010-06-20T16:00:00.000-07:00

Luke 8: 26 - 39

My brother and sister in law were visiting yesterday, on their way north. My son and his girlfriend and my mom were over for dinner as well. You know how it is when you’ve got family or friends over. You tell stories while you cook. Christy had brought green beans from the farmer’s market. While she snapped beans, I made the rice and the guys grilled the mahi mahi. Christy started to tell us about a new vegie burger she liked. She obviously really liked it – and she told us all the details – it wasn’t trying to be meat, it was clearly a vegie burger – and it was stocked with veggies! A fava bean fell out of it when she was eating it! She told us where she bought it – Trader Joe’s – Where it was located in the store – the frozen section – What it had in it – tofu and vegetables – How you could eat it – in buns or tacos with salsa – Half way through her testimony, I was pretty sure that when I was at Trader Joe’s next, I would go to the frozen food aisle and see about these vegie burgers.

Testimony – Witnessing – it just means telling stories about how this happened to me, and it was really great– and I want you to know about it. It’s called viral marketing – people telling other people. It’s the kind of marketing that you can’t buy but every business covets it. It works far better than any advertising.

It’s how you and I came to faith. Someone, somewhere, let us know that this was important to them, and that something good, maybe even something miraculous happened for them through Jesus the Christ. I came to faith through a lot of people and stories – but the ones the jump to mind are a Sunday School teacher, Miss Emma, and a minister, The Rev. Vernon Story and a piano teacher, Mrs. Phyllis Corn. Did any of these people sit me down and tell me about Jesus? No. On my birthday, Miss Emma made me a little book that had nothing to do with religion - but it was as clear as day to me that the sweetness of her gift had everything to do with her faith. The Rev. Vernon Story talked about Jesus because it was his job – but what really communicated to me about his faith was the way he listened to me – and how I saw him really listening to a lot of people, some of whom didn’t like him very much at all. I don’t ever recall my piano teacher, Mrs. Corn, saying much of anything in particular about God, but I knew she sang in the choir and that music and religion were connected. If you think back into your own life, my guess is that there are people scattered throughout your history that told you their story – whether in words or actions or both - in a way that opened doors for you into your own faith journey. If you’ve ever been a part of a small group – maybe a bible study that meets consistently – you know that hearing how other people are making connections between what is in the book and what is in their lives is what really keeps you coming back week after week – it’s the personal stories that open doors for you keep to going deeper into your own life with God. It’s how we learn - from each other.

And it’s not just advertisers and marketers that know that. Jesus knew it too. When the man who had been healed of all those demons wanted so badly to get into the boat with Jesus and go with him into his next adventure – Jesus gently, but firmly, said “no. Go back home. Let everyone see you, see how you are healed, see what a difference there is in your life. Tell everyone what God has done for you.” And that’s what the man did.

Did he talk about it much? Well, I’m guessing that he did. It was a pretty dramatic turn around for him. It was worth a lot of corner store talk. But more than his talk – I’m guessing that what really piqued people’s interest and attention and respect – was the simple fact that something profound had happened to him. He was no longer dogged by truly awful demons. He was in his right mind. He was cleaned up and clothed. He was a full fledged disciple of this Rabbi teacher that had visited them. He didn’t have to say a whole lot to get their attention.

Still, the telling was in fact a big piece of what Jesus had sent him back to do.

“Go back home. Tell what God has done for you.” There was a small Episcopal church in the Midwest that called a priest, but had trouble paying it’s bills. Small was getting smaller. Now they are growing and thriving and vital. What happened? Pretty much only one thing. They began telling their stories. They began to adopt Pentecost ways – prophetic ways – which simply means they began to notice and to share what God was doing in their lives.

Now the truth is – that is not the way we normally see our lives. We don’t naturally have that grid – so to have stories to tell, we need to see with new eyes. And that’s what the people in this church began to do. They began to see with Easter eyes – which means they began to see the events and people and situations in their lives through the eyes of Resurrection – through the eyes of people with whom the Christ was living and breathing and present. And when they began to see their lives in this way, they began to have stories to tell – and they told them. To themselves. To each other. And the fire was lit.

The Vestry met this past week – and we did just that. Broke into groups of four, and told each other what God, through Christ, had been doing in our lives since the last time we met as a Vestry in May. We heard about everything from listening with Jesus’ ears to a grieving child, to being calm in the midst of major trials at work, to finding deep peace while making decisions. And you know what? We went on to conduct the business of the parish with listening ears, with calmness and deep peace – and a lot of laughter and joy. When we see our lives through the eyes of faith – through the eyes of people who are sustained by the living presence of the Christ in us and with us – and when we share that, so as to encourage each other, and build one another up – something happens.

There’s a song – remember music and religion go together?

C Em F G
It only takes a spark to get a fire going.

C F G
And soon all those around, can warm up in the glowing.
F
That's how it is with God's love,
Dm G Dm7 G Dm7 C
Once you've experienced it, you spread His love to everyone;
F
You want to pass it on.

We can do this. We do experience God’s love here. And we can pass it on. Ultimately, it’s what we have as a church. It is our primary mission. We don’t have to make anything up, or make anything bigger or better than it is. We don’t even have to tell it to strangers. Telling each other will do.

So what has God, through Christ, been doing in your life this past week?

Resources: Pass it On, by Kurt Kaiser

Indwelling Unity

2010-05-18T16:35:00.000-07:00

Before he died on the cross, Jesus prayed for you and for me. Just that’s enough to make you stop in your tracks. My grandmother prayed for me – especially during my college years! - and even though she died some time ago, her prayers continue to reverberate in my heart. Knowing that Jesus prayed for me and for you – for all the believers that would come to believe – knowing that Jesus prayed for us before he died – that rocks! And his prayer continues to reverberate in the life of the church. It guides the life of the church. Jesus prayed for the Indwelling Christ to sustain us and guide us. He prayed that we would know unity – with each other, with people who are very different from us, with God.

Now it’s easy for us to confuse unity with uniformity. But they are not the same thing. Unity doesn’t mean voting the same way, or having the same opinions. It does not even mean that we all like each other – although not actively disliking each other certainly helps. The unity that Jesus prayed for, and that the Holy Spirit gives, does not depend upon agreement.

The unity Jesus prayed for is a gift from God into which we are born. Because the baptismal waters – whether they are the actual waters of baptism in a church – or the waters of baptism through crisis - either way, these are our spiritual birth waters. Baptism begins a life time journey that begins in that big word – Change. It is a journey in which we pass out of the world’s ways that are centered in self-gain and self-protection, into a new life in Christ that is centered and grounded in the security of God’s creative and eternal love. Our unity is born in the unfathomable grace of God and it is nurtured through our attentiveness to God’s still, small voice.

But where do we actually experience unity? Here’s three stories of unity that I’ve seen recently:

First story takes place right here in this Diocese. We are a living experiment in unity that does not depend upon uniformity. Just ten miles away at Mission House in Seaside is a thriving Latino congregation, San Pablo Apostol, that does not look, in any way, like Good Shepherd – from the overflowing numbers of children, to the language spoken, to the issues in which people are engaged – and yet we gather around the same Table and the same Bishop. We began to build visible bridges of unity when Juana, an officer and long time member of San Pablo Apostol, catered the Good Shepherd Vestry retreat dinner with the most delicious chicken mole, and it is my hope that some of the children of San Pablo Apostol will join us for our Vacation Bible School.

Second story takes place right here through Bishop Mary. Through her and with her, we share humor, affection, worship and service with a conservative African Bishop and Diocese in Western Tangyanika and a high Catholic leaning English Bishop and Diocese in Gloucester, England. In these deepening relationships, we know the unity of the indwelling Spirit of Christ, rather than a more superficial uniformity of theological interpretation.

The third story is not a wow! kind of story – but an everyday, right under our noses, kind of story – it’s the Meals that Heal for those undergoing illness or emergencies, the I-Help Dinners for the homeless, the Prayer Shawls, the Women for Women project in Afghanistan, and a hundred other examples that take place right in our own lives – these are all testimony to the Indwelling Spirit of Christ that creates natural bonds of unity that simply flow out of our hearts. It is a unity that ceases to appear remarkable but it is second nature – or really, what becomes first nature – as we live into Christ.

But we have also, all of us, experienced disunity – in our own lives and among our brothers and sisters in Christ. Disunity is a kind of prison in which we are locked away from warmth and love and each other and God. What locks us into the prisons of disunity? And what unlocks us – frees us - into unity?

Three stories from the gospels point us towards the freedom of the unity which Jesus so deeply desired for us, the unity that arises from the Indwelling of His Spirit in us.

First story. Jesus was surrounded by people eager to hear him, eager to touch him. A gaggle of children arrived, their faces and clothes dirty from a hard day of play. They zeroed in on Jesus immediately, with that instantaneous knowing that kids have about who’s safe. So they jumped up and down, tugged on his robes, hugged him, and he hugged them back, tousled their hair, stopped what he was doing to play with them. But the disciples were more than annoyed. Jesus was important. Their relationship with him was precious. And so they shooed Jesus’ young friends away. They worked so hard to understand Jesus and to protect their relationship with him, and they completely misunderstood and locked themselves away from laughter and joy.

Sometimes, we do the same thing ourselves. When we think that we’ve got the real message and that others don’t, we misunderstand Jesus. When we think we need to protect God from how others relate to the Divine, we lock ourselves into the prison of alienation and disunity.

What unlocks us into unity? Jesus pointed the disciples to the openness and wisdom of a child’s heart. “Unless you become as little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” he told them. Children don’t try to make everyone think alike and act alike – they just know they need a third baseman! They know the unity that arises out of the wonderful astonishment of simply playing together.

Second story. Jesus and the disciples were headed towards Jerusalem. The disciples lagged behind Jesus, arguing. Later, Jesus asked them about it. Turned out they’d been arguing about who would sit at his right and left hand in the coming kingdom. They were locked into the prison of power – arguing about who was the greatest, who was the most important.

It’s an argument as old as Cain and Abel. It’s an argument we know. It happens between people, between races, between nations, between religions. Who’s closest to God? Who’s got the power to make things happen their way? Whenever we are under the illusion that our safety and our identity depend upon having power over others, we are locked into the prisons of false power. But Jesus showed the way to freedom.

Jesus unlocked the prison doors of the disciples’ arguing by getting down on his knees with a servant’s towel and washing their crusty feet. He didn’t argue. He didn’t try to make them different. He stepped out of the way, and did something different. He attended to their need.

Paying attention to others is a way to freedom. A way to unity. When we cease to compete for control and cease to insist upon our own way, we open the way for Love. Love, St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, is patient and kind. It is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It is slow to take offense and it is always ready to excuse. It hopes. It hopes and endures. We find unity on our knees, in loving service to one another.

Third story. Jesus was arrested, tortured and killed. The disciples scattered to the four winds, terrified that the same thing would happen to them, blind with grief and fury, ashamed at their lack of courage and loyalty. The disciples were spiritually crucified on the cross of fear, fury, and shame just as surely as Jesus was physically crucified on the wooden cross. And just as Jesus’ body was buried in the tomb cut into rock, so the disciples’ spirits were buried in the prison of disunity within themselves, disunity from each other, and disunity with God.

Certainly, you must know from your own life that fear and shame and fury can bury you alive. I do.

But the Wisdom - the Christ, that existed from before the beginning; the Wisdom – the Christ, by which all things have their being; this Wisdom – this Word – this Christ - cannot be silenced. And so beyond the torture, beyond the cross, beyond the grave, beyond the betrayals and the shame and the fear and the fury, God resurrected Jesus. And Jesus found the disciples again, one by one, out where they had scattered, and gathered them together and breathed freedom and forgiveness and eternal life into them. He promised the Holy Spirit to live within them, to inspire them, to guide them, and to bring unity.

And that’s what happened. The Spirit came upon the disciples as they prayed together. And when the Spirit descended on them – they exploded out into the streets with the great good news of God’s Love – a Love that no power on heaven or on earth can end. Unity in the Spirit was experienced as unity in a common mission to spread the good newsThe church was born.

How do we experience unity? In the same ways that Jesus showed the disciples – through wondering and playful imagination; through paying attention to the needs of others and serving them; through joining in mission to tell about the good news of God’s eternal and abiding love.

Play. Service. Mission.

Or as the poet Mary Oliver so succinctly put it: “Pay Attention. Be Astonished. Tell about it.”

Celtic Work Blessing

2010-05-10T08:52:00.001-07:00

Holy Trinity bless the work that you do.

May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul. 
 
May the sacredness of your work bring healing, light, and renewal to those who work with you and to those who see and receive your work.
 
May your work not be wearisome, but release within you wellsprings of refreshment, inspiration and excitement.  

May you be present in what you do.

May dawn find you awake and alert and approaching your new day with dreams, possibilities and promises.  

May evening find you gracious and fulfilled.  

May you go into the night blessed, sheltered and protected.  

And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be with you in each moment of your days, and among you always. Amen.

a traditional blessing found at care2.com and adapted

Love

2010-05-02T20:38:00.000-07:00

Easter 5C

The Guinness Book of World Records lists the shortest sermon ever preached. The Rev. John Albrecht, an Episcopal priest from Michigan, stepped into his pulpit, paused, made eye contact with the entire congregation, said, “Love!” and sat down. It was reported that certain members of Albrecht’s church said it was the best sermon they ever heard him preach.

Hopefully my lack of such extreme brevity will be made up for in being slightly more comprehensive. For while the call to love is simple, simply loving is not.

Learning to love takes insight, commitment, courage, and daring. In The Road Less Traveled, Dr. Scott Peck says simply that it is work. It doesn’t come easy, because it means laying yourself out for someone else. In a very real way, love is our salvation because it is the way we leave off spinning around ourselves as the focus of our known universe, and begin to live with God at the center.

Perhaps this is why Love is the cornerstone of Jesus’ teaching. The message of the gospel today is short and sweet. Jesus had almost no time left with his disciples before he would be arrested and put to death. While they were eating their last meal together, he tried once more to make them understand. “I have only one thing to sum it all up so listen carefully.” He had said it in many ways and words before, but now at the end Jesus underlines it, puts in italics, announces it in Bold clear letters, “You are my followers if you love one another.”

According to the Apostle Paul, Love is the greatest gift out of all the special gifts that the Holy Spirit has for us. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul gave us the best advice possible. “Make Love your aim,” he said. Reach for that and the rest will fall into place.

And yet we toss the word “love” about in casual conversation as if it had no spiritual significance whatsoever. It’s certainly overused. I just LOVE those shoes! Don’t you just LOVE the way she sings!

As rich and expressive as the English language is, the ancient Greeks were better equipped than we are to talk about love. We have only one word. They had three.

Anybody remember what they are?

There’s Eros. It means to us much the same thing that it meant to the Greeks – love rooted in desire and passion. The Bible affirms God’s creation of human sexuality, and Eros, in its best form, is the human body celebrating the wonder of God’s creative power. Eros is a scintillating and powerful kind of love that grabs hold of us and makes life sparkle. The flashing flames of Eros can begin to lift us up out of ourselves, so that we notice that there are other beings in the world. It make us want to brush our teeth and comb our hair and take dancing lessons and get involved. But ultimately, eros is a self-serving, self-seeking kind of love. It might get us up in the morning, but it won’t take us through to the end of the day.

The second Greek word for love is filios. You might recognize the word from remembering our East Coast friends in Philadelphia – the “City of Brotherly Love.” Filial love is the kind of love that binds brother to brother, sister to sister, friend to friend. Maybe you are lucky enough to still know your best friend from 5th grade or from college. The truth is that while many relationships begin with attraction based in eros, filial love must take root for love to last a lifetime. Filial love grows, over a lifetime, into a sheltering tree that sustains families and friends.

Next Sunday is Mother’s Day. A celebration of filial love. Filial love is why parents work long hours to provide for their children. It is why they will stay up until all hours of the morning, waiting for the sound of the car tires in the driveway and their teenager’s footsteps coming up the steps – the same person they’ve already spent hours up at night with as an infant.

Filial love is truly where we begin to learn to lay ourselves out for another. To go beyond what we think we are capable of. To go beyond what is reasonable. Filial love is where we begin to learn something of what Jesus is talking about in the gospel reading today. Filial love is where we begin to learn about letting go. About opening our hands and not clinging. About dying, even in the littlest ways. In giving more than we get.

The truth is, Love and Justice go together. But loving is not a just experience. If we expect to get back what we give, that is a business not a love relationship. Love is basically unjust. Not only can we never even come close to evening things out with God – we can’t really ever come even with our parents, our teachers, and really, truth be told, even our spouses.

Here’s Billy Collin’s wisdom on the basic inequality of filial love.

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
- Billy Collins

Filial love – love between parent and child, between siblings, between friends – this is how we begin to understand God. But filial love still has an edge of self-interest in it. I am bound to my child partly because I see something of me in her. I am bound to my brother partly because we share the same blood. I am bound to my friend partly because friendship makes my life sweeter.

The third Greek word for love – agape – is love that is purely unconditional. There is no self-interest involved. It is the love that God gives – complete and without any conditions. God, our great Lover, makes the sun to shine on all of us, good and bad, and causes the rain to fall regardless of our conduct.

It is very difficult to really and truly receive this kind of love. A love that we cannot do anything to earn. A love that we cannot do anything to ruin. A love that knows absolutely every quirk, every flaw, every defect, every dream and hope and desire – absolutely everything about us and LOVES US. Passionately. Without end. Without condition.

God loves you and me. Whether we know it or not. Whether we accept it or not. Whether we ever truly relax into the utter blissfulness of it or not. But, if you have ever let your guard down enough so that the God who is Love has come pouring into your soul – you know why St. Paul was blinded; why people have been known to fall down laughing, why another name for Christian is “fool” for Christ. It doesn’t sound very Episcopalian does it? In fact, it really doesn’t sound very middle class American at all. But there it is. The better reason possible to kick your shoes off and say Amen!

It is foolishness. The most profound treasure in creation – God’s love and the peace that flows from that love – is available for everyone, free for the receiving.

We know about agape love because Jesus lived it and Paul described it in the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians. It is patient and kind, not jealous, conceited, proud, ill-mannered, selfish or irritable. It does not hold a grudge. It rejoices in the truth. It is a love that never gives up. It is not a grasping kind of love – but a love that desires the very best for the other – the kind of love that gives way for the other to grow and change and become fully who God intended for them to be. Children who receive this kind of love are blessed. Partners who give and receive this kind of love are blessed.

When Agape love gets ignited in your soul, it is not limited to your family and friendship circle. It looks outward towards the needs of creation and the world. It compels you to put your time and talents and resources towards making the world a better place. This love invites you to grow up in Christ. It invites you to commit yourself to a Christian community that rejoices with others and that works for the coming of God’s kingdom of justice and peace on earth.

Because we are loved unconditionally by God, because we are filled with the grace of the Holy Spirit, it is possible for us to grow in love and peace with God and with one another. It is possible for us to reach out beyond ourselves in concern and service to the world. It is possible to do the thing that Jesus commands: "Love one another as I have loved you."

With the eyes of your heart

2010-04-08T21:12:00.000-07:00

I was at a dinner party this week – Good Friday evening to be exact – and someone said, “So what do the Christians believe about Easter? What is Easter?” And the person who’d invited me said, “Does anyone really believe that somebody was actually raised from the dead? I mean, raised back to life again from their grave?” I leaned forward, put my hand up and said, “I do!” Everyone else sat back in amusement. A sweet disbelief.

One person took up the challenge and said, “well look – it’s a huge metaphor – and this is what the metaphor is: The Roman Empire crushed anyone who got in their way, and this guy was a nobody, a ghetto kid like me, and he was in their way – and so they crushed him, like they did a whole lot of people. But his message wouldn’t go away. It’s a metaphor for liberation and for brotherhood and for the people who won’t be crushed no matter how much power is brought to bear on them. It’s a metaphor for the power of love and life and grace that will always find a way to go on no matter how evil the powers are that are brought to bear down on the poor and dispossessed. “

Well, he said something like that. It was good. He was good. He said this in a booming preacher like voice. But then someone else said, “but is that really what the Christians believe?”

Personally, I would have to say – yes and no. Yes, at one level, as a metaphor that was fairly accurate. And this metaphor of Resurrection does provide sustenance for many people who are suffering under repression.

And No – because it didn’t really get to the nub of the thing.

When the women went to the cemetery, they went in grief to tend to the mangled, tortured body of their beloved. That’s why you go to cemeteries. To tend to the dead. To put flowers on the grave. You definitely are not thinking that their tomb is going to be empty. Can you imagine their utter horror and shock? I saw one artistic rendering of the scene that had the women’s hair standing on end as they raced away. I mean one thing you can be certain of – dead people stay dead.

I have been through the death of four friends this Lent. Several of you have lost mothers and fathers. A dear friend of mine recently lost her two closest friends. Grief comes in waves, and about six to eight weeks from the death it usually becomes pretty intense. Why? Because the reality that they are really and truly gone, that they are dead, hits hard. They are not coming back. That’s the order of things, and it is a cruel order, but it is reliable.

But this morning, and every Sunday morning, is the Feast of the Resurrection – this awesome, incredible, unique among all religions – claim – that the Body of Jesus was not in the grave, but Risen. Restored to Life by the same Power that created something out of nothing when He said, “Let there be Light.” And there was Light. This same Power now said “Let there be Life.” And there was Life – and no power on heaven or on earth could contradict or intervene. Let there be Life and there is Life. Death and the grave are vanquished.

Of course there are other religions that have gods who die and rise – but they are mythological, not actual walking around people. What do the Christians believe? I don’t know about you – but this Christian believes that God raised Jesus from the dead, and that whatever happened at that tomb, however that happened, the women who went there found empty grave clothes, those bindings that were wrapped around dead bodies. And they couldn’t believe it. In fact, neither could the disciples. In our reading from last night, when the women went racing back, the men thought it was – in our English translation – an idle tale. In Greek it is lalein….like lalalala … wild talk …mad talk…or in colloquial English….bull…..

And then…. Jesus began to appear to them. In this morning’s gospel, he appears to Mary, who is utterly heartbroken and while the other’s run away, she cannot bear to leave the graveyard. She does not recognize him – because we are not talking about a resuscitated body, but Resurrection, a Body of glory that is from another dimension.

In his 2nd letter to the church at Corinth, Paul described it this way: “But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another.”

Clearly, Jesus’ resurrected body got hungry - remember how he asked for food, and how he cooked breakfast over a small fire at the beach…but he could also pass through walls - remember how the disciples were in a closed and locked room out of fear of the authorities, and then suddenly, he was in their midst? But he was not easy to recognize. There is a lot of drama involved in all of these stories about who is this man? A gardener? A fisherman? A ghost? A traveler? The real drama of the Resurrection lies in learning to see, learning to recognize Jesus.

Jesus’ final teachings – his post-Resurrection teachings have to do with how to have Easter eyes. And it was different experience for each one of his disciples. Mary was sunk in her grief. So stuck on the physical plane that she could not see him. Once he spoke her name, she did see him and she wanted desperately to cling to him. But he said, “Do not Cling.” “You can go further into love” – Jesus was saying. You can love beyond boundaries, beyond barriers, beyond the physical, and this is the life I am calling you into.

There will be other appearances throughout this extended Eastertide. Some will see Jesus and others will not. Remember the two on the road to Emmaus – walking and talking in hushed whispers about the events that led up to the dashing of all of their hopes against the hard wood of torture and death…and Jesus himself appeared and began walking with them. But even when he opened the scriptures to them, they did not recognize him. Only when they invited him to stay with them, and he took bread and blessed it and broke it…were their eyes were opened and they recognized him. And then, of course, they left their dinner cold and rushed back to Jerusalem: “The Lord lives. We have seen him.” And they said to one another, “Weren’t our hearts burning within us as he explained all the scriptures to us?”

So what prevented them from seeing him in the first place? They were stuck in their story, stuck in the past, stuck in their grief and their nostalgia – so they could not see what was right in front of them - staring them right in the face. They could only see him when they came fully into the present moment, and received Christ’s bread and blessing.

And not only did they see – but they saw how to see. Just like Mary – it was through the eyes of their heart – through the attunement of their heart – it was their heart that burned within them that recognized Jesus and it was also their heart that bound them to the risen Lord forever.

My friends around the dinner table will probably never be convinced. And I did not try to convince them. Because Seeing Jesus, Hearing Jesus, knowing the truth that He is Risen - is not a teaching kind of truth. It is experiential.

The truth is, the heart tuned to Jesus is like a compass. It gives direction and it tells you where to look in order to behold the glory of the Lord. You can have your heart tuned so that it burns within you in recognition of our Lord. How? Through loving him and through service to one another and to the world that he so dearly loves.

Remember his final words with Peter? “Do you love me?” “Yes, Lord,“ Peter replied, "I love you.” In Greek there are several words for Love – and two of them are used in this passage. Peter used the word philios for I love you. Philios is a personal and attractive kind of love. Jesus used agape. Agape is love that is self-giving, that wells up and flows outwards towards the needs of others. “Do you love me?” “Yes, Lord.” “Then feed my sheep.” This is how to see the Resurrected Lord with the eyes of your heart. This is how his presence will always be known to you.

The Lord is Risen. The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia!

Resources:
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus
Fleming Rutledge, The Undoing of Death

Good Friday

2010-04-02T16:57:00.000-07:00

After friends and nurses cared for him for months, and kept vigil for days, AIDS took it’s final toll on Dave. I had been taking communion to him for a long time. One time I happened to come when a group of close friends had gathered in his home. We had a party – a last supper, as it turned out. Gathering around the couch in the living room where Dave spent his time, we feasted on the scriptures and on the bread and wine and on each other’s company. The prayers were intensely personal. Dave was dying. The small mission church that these folks had devoted many hours to, was struggling with its future. I was wondering where my priesthood was leading, where God was calling me.

There were many blessings that night. I anointed Dave and those gathered around all laid hands on him, deeply blessing and loving him as a truly gathered Christian community can do. The group laid hands on me, blessing me with prayers and longings for the full blossoming of my ministry. We held hands and prayed for the little mission in the heart of the gay and poor community along the Russian River.

A few days later, Dave died. His two sons asked if I would stay with the body until the mortuary arrived. I said yes – but had no idea that it would take so long for the van to get there. I sat for hours in the room with Dave’s body growing cold. Accompanying his complete leave taking of this world, of his thin ravaged body, his running sores, his inability to swallow, his existential loneliness.

Before he died though, the midst of this very real suffering, Dave had found a way to live as fully as he possibly could. He had found the way of the Cross. Because of Jesus and Jesus’ death and ultimate resurrection, hope continued to burn in Dave to the very end. It was this hope that allowed him to laugh at the ever increasing indignities of the process of dying. It was this hope that gave him the courage and fortitude to reconcile with his sons. It was this hope that gave his eyes their light, when all else was breaking down.

Anyone who has been through the valley of the shadow of death, knows that hope is the one thing that is essential. Faith can come and go. Even love. But without hope, we become the walking dead. Hope is hardy – like grass pushing up through cement, it’s green blades finding even the tiniest of cracks to reach through to the light . Hope is hardy – like children playing tag in the rudest and meanest of impoverished conditions. Hope is hardy. It is not easily extinguished. It finds a way to take wing and fly even when the wings are broken and the night is bitterly cold.

But I think on this day, in the heart of Jesus’ mother and in the hearts of John and the few women who were strong enough to stay until the bitter end, I think hope died.

Jesus was taken dead and cold from the cross and laid in a tomb, with no answer forthcoming from the God of Love that he proclaimed and clung to – no answer – no comforting word – no dove descending – no whisper in the ear. Through the hours that he hung on the cross, a most intensely gruesome torturous way to die – Jesus continued to love, continued to pour himself out in love, for his friends, for his mother, for those who had nailed him there and who were busy dividing up his robe and sandals and prayer shawl. He continued to call upon and cling to his Father, his Abba, the very light of his life, the love of his love. But now - there was no answer, no relief, no assurance that anything he had done or was doing had any meaning, had any purpose, or would come to any good, no word that there even was a God who heard him and knew him, much less loved him. The hope and love and light of his mother’s life was now broken and dead and cold in her arms.

What do we do when hope dies? When our dreams are shattered? When love flickers and fades and the ground we stand on is turned completely upside down and there is no solid ground left? When we are suddenly and completely turned out of the cozy world we thought we lived in – maybe by death of a husband or wife or child, or death of a marriage, or death of purpose, or death of a future we had counted on. What do we do when all of our hopes and dreams are laid out cold and heavy in our arms?

Mary turned to Joseph of Arimethea, a friend of her son’s. She and the other women leaned on each other, held each other upright as they made their feet move in the direction of someone’s home where they would sit without food or fire huddled together and too struck down to even weep. What did these few friends of Jesus do when hope died and God no longer spoke to them? They sat together. They held each other.

I don’t know whether they prayed. I don’t know whether they called upon God who, for all they could see, had abandoned their beloved Jesus and abandoned them. Perhaps, possibly, they were able, through sheer force of will and profound love, to follow Jesus even into this abandoned place. Perhaps, possibly, like Jesus, they did continue to call upon this silent absent God. Continued to call, even when there was no answer. Perhaps, possibly, the life that was Jesus’ life, did still beat somewhere in their grieving hearts, unknown and unrecognized. Perhaps, possibly, the little tiny seed bud of hope was not thoroughly extinguished, but lay dormant and deep, still and silent, waiting.

We know, of course, that Easter comes. That there is a tomorrow and another tomorrow, and that God has the final word – that Love lives. That there is no darkness, no despair, no abandonment, no place of terror and absence, that God is not – that God – by pouring out of everything he had, to the utmost of his earthly capacity, there is no darkness that Christ does not light with his presence. Because he held nothing back, he is able to accompany you into any hopelessness, any despair.

What do you do when hope dies? When the Light of the World, when the light of your world, is extinguished? Do what Dave did. Do what Jesus' friends did. Flee to the Cross of Christ. Because at the Cross, at the foot of the Cross, you will find paradise itself. You will find community and communion. You will find the very Presence of the One who loves you to the end and beyond.

Maundy Thursday

2010-04-01T07:25:00.000-07:00

I give you a new commandment-

That you love one another.

John 13: 34a

"

Monday Holy Week

2010-03-29T08:24:00.000-07:00

O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth
will declare your praise.

For you have no delight in sacrifice;
if I were to give a burnt-offering,
you would not be pleased.

The sacrifice acceptable to God
is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God,
you will not despise.

Psalm 51: 15 - 17

Whenever you
stand praying,
forgive,
if you have anything
against anyone;

so that your Father in heaven
may also forgive
you
your trespasses.

Mark 11: 25

Glory be to You

2010-03-26T11:11:00.000-07:00

Glory be to You,
who laid your Cross as a bridge over death,
that souls might pass over it
from the dwelling of the dead to the dwelling of life!

-Ephraem the Syrian (ca306-373)

Hymn

2010-03-12T11:10:00.000-08:00

XXII

1. Wondrous sight for men and angels!
Wonders, wonders without end!
He who made, preserves, sustains us,
He our Ruler and our Friend,
Here lies cradled in the manger,
Finds no resting-place on earth,
Yet the shining hosts of glory
Throng to worship at his birth.

2. When thick cloud lies over Sinai,
And the trumpet’s note rings high,
In Christ the Word I’ll pass the barrier,
Climb, and feast, nor fear to die;
For in him all fullness dwelleth,
Fullness to restore our loss;
He stood forth and made atonement
Through his offering on the cross.

3. He between a pair of robbers
Hung, our Making-good to be;
He gave power to nerve and muscle
When they nailed him to the tree;
He, his Father’s law exalting,
Paid our debt and quenched our flame;
Righteousness, in fiery splendour,
Freely pardons in his name.

4. See, my soul, where our Peace-maker,
King of kings, was lowly laid,
He, creation’s life and movement,
Of the grave a tenant made,
Yet on souls fresh life bestowing;
Angels view it with amaze;
God in flesh with us adoring;
Heaven’s full chorus shouts his praise.

5. Thanks for ever, thanks ten thousand,
While I’ve breath, all thanks and praise
To the God who all his wonders
For my worship here displays,
In my nature tried and tempted
Like the meanest of our race,
Man – a weak and helpless infant,
God – of matchless power and grace.

6. Gone this body of corruption,
’Mid the fiery hosts on high,
Gazing deep into the wonders
Wrought of old on Calvary,
God, the Invisible, beholding,
Him who lives, yet once was slain,
Clasped in close eternal union
And communion I’ll remain.

Ann Griffiths (d. 1805)

Humility

2010-03-08T06:40:00.000-08:00

Lent 3C
Exodus 3: 1 - 5; Luke 13: 1 - 9

You know the story of Job? How he was a fabulously wealthy man with seven sons and three daughters and beautiful homes and a prominent place in society and known by all for his righteousness and Godliness – and then, he began losing it all. First his homes burned down, then his children were all killed, his wife died, and last of all, his health was destroyed. Covered in boils and sick unto death, he sat in the ashes of his former life and wept. He didn’t not curse God. He didn’t blame himself. He simply sat and wept, demanding that Godanswer his cry – “Why? Why? Why?”

His friends gathered from far and near, some to gawk, some to comfort– but most all of them, whatever their response, was to find blame. Who was to blame for this tragedy? Their consensus? Job. This was God’s punishment for some terrible wrong that Job had done – Job should search his heart, search his conscience to find what he had done, and confess it. Job did search his heart and conscience, and he could find anything that he had done – certainly nothing that would warrant this kind of tragedy. But he did want an answer. He wanted the God whom he had served his whole life to answer his one burning question – “Why?”

And God eventually did answer. A booming answer – “Where you there when I established the heavens and the deeps? Where you there when I fixed the stars in the sky and the whales in the oceans? Where you there when I brought something out of nothing and set into motion the entire universe?” And Job, deeply humbled, simply worshipped – saying “before I had only heard, but now I know, now I know, that you are God. “

Why am I telling you the story of Job this morning, when none of our readings mention Job? Because it is a true story – and we are still living this story. And the people surrounding Jesus were living that story. “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?” The people had asked Jesus. And now they say – “these worshippers who went to the temple, and were arrested and killed by Pilate’s soldiers, right there in the temple, sacrificed like animals, they must have done something terribly wrong – to be punished by God like this. Jesus ups the ante – well, and what about the innocents in Jerusalem who happened to be in the way when the Tower of Siloam fell? They must have been great and terrible sinners also, do you think?

Pat Robertson is famous for the amazing things he says. When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, it was because the people of New Orleans were sinners of the first order. When the country was brought to it’s knees in grief over 9/11, people like Pat Robertson said that this was God’s punishment on a country who had embraced feminism and equal rights for everyone. Now it is Haiti’s turn to be punished for selling it’s soul to the devil in return for freedom from French colonists. These are egregious modern examples of the same kind of thinking that Job’s friends had. There are New Age examples as well – you are sick because you are thinking wrong thoughts – which is another way of saying you have sinned and are now being punished.

Jesus cut through all of this with a simple “no. That’s not the way it is.” He didn’t get caught up in the blame game and the finger pointing and any abstract talk about God. Instead he turned to the people he was with and was quite straightforward with them. If the one suffering was present, such as the blind man, he healed him. If the sufferers were not present, as in the gospel today, he attempted to bring the people who were there into the same experience that Job had. In truth, the same experience that Moses had when he turned aside to see the burning bush. It’s an experience of Metanoia – actually being in God’s presence, and the deep humility and tears of worship that follow from real experience.

In the gospel this morning, Jesus tried to impress upon the people around him, the urgency of the truth that when God is passing by –it is time to bow down – now – because it will not always happen. He told the story of the fig tree that had already had Three years, and still God is merciful. But you cannot take this for granted. And you cannot assume entitlement, you cannot assume that you are entitled to grace. That is the ego’s way, but it is not God’s way.

At another time, he put it a different way. He said “Unless you become as a child, you will not see the Kingdom of God”….remember? A child is dependent and knows, deeply knows, that she is not in charge and that there is very little actually, that she can control. Of course, children try – and they often try very hard to be in charge, but that is only to manage their fear and the anxiety of being vulnerable and frail. When the parent is strong and obviously in charge, a child relaxes and feels safe and happy because she knows that she is protected and that someone who can actually manage things is in charge. Of course, we adults know that we can’t always manage things, and that there are so many aspects of life that we are not in charge of. Hence, our need to give our lives over and to trust, what our 12 Step friends call, a Higher Power – whom we know as the Lord - the One who actually is, wholly and completely, trustworthy and adequate. But as long as we are trying to fix blame for things that go wrong, and as long as we are beating our selves up in an attempt to re-establish control, we will miss the actual and real grace of God, the burning bushes that are all around us.

Jesus did not want his listeners to miss it. He doesn’t want you and me to miss it. And so he pointed to the one thing that is urgently needed – the one thing that Job found – the one thing that Moses did – and that is repentance. The “take your shoes off because you are on holy ground” kind of true repentance – Metanoia. This kind of repentance is about getting down from the pedestal of your ego, and planting yourself firmly on the ground – “you are made of dust and to dust you shall return.” It is about embracing Reality and that almost always requires a complete change of heart. A change of mind. A change of orientation, away from trying to beef yourself up to manage what is essentially unmaneagable – Life – and instead, bowing down in worship before God.

In the story of the fig tree, we tend to focus on the figs – whether there is fruit or not. But it’s the manure that’s magic. That wonderous substance that all farmers know about. The people around Jesus were focused on grand theories about God and who God protected and who God punished. But Jesus , completely in the here and now, pointed to manure. How like him! He “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, and becoming obedient even unto death on a cross..(Phil. 2: 6-8)

St. Augustine said that manure is a symbol of humility. It is a lowly substance, something we don’t talk about much, but it can bring life into a place of no life. It can work a kind of alchemy, a mysterious transformation from what is basically "manure" into what is basically gold. And isn’t there plenty of room in this world for a lot of that kind of transformation!

If you are suffering, try to leave off blame. “Why did God do this?” “How have I sinned?” It does not help, and it leads you down a path that takes you further and further from Reality. Further and further from any encounter with the God who is the I AM.

If you are not suffering right now, Jesus invites you to join with those who do suffer, whether they are in Haiti or sitting next to you. He invites you into metanoia. To come down off of whatever pedestal your ego has persuaded you to climb, and let the deep humility of Christ – the One who could command wind and waves, but who went, of his own free will, to the cross, in order to not swerve or run away from the path of deepest love and loyalty – let this humility enter into your blood and bones, into your mind and heart– and create new life and new possibilities in you.

And the Glory of God which is the Humility of God which is the Love of God will sustain you, and will produce good fruit, in this life and in the next.

Mark 4: 35 - 41

2010-03-05T08:23:00.000-08:00

Asleep in the stern
his breathing slow and steady
his warm breath curling
around my head like a halo -
his arm heavy around me - I lace
my fingers in his.

When they awake us,
shivering fear splashing cold water -
but his heart beat so calm, so strong, is still
at my back - and so I hear the
compassion in his eyes.

"Peace. Be still."

And we are all then, wrapped
around in his breath. His heart.
His power.

And know awe.

St. David of Wales

2010-03-02T13:10:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the Deacon of Good Shepherd, The Rev. Cynthia Montague, for remembering and blessing the anniversary of my ordination, the Feast Day of St. David of Wales.

Maggie Ross, Anglican Solitary in residence at The Bishop's Ranch, wrote this Collect and Poem for this St. David's Feast Day. It was written for the group that gathers for daily morning prayer at the Bishop's Ranch chapel. Her blog is Voice in the Wilderness.

David of Wales

Lord of Peace, your servant David walked the edge of the world, conscious of its dangers and deceits. May we, like him turn from possessions and preferment to the humble service of your life-giving Word. Grant us thirst for the water of life and hunger for the bread of angels; salt us with the sting and savor of eternal truth, and bring us to the courts of joy, for your Love's sake. Amen.

A Canticle for St David of Wales

Wild was the storm — the day of his birth,
Narrow the strait — a perilous place
the wrack of the world — and the song of the sea.
Simplicity his coracle, — his rudder, humility;
wings of angels — fanned his sails.

"Small acts" — he said
"swing the compass — towards peace."
His purified heart — now sings forever;
eternity's haven — his radiant home.

Workouts

2010-02-28T22:10:00.000-08:00

Genesis 15: 1 - 18; Psalm 27; Luke 13: 31 - 35

Do you remember a real high in your faith walk? Maybe it was time when you were having a hard time in your life but you felt completely at peace in God? When you trusted that, however things turned out, everything was going to be ok because you knew in your heart that God had things under control?

Do you remember a time when you didn’t feel this way?

I’ve had a lot of difficult times in my life, and sometimes I had inner peace, and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I trusted God and sometimes I didn’t. And that’s the truth about the faith journey. We don’t always have the same high level of trust in our Lord and Savior. There are times of great intimacy and we want them to never end. We want to always feel like our faith is fresh and new and front and center, but these times don’t usually last forever. When we have them, it is because of grace. And likewise, when we feel distant from God, or we wonder if God has forgotten us, or we can’t seem to find any real enjoyment in prayer and church, believe it or not, those are times of grace as well. It’s at those times, that our faith muscles and our hope muscles can be developed and strengthened. It’s a bit like a really good work out. I checked with Dorian, one of our high school football players – and he verified that it’s true: A good workout causes small tears in your muscles, so that when they heal, they are stronger.

So whether you are enjoying the great grace of God’s consoling presence, or whether you are in the desert and do not feel God’s presence – know that, either way, you are journeying towards the heart of God. If you’ve ever walked a labyrinth, you will have had a physical experience of this. In most labyrinths, the path takes you towards the center, and then far from the center, and in the final round, just before you enter the center, the path takes you the furthest away yet, all the way out to the perimeter….and around, and then in to the center. So however close you are, or far away you are, you are, in actuality, not lost, but getting ever closer to the center, the heart of God.

I have not read Mother Teresa’s book, but apparently this was her experience. Much of her life took place in interior spiritual desert, without any felt sense of God’s presence. And yet, look at her life! She lived and served and loved the poor in utter faith and abandonment to God. That is walking the path of faith.

Abram is known as the icon of faith. He was a prosperous man, a wealthy man, an old man - when God asked him to pull up stakes and leave for unknown places. And he did! He gathered up his family and as much of his wealth as he could take - and followed. He and God regularly talked and enjoyed great closeness. “The word of the Lord came to Abram: Do not be afraid Abram. I am your shield and your reward shall be very great….” And yet, he walked mostly in darkness – not knowing where God was taking him, or why.

In the reading this morning, he finally argued: “OK, I’ve followed you. I’ve done everything you asked. But I don’t get it. You promised an heir. And I don’t have an heir, other than my slave. And I’m getting ready to die. So, God, what’s going on?”

And in return, God gave him an astronomy lesson! “Look at the stars….that’s going to be the number of your offspring.” It’s a promise that is so over the top - it’s of such abundance that it is overwhelming.

But Abram had asked to know… and now, instead of keeping him in the dark – God revealed more to him. In the portions of the reading that have been left out, verses 12 – 17, God revealed to Abram what would happen with this offspring, probably far more than Abram wanted to know. It was knowledge that would leave him wounded for the rest of his life….

“12As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. 13Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; 14but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. 15As for yourself, you shall go to your ancestors in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. 16And they shall come back here in the fourth generation;”

Be careful what you ask for! As a German child, Corrie ten Boom’s parents took in Jews and hid them during the holocaust. They were eventually arrested and sent to Buchenwald. Out of her entire family, only Corrie came out alive. When they were boarding the train that would take them to Buchenwald, Corrie asked her father why God would allow something like this to happen. They were good people and had done only good on God’s behalf. Corrie wrote later that her father set down the very heavy suitcase that he was carrying, and told her to pick it up. Corrie, being a young girl, could not lift it. That, her father said, is like the knowledge that God has and that we do not. There are things that are simply too heavy, too much for us to bear, and so God carries them. Our job is simply is to continue walking alongside of him and trust.

Sometimes God lets us in on the big picture – as he did Abram – and sometimes he doesn’t - as in most of the time. And like Corrie’s wise father told her, and as the Psalmist verifies, and as countless people of faith throughout the centuries have tested out, our job is to wait patiently and trust.

Of course, that does not rule out some complaining and arguing! When you are close to someone, do you always just take their word for it? Of course not. You ask, as Abram did. You plead, as the psalmist does. “Hearken to my voice, O Lord, when I call, have mercy on me and answer me. You speak in my heart and say, seek my face. Your face, Lord will I seek. Just don’t hide your face from me!.”

The truth is, we all set out on this journey of faith with the greatest of intentions – to know Christ, to make more room for God, to be an excellent parent, to love more deeply and less conditionally - but as we travel along, those intentions can get bruised and forgotten under the pressures of life. That happened with the Psalmist - in the beginning, he had passionate confidence in the Lord, great intention to trust no matter what, and then, in the space of one verse, it is obvious that he ran into trouble. That he lost his way, and couldn't really find God and had trouble with his original intention to "just trust." What did he do? Well, what he didn't do, is despair. He turned and asked for help. “Show me your way, O Lord. Deliver me.” He acted his way - he talked his way – he prayed his way - into faith and trust. Only this time without the bravado and gung ho confidence that he had had at first. By the end of the psalm, he spoke with greater simplicity and greater wisdom. “O tarry and wait the Lord’s pleasure. Be strong, and he shall comfort your heart. Wait patiently for the Lord.”

This morning, if you are in a place in your journey where it is easy for you to trust and you feel God’s presence close by – say "thank you, thank you, thank you." But, if, this morning, you are in a place in your journey, where it is not so easy to trust, where you are more like Abram and questioning, and like the psalmist and pleading, “where is your face, O God?”…. Say "thank you" and add, "Help me!" As your faith muscles and your hope muscles are being torn, these same muscles are also being made stronger. And believe me, the best course, the safest course to follow when this is happening, is to trust, and wait patiently even - especially at the times when it is hardest to do – and God will comfort you and God will bring you into the land of the living.

Before you were born, I knew you

2010-02-03T15:00:00.000-08:00

“Before you were born, I knew you.” Jeremiah spoke truly. Let these words settle into you because they are trustworthy.
Before you were born, God knew you. You were held in God and then God spoke you into being. But you did not depart from God; just as the words I am speaking now go into your heart, but that does not make them ever leave my heart.

And now that God spoke you into this existence, you are here, in these body clothes, with your own particular personality and you’re your own particular experiences, and your own particular questions and responsibilities and needs and wants – and it is as true as ever before. Now that you are born, God knows you – intimately – just as surely as God knew you before you were born. And when you die, when God breathes into you for the last time and then withdraws his breath for the last time, you will return into God’s knowing and you will wake up fully and completely known and loved. Loved as you have been from before, loved as you are now, and loved, as you will be when your stay here is over.

You are never separated or apart from God. And the truly blessed and merciful thing is, you don’t have to wait to die to know this! To know God’s embrace. To know God’s gifting you and commissioning you and sending you out to translate God’s love into your own friendships and family and responsibilities and pleasures.

This was Jeremiah’s experience. This was Paul’s experience as well. though he came to it differently. Because before Paul ever knew God’s grace, he knew God through the commandments, through the law, and he thought he was commissioned and sent by God. He thought God wanted him to keep the faithful safe from harmful influences. And in Paul’s case, the harmful influences were the Christians – who, for Paul, were heretics. He presided over their being driven out of the synagogues and in some cases stoned and killed.

Convinced in his heart that this was God’s will and way, he was literally knocked off his horse, blinded by light, and deeply questioned by the God whom he thought he served. His sincerity saved him. His sincere desire to love and serve God enabled him to immediately recognize God’s touch. It was a touch that permanently altered his consciousness and changed his life.

So instead of persecuting the heretics, he became one! The earliest Christian writings we have are Paul’s letters to the churches that he himself founded. Chapter 13 of the 1st letter to the church at Corinth is probably the best known of all of Paul’s letters. Some sorority chapters read it at every meeting. It is read at almost every wedding. It is beloved by Christians and non-Christians. Why? Because it springs from the same fountain as the opening to the chapter read this morning from Jeremiah. “Before you were born, I knew you. I formed you in your mother’s womb. You are mine. “ And you are beloved. This is your birthright. It is your inheritance. It is your wealth. And it is pure sweet gift. It is Love Mercy that sustains you at every moment, whether you are currently blind to God’s grace or whether you have begun to see through the glass though still darkly.

Paul invites you to put on Love’s clothing – so that you will be more easily recognized for who you really are. – a beloved child of God, and a friend of our Lord Jesus Christ. So Paul tells us to put on the clothes of patience and kindness. He encourages us to wear the warmth of endurance and hope and rejoicing in God’s truth.

Just before this, In the 12th chapter of this letter, he named a whole variety of spiritual gifts – gifts that are given by God to build up the whole body – and now he says – as wonderful as these gifts are – gifts of preaching and teaching and healing and administration – as wonderful and good as these gifts are, they are nothing, they are worthless, without Love. Without the continual awareness and thanksgiving that they arise from God and are given solely for the purpose of letting more Love loose in the world.

We are called, commissioned and sent out, each and every one of us, to serve the world God loves so dearly, and to do so undergirded in every moment by Love. We rely on Love. We trust Love. We hope in Love. And Paul insists that this is not something we do. It is something we receive and that flows through us.

I don’t know about any of the working of this congregation at Corinth – except what is contained in Paul’s two letters to them. But from that little bit, it is striking to me how similar they seem to have been to us in our own day and age. They were proud people. They were, for the most part, educated people. They followed Christ, but they retained the cultural norms of their time. When they gathered for the Eucharist, they copied the patterns of every Greek dinner – the wealthy ate in the dining room, with copious amounts of food and wine, and the poor stood waiting in the outer rooms, eating little or nothing at all. They boasted of their spiritual insights and wisdom – and Paul writes to them with some testiness. This isn’t it – he says. You are a new community. You are a community gathered now in Christ – and at the root and heart of your being – your own individual being, but not just that – at the root and heart of your being as church – is this sweet mercy of unending, unearned, sustaining Love that knows you fully.

Once you have grounded yourself in that, all the other decisions about your communal life, and your individual lives will sort itself out. You won’t always agree, Paul says, but in kindness and patience, and by giving up what we would call “black and white thinking” you can make room for difference, and you can discover the enormous energy of the Holy Spirit guiding you into greater and greater faith, and hope and love.

Called, commissioned and sent out – Jeremiah experienced this. Paul and the church in Corinth experienced this. Jesus experienced this. After his baptism, Jesus fasted. He prayed and he lived in solitude for a good length of time. He let himself be fully and completely pulled into God’s orbit. It took time to incorporate this profound awareness that he was God’s heart walking around in human form.

Then, filled with the power of the Spirit, he followed God out of the desert and into the lives of ordinary men and women. He followed God right back to his home town. What harder and more difficult place could there be to claim the fullness of who you really are. To come out of the closet – because of course, each in our own way – we have to do this. Thanks to our gay brothers and sisters for the terminology – but they do not own this experience. It is true of each of us as we shed more and more of our accumulated defenses and coping mechanisms and let the God self within become the self that our partners and our children and our colleagues and our community can see and taste and touch and know. Not easy sometimes. But Jesus led the way close to the beginning of his public life.

And truth be told, he didn’t get a really great reception. Still, he was spoke truth as deeply as he knew how – and entirely in Love. He wasn’t touting himself – though by that point, it was impossible to separate himself from the God who formed, called, commissioned and sent him. Impossible to say where the Word ended and he began. Impossible to untangle the Divine and the Human. And so, Jesus sat in the synagogue among his brothers and sisters, his aunts and uncles, his fellows, and spoke the truth in love.

And eventually, some of those who wanted to throw him off a cliff that day, became followers and fellows and friends in this with God life that he imparted and for which he died and to which he was raised. Praise be to the one God almighty and merciful and everlasting.

“Before you were formed,” God says, “I knew you. I formed you in your mother’s womb. You are mine. And do not say – you are only…..Alice. You are only….a pianist. You are only….an attorney. You are only…..Joe. You are only…..a boy. Do not say this. Because I touch you. I gift you. I commission you. I send you. I uphold you. And I am with you now and forever more.” Amen.

Journeys Near and Far

2010-01-26T20:45:00.001-08:00

Many Thanks on behalf of Episcopal Relief and Development for Haiti. Between the Bake Sale, the Sunday Offering, and Discretionary Funds, the parish sent $1,800 this past week. Many parishioners have also donated directly to ERD. The need is growing and I invite you to continue in generosity.

Epiphany began with the Magi journeying across long distances, seeking the Wisdom Child Jesus. This week, your spiritual leaders are also journeying in search of wisdom, new ideas, and refreshment.

Desi Brown, Youth Leader is at the National Episcopal Christian Educators Conference in Menlo Park. Free from household and work responsibilities for three days, please pray that this learning retreat is a time of deep refreshment, networking and learning for her.

Deacon Cynthia Montague is at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco learning about music that makes community. The parish will benefit from this, as will the residents of the Monterey County Jail, where she spends her weekdays in ministry.

And I am attending a five day retreat called Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate, at the Center for Contemplation and Action in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The focus is on critical phases of our journeys of spiritual awakening.

Other journeys are happening closer to home! Seventeen people gathered last Sunday at 9 AM in the Parish Hall to practice Qi Gong under the capable and wonderful leadership of Dr. Michael Luder, Brooke Fiske and Antonia Fiske. You are welcome to try this out and see how it enhances your Sunday morning worship.

And Yvonne Crane and her artist friend Kat Ogletree are busy planning for the Women’s Retreat to be held in March at Mission San Antonio. The Men’s Retreat will be held the following month, led by Deacon Don Fusilier.

Jesus regularly took time away to contemplate, pray and re-group. Please pray for your leaders as they do likewise!

Journeys Near and Far

2010-01-26T20:38:00.000-08:00

Our DNA

2010-01-19T22:31:00.000-08:00

Our hearts and minds are overflowing with sorrow over the unspeakable calamity for the Haitian people. The earthquake this past week – este terramoto – brought down buildings –cathedrals, the Episcopal bishop’s home, and thousands upon thousands of apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, homes. People in Port Au Prince report that the smell of death permeates their hair, their clothing, their nostrils – and that no amount of washing takes it away. Water, even just water for drinking, is in terribly terribly short supply. You know all of this. You’ve seen it on the news. You’re read it on the internet.

And it affects the way we hear the readings this morning. What on another morning, we would hear as a gospel reading of joy and festivity – the celebration of a wedding – sounds different this morning – as we mourn for the lost, the dead, and the dying in the streets of Haiti. This morning, when I hear the gospel, I don’t think of celebration, I think of contrast. The contrast of happiness with sadness. The contrast of celebration with mourning. And, in the context of this week’s news, I hear the question of timing.

“It is not yet my time”, Jesus said. And because of the reports streaming in of the difficulty in getting aid into the single airport, and then from the airport to the people in need – we know that timing is everything. Anguish grows as time passes. Rescue becomes less and less a possibility, until it becomes not possible. Chaos erupts as time passes.

“It is not yet my hour,” Jesus told his mother. Jesus was right of course – it wasn’t his hour. Because "His hour" is an allusion that points towards the cross, the resurrection and the ascension. But Mary, confident as the Mother, and confident in the power and compassion of her Son, told the servants, Do as he tells you. And she was right also. It was the time, because there was need. And so, she, as Mother, pointed out the need – and the rightness of responding now, in the present, whether it accorded with God’s timing or not.

The miracle of the gospel reading is not about alcohol. There were prodigious amounts of it for sure, but the real miracle is about a deeply gracious and enormously abundant response to need. The wedding and the party were synonymous. The new couple would have no social standing, no future, without being able to provide hospitality for their friends and neighbors. This wasn’t a crisis of a party run dry, it was a crisis of connection and community. Mary realized this and turned to the person who could do something about it. Jesus heard her request, understood the need, and did something about it.

I love that Jesus’ first miracle – one of his most famous – is done so quietly, so anonymously – only the servants knew about it – and it was done in a relatively private setting. So many miracles are like this aren’t they. People responding to need in ways that don’t ever hit the headlines, that aren’t ever recorded – but just done, quietly, simply and effectively. I am privileged to be privy to more and more stories about how this happens all the time among the lives of the saints gathered here this morning. People quietly, without fanfare, going about the business of hearing about a need and figuring out the best response to it. Sometimes that means bringing in the whole community. Sometimes it means only a few knowing about it. But however it happens, the Body of Christ is built for action. It’s a built in characteristic of the Body of Christ that need among believers or need in the world that God loves so dearly triggers a response by the Christian community. I heard one of these stories yesterday from a parent.

One of our young parishioners told her friend at school that he needed to sit down and listen to her because she needed to tell him something very serious – she said that there were buildings that fell down and people who were dying. Then she said, but my church is going to bake cookies and sell them and we are going to send the money to help those people. You should come to church and buy those cookies. She told her teacher too that she should come to church. When the teacher replied that she didn’t go to church, our young Christian told her that that was ok – but that this Sunday she should come to church and buy cookies so that the people who needed help could get help.

We respond because we are fashioned and formed by a God who responds. It was need that brought God down out of the heavens and into earthly existence in the person of Jesus Christ. God’s splangthna – bowels – were moved in compassion by our plight and he became human and dwelt among us.

It is need that brings God to bend down to earth. Need that moves God to compassion - to entering into this earthly life of earthquakes and buildings falling down and poverty beyond understanding. It is need that moves the Body of Christ, however broken we are, however disjointed and dysfunctional the church, the dear Body of Christ may be – need brings forth response.

But let’s be honest. Some of us – not all of us – but some of us – wonder about this compassionate God – wonder what kind of God would allow the enormity of this kind of suffering. The poorest people in the Western Hemisphere – already buried under crushing poverty, and debt, now buried under cement blocks and slabs. We see the bodies bulldozed into mass graves, and some of us, like Job, raise our voices – Where are you God? Where is your compassion? It is deeply disquieting to our spirits to see these images, to hear these voices calling for help that has not gotten there in time.

Job’s friends gathered around him with their answers – their platitudes, their proverbs, their ready answers. But God did not. When God came to Job in the whirlwind, he did not provide an answer. Instead, he provided himself. God entered into relationship with Job. He took Job and his questions and laments seriously. And when Job came to know God, not only through his mind, but intimately, in his gut, in his bones – in Real Presence, he responded in the only way that he could - with worship. By bowing down in worship. By letting the energy of that relationship move through him and bring him to life again. Bring him back to life again.

Like Job, we are not apt to get an intellectually satisfying answer to our questions about justice and suffering and why or how God could or would allow things like this Haiti earthquake to happen. But when we feel deeply, when we don’t distance ourselves from our suffering brothers and sisters, when we respond in the only ways that are really open to us – through prayer and by sending money – we are likely to find ourselves shoulder to shoulder with God, in relationship. We are likely to find the energy of relationship with the Divine moving through us, breathing life into tragedy.

At heart, this is what the Incarnation is about. It is what the Right Time is about - God entering fully and our receiving him fully into the bricks and mortar of our lives. The Right Time – the Time of the Incarnation is the Time of God entering into and our receiving him into the calamity of crumbling cement and the reality of our human and very broken systems of government and aid and hands held out with whatever small cups of water we’ve managed to find and offer.

The Right Time of the Incarnation is the Now time of small brilliant miracles of hope and connection and comfort and mercy.

So – this is a place, the community of this church is a place – where we can be honest. Honest with our questions about God. Honest about our needs and the needs of the world.

And it is a place that gets that the DNA of who we are as the Body of Christ - is a Body that responds to need, in real Time.

Mary's God

2009-12-21T20:41:00.000-08:00

The Rev. Linda Campbell
Advent IV, Year C, 2009

Have you noticed the children before church, after church, come into the side chapel and light a candle? Maybe you have lit a candle and offered up your concerns and loved ones to God. For those of you fortunate to have been raised with a theology of the Mother of God – perhaps you sneak in a prayer said through the intercessions of His Mother, Mary.

Mary’s God is a comforting God, one who is available to us as Parent and Savior, Mother to all the peoples and creatures of the world. Mary’s God’s embraces without measure and without condition. Mary’s God drips with milk that nurtures us and helps us to grow healthy and strong in faith. This God longs for us to suckle and cuddle and lay our heads down, in rest and utter contentment. And at some level, don’t we all long to do just that? To truly become a child of God.

I know that when I get knotted up with worries and fears and what if’s and if only’s and how come’s, the knots melt away when I light a candle, say a prayer, and crawl up into God’s wide, warm lap. And after awhile, I’m ready to be a grown up again – a grown up that doesn’t take myself or anyone else too seriously. A grown up that knows it is good to also be a child of Mary’s God.

The church I first served was a historic building, built from redwood in the late 1800’s, with a magnificent pipe organ, and a deep sanctuary for the choir and the altar. Among the artwork was a beautiful painting of Mary and Jesus – hidden away in one of the small alcoves. Those of us who served at the altar would talk about how beautiful it was, and we wondered where that lovely painting might go so that it would be more accessible to everyone. But in the end, we decided that the painting should stay where it is – because another truth of Mary’s gospel is that God is often hidden, and found in unexpected, small, out of the way places. Found in places where no one thinks to look and in places that are not available to everyone. Places in our lives perhaps of disappointment and sorrow. Places of tragedy and even curse. Places where we come face to face with what a mess we are, private places where we cannot bear a great deal of public scrutiny. Places of fragile new beginnings. Places of hopes and dreams that are not yet ready for the harsh sunlight of details and facts and figures and rational logic.

Mary’s God is wide and warm and completely available and also hidden and small and unexpectedly last and least. We meet this wide, warm God in Bethlehem, a small out of the way place of complete ordinariness.

The truth is that our advent journey towards the manger of Bethlehem;
towards the infant born under the cold night air;
towards the peasant woman giving birth to her first born child, far from home;
our journey towards the unspeakable mystery of Christmas,
is a journey towards those places where the
great, vast richness of the Creator,
enters into the cramped small places of our lives, of our world -
without reservation, without hesitation,
without hanging on to a scrap of dignity.

Our journey towards this revelation of Almighty God, under the improbable cover of a vulnerable naked refugee infant, is a journey to the places where the last and the least are born. Where they live and die. To the people and places who do not occupy any place in history or in the news. People and places that are insignificant. It is a journey towards those places in our own hearts where our carefully and tightly woven veils of plans and protective defenses fall from our faces and we must acknowledge that we, too, are insignificant and bloodied with the afterbirth of purpose gone astray.

But these are not places where we really like to go, is it.
The truth is, we long to meet God in places like Herod’s palace.
Places where we are secure in ourselves. Where we have got our
best foot forward. Where we can point to pretty pictures
and classic statues and carefully cultivated gardens. Where there is
beautiful background music and where we are confident that we would
hear God say to us, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
You have been faithful with a little. Now, I shall put you in charge of much.”

Despite our acknowledgement and bewailing of our manifold sins and transgressions, we most want to meet God in the palaces of our making. And if we can’t do that, then it might be ok to hike over to the manger, greet God, and then high tail it back to our places of security and order and predictability.

But Mary stops us. Our Mother rather forcefully puts her hand out, grabs us, and tells us to wash our ears, and don’t forget the backs of our necks, and forget going home to our palaces that are due to fall any minute anyway.

“My soul magnifies the Lord”, she says as we squirm. “And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful, lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

Jesus had a fiery mother. A mother who knew whom to say yes to, and whom to worship. She did not worship safety or popular acclaim or social status. If she did, she would never have found herself in the awkward and dangerous position of being pregnant and traveling by foot, alone, to take refuge with her older cousin, Elizabeth. If she worshipped her own future, she would never have said yes to God. But she did worship and love God above all else, above all other considerations. And so she, the first Christian, the Mother of the Church, calls us out of our worship of security and predictability and into worship of her God. The God that comes to lowly places, to places of humility and emptiness, to bus stops and soup kitchens and in the middle of the night. The God that asks us to lay down our whole lives “in a small, chilly manger warmed only by the hearts of the lowly and know with perfect joy that we are home.” (Sojourners)

From early childhood, we are mostly trained to go towards the spotlight – and to work hard for all the benefits the spotlight brings. But the good news according to Jesus’ Mother, Mary, is that the world’s spotlight is neither here nor there. If wealth and fame and power and visibility fall on you, so be it. Rejoice. Use your resources with humility and joy and confidence, for the sake of God’s good news. But if obscurity and emptiness and lowliness is yours, so be it. Rejoice. Say, along with Mary, an unknown girl; and along with Jesus, a stranger born among the last and the least, “See, God, I have come to do your will, O God.” (Hebrews 10:7) “Let it be with me, according to your Word.” (Luke 1: 38b)

And whether we serve our Lord in the spotlight or in obscurity, let us join our hearts and minds and hands in prayer:

“Come, little Word, there’s a weary world awaitin’
Come, little Word, with your eyes open wide.
Come, little Word, the welcome table is ready.
Now, little Word, would be a good time.
O come, Lord Jesus, come.” (Sojourners)

Amen.

Quotations from: “Sojourners Advent Bulletin”, 2003

"All In"

2009-11-13T12:59:00.000-08:00

You know, it takes awhile to feel as if you have moved in. It can take many years, actually.

But along the way, there are occasions that you know you’ve turned a corner – and that you are more at home.

Friday night’s Attitude of Gratitude Parish Dinner was another corner turned for me. What a fantastic night. Talk about an attitude of service – of servant ministry – our Stewardship Ministry Team is awesome, standing on the shoulders of the previous Stewardship Ministry Team. At some point during the evening, I looked around at the full room, tables filled with smiles and conversation and a thick joy filled me. Here we are. We’re in this together. There was a whole room full of people who have discovered the joy of living wholeheartedly – of leaping in with all they’ve got – whether it’s smiling in welcome, handing out plates, pouring coffee, cleaning up – it’s all offered. The two copper coins of self deposited into God’s treasury – available for whatever God decides to do with the gift. I sat at the table with Ida and Florence – neither of whom could hear much of anything – given the acoustics in the parish hall. But there they were, continuing to offer themselves to their fellow Christians, their fellow parishioners.

I want to talk about this sense of being “all in.” I don’t really play poker – I have tried, but I need to keep looking at the “cheat sheet.” And I would never be able to master a poker face – but I like that poker term, “all in.” As in, here’s all my chips, all I’ve got to play with, and I’m going to put it all down – win or lose.

The widow, of course, was all in. Her last two chips, all she had – pushed to the center of the table. All in.

The same with Jesus. He had steadily made his way towards Jerusalem, knowing what awaited him there. In the next few weeks after the incident we read about this morning, he was arrested and crucified. He spent these last few weeks the same way he spent all the rest of his weeks – teaching and healing. Now having come to Jerusalem, he taught in the temple. At the pinnacle place of interlocking state and religious power. And just because he was in mortal danger, he didn’t back away from his challenge to a structure that lived on the backs of the poor. No – Jesus was all in. No halfway measures. No wiffle waffling. No backing out. Steady – confident – and 100% - his whole life given completely for those people at that time in that place. He didn’t hold anything back so as to wait for a more opportune time to get his message across, or for a more teachable moment, or for a more insightful group who might understand what he was teaching – what the point of his sacrifice was. He wagered the whole of his life, on this bet that the goodness of God would have the final say, and that this God could be trusted absolutely.

The same with God. In the person of Jesus, God entered into creation – not only as Creator, but as Savior. As the Eucharistic Prayer puts it, "He became one with us, sharing our human nature, living and dying as one of us". Or as one of the most ancient hymns of the church, found in the letter to the Philippians puts it: “Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God; but emptied Himself, taking upon Him the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, becoming obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross.”

Through Jesus, God did not depend upon the abundance of his power, his knowledge, his omnipotence and omniscience. God threw his lot in with creation, with humanity, with this bent and broken world – and through the Holy Spirit, He continues to throws his lot in with the poverty of our condition, with the worthless coins of our condition, and not only befriends us here, but works with us to salvages the mess we have made of things, and to redeem us.

The truly miraculous thing is – the widow, Jesus, God – put all their chips in – not into a perfect system, on behalf of perfect people – but into a broken system on behalf of broken people! To a system that was, and is, corrupt. Jesus pointed to the corrupt system of the powerful and privileged Temple/State system that sustained itself by taking advantage of the poor, by “devouring widow’s homes.” He pointed to the deadly combination of power and hypocrisy that displayed itself as false piety. And yet.... he taught there and he pointed to the faithfulness of the widow who gave all she had.

In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul pointed to the agape love that God showed towards us through Jesus – “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” This love and faithfulness is a priori – it is grace – and it does not depend upon our goodness, or worthiness, or responsiveness.

God does notice however when we respond – He notices the small quick motions of the faithful ones, the little ones, the ones who make their offerings in faithful trust and gratitude. Who jump in to this "With God" life – not knowing exactly where it will lead them, but sensing that it they are getting themselves in with some really great company!

So – here we are – right in the middle of Stewardship Season. Actually – here at Good Shepherd, we are clear that all seasons are stewardship seasons. I love that our wall decoration at the dinner were the signs that Linda Kodet made out of recyclable materials – Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. We are jumping in more and more into our identity as Stewards, believing more and more that it is the primary identity given to us human beings. That from Genesis on, we are to be stewards of creation - the animal kingdoms, the trees and water and air and earth. Good stewards of family relationships – of being all in with the ones to whom we’ve promised ourselves to. Good stewards of our time and our bodies and our resources.

At the heart of good stewardship of course is the knowing that none of it is “ours.” It is all Gift. Pure Gift. We are responsible and accountable for the short time that we are here on this earth. And the Good News is that there is One to whom all that we enjoy belongs – and He is here, with us, watching, helping, guiding. He is both the source of all that we have, and the end to whom all will return - and in between, he asks that we take good care of each other, of his world, and of his church.

In the fall season – we talk about the aspect of stewardship that has to do with money. It’s the season when we acknowledge the basic truth that the mission of the church depends upon each of us throwing out lot in with each other and with God– that when God gives us the desire to expand our ministries with teens and children, to have a gardener for three hours every other week, to expand our ministries of outreach, and to adequately maintain this sacred trust of property, and to use the land for the benefit of the community and to pay our clergy and our bookkeeper and our sexton and our secretary – it requires offering back through the church a portion of what God has given us.

What proportion? That is between you and God. The Episcopal Church standard is 10%. Some of us aren’t there yet, but by raising our offerings by an additional 1% each year, we’re on our way. Some of us know the joy of tithing and go beyond. The truth is that God takes whatever we offer and is able to ignite from our sparks of faith, a blaze that will ultimately consume our hearts and fill us with love and joy, peace and contentment.

Let us pray.

"O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts and blessed peace to cheer us,
And keep us in all grace, and guide us when perplexed,
And free us from all harm in this world and the next."

(2nd verse Now Thank We All Our God)

"I Sing a Song"

2009-11-13T12:41:00.000-08:00

All Saints, 2009

As some of you know, I grew up in the Methodist church, traveled with Quakers during college and my young adult years, and finally, came home to the Episcopal Church. Before the Episcopal Church though, there were no saint stories. No Virgin Mary, apart from Christmas. No Feast Days or Fast Days. No liturgical calendar. All of this came with my conversion into the Episcopal Church – and I found it utterly delightful – but not quite sure what to do with it. I had suddenly inherited this whole family that seemed strange and unfamiliar and truth be told – in whom I was not really interested.

When I became the lay Associate for Youth and Family at the first Episcopal church I served – Church of the Incarnation, in Santa Rosa - my office was located in a room called “Venerable Bede.” All the other rooms and offices were called by saints names as well. The Nursery was St. Lucia, the choir room was St. Cecilia, the 4th/5th grade classroom was St. Agnes. You get the picture. I remember thinking, with my still overly Protestant brain, why not just name the rooms by what they are: Choir Room. Nursery. Classroom. Associate’s Office.

On All Saints Day, we sang “I sing a song of the saints of God” and the children paraded down the church aisle in costumes of various saints. October Sundays were spent constructing the costumes – presumably learning about whichever saint they were costuming as.

I found it odd, if not slightly heretical.

Still, I was attracted to what all these saints seemed to point to - a life that went on under the surface / a deeper sort of Christianity than I had been exposed to, and had only dreamed existed.

I began to read about the saints – and it was clear that most of them were somewhat odd people, misfits even in their time, but utterly converted, body, mind and soul, with a love of God so significant that they embodied the kind of hunger and thirst that Jesus talked about – but hunger and thirst for what? It differed. Some thirsted for justice. Some for divine union. Some for peace. Some for education and relief of suffering. Some for the conversion and salvation of souls. Whatever form it took for each of them, the underlying reality was the same – a passionate love for God that had united with God’s passionate love for them.

In other words, saints drink from the wellspring of Life and know that we are made from God and for God. We are created by God from our Genesis, and we return to God at our End. And here – in the middle – we adopt an attitude of gratitude, and surrender ourselves in as much trust as possible – to the Divine Spirit that enlivens each one of us.

Gratitude, surrender and trust. At it’s simplest – that’s what it means to be a saint. To give thanks for everything – and to surrender everything, trusting God. The Saints usually have no idea where this gratitude, surrender and trust is going to take them – all they know is that as they surrender their entire being – their possessions, their will, their understanding, their memory, their future, their time, their resources – as they do this, miracles unfold and Life in all it’s abundance begins to take root and grow and to bear fruit.

So, what form did this take for the Venerable Bede – whose office I occupied? It turns out that he was an English monk and scholar in the early 700’s. He lived in the monastery from the age of 7, and was quite clearly brilliant. His best-known work is his History of the English Church and People, a classic that has frequently been translated and is available in Penguin Paperbacks. It gives a history of Britain up to 729, speaking of the Celtic peoples who were converted to Christianity during the first three centuries of the Christian era, and the invasion of the Anglo-Saxon pagans in the fifth and sixth centuries, and their subsequent conversion by Celtic missionaries from the north and west, and Roman missionaries from the south and east. His work is our chief source for the history of the British Isles during this period. Long before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he was aware that the earth is a sphere, and he wrote that the solar year is not exactly 365 and a quarter days long, so that the Julian calendar (one leap year every four years) requires some adjusting if the months are not to get out of step with the seasons. For Venerable Bede, gratitude, surrender and trust meant using the gift of his brilliance to spend copious quantities of time and thought and ink separating fact from fiction and hearsay as he wrote history and advanced the cause of what would later become known as science.

For Agnes, for whom the 4th and 5th grade classroom was named, it took the form of martyrdom. Agnes died at Rome around 304 in the persecution of Diocletian: the last and fiercest of the persecutions of Christianity by the Roman emperors. She is said to have been only twelve or thirteen years old – and her young age shocked many Romans into demanding that the persecutions stop. Her fearless attitude caused others to say that “If this religion can enable a twelve-year-old girl to meet death without fear, it is worth checking out.” I think making her the sponsor of a classroom of ten and eleven year olds has the potential to give children courage in standing up for what they believe and resist peer pressure to participate in bullying or sexual activity or drugs….which yes, do affect kids at a very young age. For Agnes, gratitude, surrender and trust, meant calm conviction in the reality of the resurrection – a calmness and conviction that is possible for even the young folk among us.

I want to tell you a third story about saints. This one is not from the 300’s or the 700’s. It’s from 1970’s to now. I heard this story first in 2002 when I met a Ugandan Bishop who wore a large pectoral cross and spoke English with a heavy African accent. The cross he wore was given to him by the Ugandan Archbishop Janani Luwum, before he was martyred by Idi Amin’s government in 1977. There had been many persecutions by Amin towards Christians, and Luwum had personally gone time and again to secure the release of prisoners. In the end, he secured the release of many Anglican bishops and took their place with his own person. Before he was put into the Land Rover which took him away, he handed the cross to the Bishop that I met. I’m sorry that I cannot remember his name – but I will never forget the cross he wore. Janani Luwum’s feast day is February 16th.

At Convention, I met a priest of this Diocese, Jerry Drino, who works with the Sudanese, and has been instrumental in the process of putting the Martyrs of Sudan onto the most recent Episcopal calendar of saints. Here is what the next publication of our Lesser Feasts and Fasts will say about the saints of Sudan.

"The Christian bishops, chiefs, commanders, clergy and people of Sudan declared, on May 16, 1983, that they would not abandon God as God had revealed himself to them under threat of Shariah Law imposed by the fundamentalist Islamic government in Khartoum. Until a peace treaty was signed on January 9, 2005, the Episcopal Church of the Province of the Sudan suffered from persecution and devastation through twenty-two years of civil war. Two and a half million people were killed, half of whom were members of this church. Many clergy and lay leaders were singled out because of their religious leadership in their communities. No buildings, including churches and schools, are left standing in an area the size of Alaska. Four million people are internally displaced, and a million are scattered around Africa and beyond in the Sudanese Diaspora. Twenty-two of the twenty-four dioceses exist in exile in Uganda or Kenya, and the majority of the clergy are unpaid. Only 5% of the population of Southern Sudan was Christian in 1983. Today over 85% of that region of six million is now mostly Episcopalian or Roman Catholic. A faith rooted deeply in the mercy of God has renewed their spirits through out the years of strife and sorrow."

I am stilled by this kind of witness. And I look around at my own life, and wonder how it is that I continue to have trouble surrendering and trusting God. Why it is that I continue under the illusion that my life and my possessions are actually my own - when it is obvious that everything I have, every breath I take, every dollar in my account, every child that sits around my table – is mine on loan and in reality, belongs to God. The truth is, we begin and end in God. And in the middle here? We are called to trust.

Let us join with all the company of heaven, the saints, martyrs and apostles, the witnesses in ages past in and in our age right now – in relaxing our grip, in opening our hands, in surrender and trust – so that the miracles that are always associated with Abundant Life can happen now in our own lives, in our own church, in our own hearts.

The Next Day

2009-10-12T13:21:00.000-07:00

Hebrews 4: 12 - 16; Mark 10: 17 - 31

Remember Groundhog Day? Bill Murray plays Phil, a self centered tv anchorman, who is sent to the small town of Punxsutawney, to film a news piece on Groundhog Day. While he is there, he falls into a time warp that traps him into repeating the same day over and over. The same waiter dropping the same tray of plates at exactly the same time. The same boy falling out of a tree. The same ladies getting a flat tire. The same insurance salesman. Every morning he wakes up to the same music on the radio.

Once he figures out that there are no consequences to anything he does, he tries increasing his self centeredness into meanness - trips the old lady that bugs him; walks in front of cars; barks at a man who annoys him. But after awhile, being mean ceases to amuse him, and he grows increasingly horrified at being doomed to repeat the same day - over and over.

So, he does the opposite. He discovers the happiness of being good. Of going out of his way to help other people and make other people feel good. The goodness of following the Golden Rule; the 10 commandments. Sure enough - he's happier. But

he's still trapped. Same day. Over and over.

Until..….. he begins to love - without regard to self - without regard to appropriating / taking / for his very own / anyone or anything. Phil, the self-centered anchorman, becomes Phil, the golden rule guy, becomes Phil, the one who loves - without regard to whether or not he will be rewarded, without regard to whether or not his own dream will come true.

And then - lo and behold - he's free. The next day begins. The clock flips over to February 3rd! Love that does not have self at it's center - is the key to Phil's freedom.

Something of the same thing is going on for the rich man who comes to Jesus. This man has already discovered the happiness of the commandments. He isn't one of the people who've been tormenting and trying to trap Jesus with trick questions. This is a man who lives what St. Teresa of Avila called a "well ordered life." He is a good Jew. He follows the commandments. He does what is expected of him. He's nice to elderly ladies and to children. He tithes. He honors his parents.

But something is missing. He longs for something he can't quite put his finger on … but something more. Something greater. for freedom maybe - for the adventure of the next day. Of the day after. He is looking for the doorway into whatever it is the comes next after you've got the "being good" part down pat.

Forgive me for overlaying modern themes on this old Gospel story - but I wonder if perhaps this wealthy man was either young or middle aged . Because those are the times in our lives when we are most familiar with our hungers for the next step - for something more. For young people just graduating from high school or college - this hunger often reveals itself as a quest - perhaps a pilgrimage to a far distant land, where all the familiar support systems are absent and the traveling young person needs to dig deep within themselves to find inner resources they didn't know they had. For some questers, they find a new relationship with God. The familiar God of parents and culture now becomes the God with whom they have their own relationship.

We are also familiar with this hunger for the next step - for the next day - that arises often in middle age. When the familiar no longer satisfies and there is a gnawing need to enter life from a very different angle.

Maybe this wealthy man was young or middle aged - but in any event, he runs to Jesus and falls on his knees and asks him a big question - what Fred Craddock calls - one of those ultimate questions. And Jesus honored him by giving a big answer. A small answer would have been insulting.

So Jesus gave him a simple answer that was big enough to go straight to the very heart of the matter, straight to the next step on this man's journey towards the Divine. This answer that Jesus gave - wasn't complex or nuanced or obscure - it didn't need academic theologians to decipher it. Though many have given it their best shot.

This particular gospel reading has been the subject of hundreds of commentaries - mostly designed to soften it or explain it away. I'm sure, through the years, you've heard all the methods for blunting the simple sharpness of this reading. The main two being:

1. Jesus said this to this particular man - because this man had an issue around wealth. No one, not Jesus and not Mark, meant it as applicable to the rest of us.
2. What it really means is not that wealth is the problem, but that trusting in wealth is the problem.

It's simplicity of course, did not make it easy to swallow or to follow - and it's not any easier today. In our weekly gospel readings, we are advancing into the truly rigorous part of Jesus' teaching - as Jesus walks towards certain crucifixion in Jerusalem, his words are aimed directly at reaching through the walls we put up around our hearts.

But before he said anything, "Jesus looked at him and loved him." Saw right into him. Knew him.

Maybe you're like me and this is what you want most - to be seen all the way through, known completely, loved without measure. This was the kind of love with which Jesus looked at this man. But this kind of love has consequences. The truth is, the loving gaze of Jesus penetrates to the heart. Because he is the Living Word that the letter to the Hebrews speaks of - the living and active Word of God whose gaze can pierce, like a scalpel, and dissect bone from marrow. He is the one whose winnowing fork separates wheat from chaff. His love sees clearly and speaks truthfully.

And the words follow. Twelve step language has become part of our vocabulary - and so using 12 step language, we could say that Jesus performed an intervention with this man, with the kind of love that steps with boldness between the addict and the addiction. It is the kind of love that speaks clearly and truthfully about the things that bind him, that keep him from true joy. First things first, as theologian Kathleen Grieb says. Change this one thing - and everything will change.

"You lack one thing," Jesus tells him. "Go, sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." This is the story that converted Francis of Assisi. Remember the story from last week? Francis went from the church to the public square, and completely disrobed. He took these words exactly to heart, and followed Jesus into an entirely different life path.

We are clearly in another world here - what I am talking about is non-rational. Don't even try to make this make sense in a logical, linear sort of way. This is a camel through the eye of a needle kind of talk. And the only way to enter into it is through the heart. The imagination. The soul. The Spirit.

So what might it mean for you and for me?

I don't have an answer - but what I can say is this - discipleship begins when the one thing that enslaves us is released, and it's claims upon you are dissolved. On that day, you begin to walk differently in the world. That day may have already happened for you - and it may not have. It may have happened over and over again. But at some point, if you continue in the path of Jesus, you'll come to a crossroads -

and this gospel story is here to help you across.

What else helps you across?

The story - and the community. Jesus does not intend for us to be solitary and lonely. He promises fields and family and houses to those who follow - not in a prosperity gospel sort of way, but in the real way of those who've crossed the crossroad and entered into Jesus' inner circle. There are mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters there. And while it's not hunky dory all the time in God's household, there is the splendiferous light of Love shining underneath and around and through - all the time - whether you personally can see it or not.

What else helps you across? There's the story and the community and the Spirit. When Jesus invites the man to follow - his invitation itself confers the power to do so. Mission Impossible is God's daily agenda! We are not left to ourselves in this matter. Ultimately, as Deacon Cynthia so wisely said at the 8 AM service, "it is simply a matter of surrender." Surrendering to the beauty and power of God's Spirit. In this surrendered state, you really can let go over everything you "own" and find yourself blessed beyond belief with abundance and joy. It's true. And I cannot describe exactly why or how it is true. But I can verify that it is so.

We don't know what happened after the man turned away sadly. He very well might have thought about it and figured out that joy really did lie in the direction Jesus pointed him to. But whatever happened with him - the closer question is what will happen with you?

You may be, after all, in this wealthy man's position. Hungry for the next step in your pilgrimage into God. Maybe you've sat on various committees of the church, you've pledged significantly for years, you've assiduously followed ethical business practices, you live a well ordered life - and that's all good, and you don't intend to give it up - but you're ready for the next step in the pilgrimage to God. You long for whatever it is that comes next. And so - Jesus invites you too into the day after - the next day - the day of freedom.

Resources:
Christian Century, A. Katherine Grieb, October 2009
Fred Craddock
Teresa de Avila, Interior Castles
Kai Harris, "Quests, Communities and Stewards", to be published in Broadcast, newsletter for Young Adults and College Students.

Feast of St. Francis with children and adults

2009-10-10T22:26:00.000-07:00

Galatians 6:14-18; Matthew 11:25-30

Do any of you carry big heavy back packs? Sometimes back packs come with wheels on them so you don’t have to carry so much weight. I don’t like carrying really heavy things, do you? It hurts!

But sometimes we carry heavy burdens inside and we don’t really know it. We just know that we don’t feel so good. Sometimes we might think that life is really not very fair and that somebody else has a way easier time of it than we do. Or we might want something we don’t have. Or we might resent that somebody else got all the notice for work that we actually did. There’s all kinds of things that can weigh us down – we might be addicted to something like alcohol, or somebody, like a boyfriend or girlfriend. We might be burdened with too much guilt, or too much worry, or just too much of too much!

Carrying all that stuff around inside hurts, and it can make us sick or sad or lonely.

But Jesus said that his burden was light and his load was easy to carry. Just love God with everything you have. Everything you own, love God with it. And love your neighbor as yourself. Love with everything you have. Don’t keep anything back – just abandon yourself, warts and wiggles and all, to God. And don’t hold anything back from your neighbor. No act of love is too small.

And that’s it! You’ll be light as a feather, shiny as a star. No more heavy backpacks on the inside to lug around. So why isn’t it easier? Why is it so hard? That is a very good mystery.

Really, Jesus was talking about being who you are naturally – a God centered, God shaped being. We’re made for love and to love. So carrying Jesus’ easy burden really means becoming exactly who you are naturally meant to be. Animals certainly know how to be exactly who they are meant to be. Trees know how to do this. The sun is the sun’s truest self at all times. So are children. Tired? Wah! Hungry? Let’s get something to eat! Joyful? Let’s yell and dance around!

But something happens as we get older and wiser. Older and smarter. We start getting so smart that we can’t just hear Jesus and believe him and follow him. It takes the full on power of the Lord’s Spirit to get us to lay our burdens down and be healed. It takes Prayer – usually of a whole community - for us to become utterly convinced of God’s love and acceptance.

So Jesus was enamored with the little ones – with those who were not burdened by sureness in their own abilities. People who were foolishness enough to just take God completely at his word. People like Francis of Assisi.

When Francis heard God say – “Go and re-build my church” – he did, stone by stone, begging people for rocks to rebuild the little village church that had fallen into disrepair. When he went to church and heard the gospel reading for the morning that said – “go and sell all that you have and come and follow me” – he did. Fortunately for his father, Petro Bernardone, most of the family business was not in Francis’ keeping!

Jesus called God, “Father”, so Francis did too. So literally that he took off all of his clothes in the public square and said, ““From now on I can freely say ‘Our Father Who art in heaven,’ not father Peter Bernardone….”The Bishop tried to rescue the whole situation, by taking off his cope to wrap around Francis.

Because God was Francis’ Father, all creatures were his brother and sister. The lepers. The trees. The birds and the wolves. The Sun and the moon. The water. Cold and fire and death itself.

Francis’ life became a parable of the Divine. And the Divine Life abounds in paradoxes – the kind that our brilliant minds simply can’t make sense of. Who can “understand” God? Well, maybe children who love stories, or animals who live utterly true to their own nature, or those fortunate enough or foolish enough to be utterly abandoned to the fire of the Holy Spirit.

For those of us bumbling along the way, feeling our way rather blindly toward the Divine, living parables like Francis help light the way. Actually, if you meditate on the saints enough, they will de-stabilize you more and more until you too tip over the edge into the pure ocean of God.

So – one of these paradoxes Francis discovered was this: Poverty – by which Francis meant not appropriating anything or anyone for your very own – this Poverty was actually Freedom and Wealth.

This is as impossible to understand now as it was in Francis’ day as it was in Jesus’ day. There is no human learning that can make this make sense or make it a checked off item on your “getting spiritual to do” list. It’s not something you do or don’t do. It’s a holy work of the Holy Spirit. All you can do is fervently desire that the Holy Spirit comes to you, and fills you and brings you closer and closer to the feet of Christ.

And meanwhile, love in whatever small way that is open to you. Walk in however much light you’ve been given. Eat the body of Christ with as much faith as you have that this is indeed the bread – the very sustenance – of heaven itself. And the Lord will work his holy work in you – gradually and gently, or suddenly and stormily – either way you are being brought safely home.

Let us pray.
Relieve us of our own wisdom, Holy God, so that our only wisdom is Your eternal Word, Jesus. Help us set down those things which weigh us down, and fill us with your easy burden and the light load of your Love for others. Grant us the peace that passes all our understanding. And make of us a church that delights in paradoxes, in children, in animals, and in You.
Amen.

Two Stories

2009-10-10T22:08:00.000-07:00

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10, 9:20-22; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50

Courage for community. Fervent, embodied prayer that makes a difference. Difficult decisions made on behalf of the safety and wellbeing of the little ones. These are the urgent, life and death matters that run through the scriptures this morning.

I’ve told one story already this morning – from the only book of the Bible with a woman’s name attached to it. Esther had the courage for community – she “came out” as a Jew to the King, though it could have cost her her life – and the community prayed fervently on her behalf, to support her as she risked everything in order to try to save them.

I’m going to tell you two more stories. The first is a tragedy. It highlights the unspeakable consequences of life lived at a pace that is outside grace in which it is difficult for little ones to thrive. The second is a story of leading a wandering soul back to safety. They are both of them, stories of community in which God is active – though not directly spoken about – just as in the Book of Esther.

A doting father tears up whenever co-workers ask about his baby son. He and his wife are overjoyed about this baby. They are also distracted with the care of an infant and the demands of their professional lives. One morning, the father parked his car at the BART lot, and rode the train to work. He’d not had a lot of sleep and his routine had been disrupted. So much so that he drove straight to the BART rather than to day care to drop off his four month old son. He returned to his car, as usual, in the early evening. Too late. When this happened, I lived just a few blocks from the train station. The outpouring of support for this young mother and father was overwhelming – coming from all over the Bay Area – though none of it could ever take away the exquisite grief etched into their hearts.

Around the edges, questions began being asked - why is forty hours of work no longer considered sufficient? Why are we working ourselves and our children to death? And why did no one see the child? The car was in the middle of a very busy parking lot. God forbid, that someone saw the child and figured it was none of their business. The comments and conversations continued – and people began making pledges to look up away from their own routine, their own world, their own blinders, and out into the world around them. Who needs help? Who needs a hand? Who needs an ax, literal or metaphorical, to help release a little one from danger.

Jesus said that everyone of us is responsible to be a place of safety for little ones. To do that, we need to get out of our heads and into the common sense of the world around us.

Whenever the disciples got into a heady discussion –or so far into their own agenda, Jesus took a little child, set him in the middle of the disciples and said, “Look. This is the way. Right here. Standing in front of you.” Zen Buddhists call this “beginner’s mind.” Christians call this “the way to heaven.” Mothers and Fathers call this, “I need some rest. Could someone help me for awhile.” And the Christian community is pledged by our Lord to say yes. We can help you.

A second story. One of my dearest friends is in her mid eighties. She swims every day at her club in Marin. She is helping to raise her grandchildren and she is often beside herself with frustration with them. But a couple days ago, when she had just gotten out of the pool, she noticed a teenager she didn’t know off to the side of the pool, talking on her cell phone– right under the sign that said, “No cell phones!” The girl was crying, sobbing, really. “I don’t know why she did that to me. My name will be all over the school now. I can’t imagine going back there.” Now, Nancy has gotten way past the point of caring whether she’s in fashion or not, or whether she is politically correct or not. So she stopped and touched the girl’s shoulder. "Believe me," my friend said, "whatever she did to you, put it out of your mind. In the long run, it will harm her more than it will you. Look out,– there’s so much in the world for you to be part of. Forget these people who treat you badly. Move out into all the good the world has for you. There are good people – do things with them.” Of course - she was a teenager - she didn't respond! – but I don't doubt for a minute that this act of kindness connected the girl to a larger reality and saved some piece of her soul from the terrible ravaging that only teen age girls know how to inflict on each other.

It would have been very easy, and probably much more socially correct, for Nancy to have pretended that she didn’t hear the conversation, didn’t notice the girl’s tears. Touching her on the shoulder. Offering her an elder’s wisdom. All of this is slightly beyond the norm.

But when your hearts and minds are engaged with the people around you, and you have been fervently praying to be of service, you will find yourselves in situations where you are able to offer a word or a touch of healing and hope. And while God’s name may never be spoken, it is nevertheless true, that God is present and active. It’s also true that most of the time, you will never know the good you have done.

It is my hope that it can be said of Good Shepherd in the years to come, “This is a community whose prayers are effective, whose touch confers healing and harbor for anyone in need – and who knows how to celebrate salvation with exuberance and thanks.

Amen.

Keep Coming Back

2009-08-23T23:42:00.000-07:00

Keep Coming Back.
1 Kings 8: 22 – 43; Psalm 84; Ephesians 6: 10 – 20; John 6: 56 – 69
August 23, 2009; Proper B16

The I-Help Pasta with Pastors dinner was last night at the Northminster Presbyterian Church on East Alvin St., in Salinas. I was one of about 15 or 20 pastors serving dinner, along with a kitchen cooking crew of homeless guys who participate in the I-Help program.

Hard to believe, but I was the only woman pastor. Before we started serving, we got our picture taken. There I was, front and center, surrounded by a band of brothers. I was asked many times what church I served. Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd got good press last night! Although I was a bit taken aback when someone said, “Oh, that’s that radical church!” I said, “really – wow! Tell me the history.” It turned out that he was talking about the Episcopal Church’s welcome and ordination of gays and lesbians. I laughed in that good natured way I've got - I guess it’s still obvious I come from the Bay Area, where radical has a much different connotation. We agreed to downgrade radical to progressive!

It was a great night – there were Mormons and Nondenominationals and Catholics and Methodists and of course, us radical Episcopalians! At one point, walking through the crowd, with a plate of meat spaghetti in one hand and a plate of vegetarian spaghetti in the other, I looked around and thought – “here is my family – here are my brothers and sisters – these are the people of God.” And my very next thought was – “hmmmm…. We look so incredibly ordinary. There is absolutely nothing romantic about this group. No hazy halos. No particularly spiritual glow.” Well….Gerry and Miryam were there. That was an exception! Gerry definitely has that glow about her! …. But in that moment, looking at all of us with spilled spaghetti on the tables and cake trays and coffee in Styrofoam cups, I kind of tried adjusting my gaze, trying to look with the eyes of Jesus…. But nothing happened. There we were. Eating dinner in a large parish hall, in unspectacular surroundings, unspectacular people. Ordinary.

Except….that we were there. From a lot of different variations of being church. All of us, in one way or another, get up every day and make a decision all over again to try to follow Jesus. To hold hands with the homeless. To go to work in the morning if we have a job, or to pray for work if we don’t. To try to be faithful in the very ordinary routines of life.

But if you were to scratch the surface of that crowd last night, or this group this morning, if you and I were to sit down and talk heart to heart, my guess is that we would find out that we are not the only ones who have wondered at one time or another if this whole faith journey thing is worth it.

I mean, which of us has not - at one time or another -wondered whether we have believed in vain? Maybe it was during the dark of night, when you were by the bedside of your very sick child wondering if he would recover. Or maybe it was in the early morning, waking up alone, wondering why your spouse left you and if he would ever return. Maybe sometime during the day when you’re looking at the help wanted ads, feeling helpless about ending up unemployed and worrying about ever finding a job again. Or, maybe at dusk, stirring the soup for dinner, thinking about the ill will between family members and wondering how things turned out so different than you had imagined or hoped.

If you're like me, you've got to admit that there are plenty of these kinds of times and that occasionally you are tempted to conclude that your faith is maybe misplaced. You might not walk away - but you might find that getting to church is harder, and when pledge time comes around, your pledge shrinks, and you wake up one day and realized that you haven't prayed in some time. And the result is pretty much the same as what happened with the disciples in today’s gospel reading – you’re out the door, gone, onto other things.

“These sayings of yours Jesus are just too hard. The cross cannot be God’s plan. We’re leaving.”

It's tempting to write off those who gave up on Jesus as people who were lazy or unfaithful - but these folks not simply "the crowds," - these are the "disciples." You and me. People who have believed in Jesus, who have followed him, who’ve given up a lot to follow him.

I’m convinced by my own life and the lives of many who have shared their struggles with me – I’m convinced that the picture of the disciples in today's gospel may be not pretty, but it's realistic. The spiritual walk is no cake walk – and at one time or another, my guess is that maybe you too could not quite remember what attracted you to Jesus in the first place.

But this isn’t just a story about leaving – it’s also a story about staying. “To whom would we go, Lord?” Peter responds. “You have the words of life.” Maybe Peter spoke out of courage and faith. Maybe hard headedness. Maybe he was hoping that he could still cash in on the biggest bet of his life. Whatever the reason, he and a few didn't leave.

So what made them different? It’s plain that these were not the smartest guys, or the bravest, or the best. They argued. They complained. They didn’t get it. In Jesus’ greatest hour of need, they got so scared they ran away. Still – as much as they could – they stayed.

So what was different about them? The Rev. Dr. David Lose says that pretty much the only difference was that they had somehow figured out to keep looking at Jesus. "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." They knew to keep their eyes on the prize – to keep looking to Jesus.

That is the witness of Christians who make it through the centuries. They simply “keep coming back” – you know the AA term. They keep coming back to the gathered community – the church - to feed on the Living Word of God through the scriptures and the sacraments.

Is church the only place that God reveals God’s self or that God feeds us? Of course not. When Solomon prayed the dedication of the temple, he immediately acknowledged that the temple could not nearly contain God. This world pulses with the presence and activity of its creator: in nature, in government, in family, in work. In all these places, God is present and active, creating and sustaining the whole creation.

And yet each of us knows just how difficult at times it can be to see God. Nature turns violent – I was in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and saw first hand the terrifying destruction of winds and water. Governments can go corrupt. The family can be a place of discord and the workplace can be divisive.

When all the things we count on come up empty, there is still the Church – that thin place where we hear the gospel and we celebrate the eucharist, where we are washed in water and fed the food of hope and encouragement. Where we are assured over and over of forgiveness, and acceptance, and meaning and purpose for our lives.

The truth is that church – the gathered community who has been grafted onto the living vine of Christ – feeds us in a way that is simply not available in any other way. Hearing the Gospel proclaimed in the gathered community is not the same as reading it to oneself in the privacy of one’s home. Walking in nature – as wonderful as that is, and as revealing of the Creator as it is – is not the same as breathing in the fragrance of the prayers of our neighbors.

Given the challenges we face, I know that baptism and communion seem like small, even paltry things. And yet, God has determined to be most clearly known through the “weak” word of the gospel of Jesus and his very ordinary band of followers, the church. And this band of followers, the church – what is it, exactly? It is simply those who say “Amen” to this goal – to walk all the way into the Kingdom, holding hands with the homeless, holding hands with our very ordinary neighbors, holding hands with Jesus whether in sickness and in sorrow or in joy and in plenty.

So, I’m glad you got dressed this morning, and got into your car and drove yourself here. The Lord rejoices that you got up, once again, and said – “to whom else would we go Lord. You have the words of life.”

What’s the secret to finishing well? Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus and then just keep coming back.

Amen.

Resource: The Rev. Dr. David Lose, Words of Eternal Life

Eating our way to God

2009-08-03T17:54:00.000-07:00

“Lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called” “and grow into the full stature of Christ.”

How do we do that? How do we grow and mature into Christ? We eat our way there! We eat the right food and we grow into Christ. And how do we choose the right food to eat? For that, we need to know what kind of hungry we are.

King David was confused. He thought he was hungry for power. His armies attacked and conquered other armies. He amassed victories and wealth and territories and women. But his hunger was not sated. And so, even with all of his wives and concubines, he commandeered Bathsheba. And then when he got her pregnant and he couldn’t keep his hungers secret, he tried to make the problem go away by killing Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah. One of his most loyal men.

The prophet Nathan told him a story to wake him up, to wake him up to his true hunger. And David got it. He was powerfully sorry for the mess he had made – but the unintended consequences were set in motion and it wasn’t only David that suffered. Bathsheba’s life was forever altered. Her husband was killed, and the child she carried would also die.

So David fasted. He refrained from eating. He needed to reconfigure his hunger and become hungry again for the truth. For forgiveness. For doing what was right, what was worthy of the calling to which he had been called.

The people around Jesus were hungry. Really hungry. Unlike David, they didn’t have power. Their bellies often rumbled because they didn’t have enough to eat. And now, here was Jesus. He made their twisted limbs straight with a touch of his hand. He spit in the dirt and with the mud made their blind eyes see. He fed them with barley loaves and fish. And he taught them. He fed their minds and their hearts with God’s words. Words that gave them hope. With his words and touch and food he let them know they weren’t forgotten. He calmed their fears. He connected them with their own self worth. And the people were powerfully hungry for all of that he did – and so they tried to take him by force and make him into another King David.

But Jesus wasn’t like David. He wasn’t like the crowds. He wasn’t hungry. The hunger for security that is created by fear; the hunger for confidence that is created by self doubt; the hunger for connection that is created by alienation – these hungers did not gnaw at Jesus. He wasn’t hungry in the same way they were.

But why? After all, he was completely and totally human. The difference? He was filled – full up – with God.

Remember in the desert when his belly was rumbling because of fasting 40 days and nights? The devil came to him - “If you are hungry, turn these stones into bread.” And Jesus said “No, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the Lord God.”

And remember when his disciples went into town to buy food, and they came back and found him talking to the Samaritan woman. She had been drawing water at the well, and he asked her for a drink. When he’d drunk his fill of water, he told her that he knew where she could get water that would quench her thirst forever. When she asked where she could get that water, he said, “I am living water.”

And then the disciples came back with food and asked him if he was hungry he said that he had food that they did not know about. They thought maybe someone had come and given him a sandwich – but that wasn’t the kind of food he was talking about.

The truth is, he hungered like you and me. He needed to eat. But the driving hungers that cause us to act badly, the driving hungers of fear and self doubt and alienation did not drive him. He was filled up with the security and the confidence and the connection that come directly from the Source of all that is.

And so, he fed others without controlling them. He healed others without taking advantage of them. He taught others without ruling over them. He did not need power. He did not need the adulation of crowds. He was not hungry for security and self worth and connectedness because he knew in his DNA that he was God’s beloved. And it was this relationship, this living relationship of belovedness that David hungered for. This was the hunger that had the crowds running around the lake after Jesus. It the same hunger that you and I have.

OK – I’ll make it personal. It’s the hunger I have.

Are you familiar with the psychologist Maslow? He said all humans have a hierarchy of needs that starts out with the basics – food, clothing and shelter. It goes up from there. Well, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is covered in my case. I’ve got the basics. Ascending beyond the basics, I’ve got great relationships, good community, and wonderful work. And up towards the tip of the hierarchy, I’ve got purpose and meaning.

But there’s something more I hunger for and it makes me restless and anxious. And it turns out that that something more will not be – cannot be - filled by anything other than God.

St. Augustine said it best when he said “our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” There is a God sized hole in my heart and I believe it’s in your heart, and in the heart of every human being, and nothing else will satisfy.

Until we eat the living Word of the Beloved, we will keep chasing after Jesus to make him into something he will never be – like the king that will give us what ever we think we want. Or we will, like David, try to find satisfaction in ways that set into motion unintended consequences that hurt ourselves and others.

I’m going to continue to make this personal.

I’ve been a Christian for a long time. And I have heard about the words of this gospel many times – Come to me and you will never hunger - and frankly, I have continued to know hunger – and I’m not talking about physical – I’m talking about in my soul.

But what I am beginning to understand is that I inherited a faith tradition that long ago split off the spiritual from the material in a way that is false and un-biblical and the result is that even though I have devoted my life to this faith - I have still been hungry! And I think a good many other people are too. A lot of young adults I talk to have either given up on church or they try other religions that seem more exotic and promising.

But Jesus never made that split. He never isolated the holy and sacred in any one place or any one element. God was in every face he looked into, in every loaf of bread he shared, in the air he breathed and the ground he walked upon. He would not have recognized a tradition that had God present only as living bread in elements offered at a church altar. This meal of Christ's that we share gathered here is to powerfully nurture the Spirit within, grow us up into Christ, and remind us that the bread and wine that we offer here is a concentrated and focused sign of the presence of the same God who feeds us just as powerfully in our daily life, in our daily bread.

A couple years ago I had an experience that was specifically designed to help heal this split between the material and spiritual worlds. It was at a Clergy Wellness retreat put on by the Church Pension Fund. All clergy are invited to participate - I think the basic goal is to keep us clergy well enough to not need our pensions for awhile! There were medical doctors, financial advisers, spiritual directors there. This experiment that I'm sharing with you was led by one of the doctors.

He had us gather for dinner – but this time, we were asked to wait to eat until everyone had gone through the serving line. Then he asked us to simply look at our food. He said that each morsel of food was an ambassador from the cosmos. He told us to pick up a piece of a food, and look at it for half a second, then smell it, and then to put it into our mouth and taste it. Then chew it slowly. He said, "When you are looking at a piece of carrot, it is possible to see the sunshine in it, to see the earth in it, to see that it has come from the whole cosmos for your nourishment." You get the picture. We did this with each bite for awhile – long enough to really really slow down and take in the full nourishment of our food. After awhile, he allowed us to go ahead and eat the rest of the meal as we normally would – but the amazing thing is that most of us were completely full and we’d only eaten a portion of what we had put on our plates.

We talked after about how we eat, but don’t really eat what is right in front of us. Instead we are eating our sorrows, our fears, our angers, our past, our future.

It is easy to think of God as out there – and that if we are to eat the Living Bread of Heaven, it will be here, kneeling at the altar – and it is true – we do eat the Living Word of God here in this time and place. But it is true as well that God feeds us continuously through the sun on our skin and the smiles on our friend’s faces.

The truth is our truest hunger, our deepest hunger, the hunger behind all our other hungers is for God. And God is very, very near at hand. Let us bless the Living Bread and give thanks.

Communion stretches your heart

2009-07-28T17:49:00.000-07:00

Communion Stretches Your Heart.
Ephesians 3: 14 - 21; John 6: 1 - 21

I grew up a Methodist. And in the Methodist church, we had communion about once every three months. We were reverent people and communion being special we didn’t want to wear out the occasion by too much repetition.

The choir rehearsed for weeks preparing for Communion Sunday. About two hours before the service, the ladies would arrive and head to the kitchen. There was plenty of time for gossip – the neighborly kind – while they poured grape juice out of the large store bought cans into the thimble sized communion cups - shot glasses, actually. When my girlfriends and I got old enough we were allowed into the kitchen and it was our job to arrange all the glasses into the round silver tray holders. The ushers took their job of passing those trays from pew to pew very seriously. And so did we – we passed the trays from person to person down each row, holding our tray carefully while our neighbor took out their own glass, placed it in the pew rack, and then took the tray out of our trembling hands and passed it on.

I sincerely do not remember anything that the minister said to us in preparation for these occasions. I do remember singing. And the stained glass windows, the light streaming around Jesus who had drops of blood on his brow as he prayed in the garden. His long brown hair was thick and wavy and it grew past his shoulders. With that hair and pleading eyes he definitely did not like any man I knew. But he did look holy and very kind. I remember the responsibility of holding that silver tray so that none of the juice spilled. And I remember the dilemma of whether to go ahead and eat the wafer and swallow the juice or wait until everyone was served.

I usually waited.

Even to my child’s heart, it seemed like this was something that should be done together – something that could only be done together. And even in a very non-mystical, non-sacramental church - it did. Phyllis and Ann and Toby and Mike and Carol became not just my school principal and my teachers and my classmates and the grocery store owner. They became co-conspirators in this kingdom of God. I didn’t especially like all of them – but in front of Jesus, eating his food, it just was not all that important whether or not I liked them. Even at 10 years old, I knew that when we prayed “Thy kingdom come” and we passed the communion tray to each other and we sang passionately if not in tune and then went and had punch and cookies together, that God meant for us to take care of each other and that God meant for each and every one of us to arrive home some day. That in some mysterious way we go to God together.

So, when I first encountered Episcopal worship, I knew in my bones that this was the way I needed to worship – and that the one chalice was perfect – it was exactly what I knew to be the truth of belonging to the Body of Christ.

We are going to get to reflect on the Eucharist for five weeks in a row! That’s what the lectionary has us doing – from this Sunday right through until August 23rd. That’s so much bread and life that I’m already feeling a bit bloated – but also looking forward to exploring this central mystery of our faith.

I teach a communion classes for children during Lent - and I usually hear from the parents how much they enjoyed the class! Things they'd never known, or had forgotten about, open up for them - and we talk about how communion is like the facets of a diamond, always shining light a bit differently. We have many names for communion - maybe as one way to acknowledge these different facets: Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, Holy Communion, Mass.

The facet I’ve just been exploring is what it means to be in Holy Communion with all the others who say Amen to the prayers and drink from the cup. I want to tell you more about this. Edythe was a widow in a church I served. One day, in an adult confirmation class, Edythe shared with me her favorite part of the worship service. It was the ending of the Eucharistic Preface which has the church on earth joining with the hosts of heaven with the unending hymn: "Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might." She knew in that moment that her beloved Myers was with her and that somehow this meal joined together "things in heaven and things on earth." Communion opened up a window into eternity for her, a tangible connection to the "cloud of witnesses."

Paul closes his beautiful prayer that we read in Ephesians this morning with a doxology of praise by referring directly to this holy communion that is opened out into eternity - “to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations for ever and ever. Amen.” In other words, it is within the company of believers, this cloud of witnesses, who are in union with Christ that God is glorified.

That’s possible because the church is Christ’s body – Christ and his church are deeply and intimately one. That doesn’t mean that the church is Christ’s presence on earth – like an extension of his incarnation. But it does mean that all who are incorporated into the church by faith and baptism are also in union with him who is their Lord. We are in holy communion – and the practice of the Table is a sign of that – it points to that reality – even more, it becomes that reality in these moments when we are gathered together and transcending the time/space continuum.

This was the theme of General Convention – Ubuntu – an African word that means the community that is a given – the reality of the larger whole to which we individuals belong whether we are conscious of this or not. Dottie will give us a flavor of what that meant for her when she reports to us hopefully next week.

If you want a great visual of the way holy communion stretches boundaries, and creates this ubuntu / this deep unity – watch Places in the Heart – a 1984 movie starring Sally Field, Danny Glover, and Ed Harris. It takes place in the 1930’s when many Texas families have lost their farms. The sheriff’s farm has not yet gone under – but when he is accidentally killed by a drunken young man, his young wife and two children are left in dire circumstances. His death sets off a string of events that highlight racial, class and gender divisions as well as many grace filled moments of redemption and unity across sharp dividing lines. There are tormentors, betrayers, and all out sinners aplenty in this film – but the closing scene takes place in a church – much like the rural Methodist church I grew up in. Those communion trays with the shot glasses of juice are passed down the rows – but as the camera pans through the pews, you realize that you are seeing the cloud of witnesses gathered – those who have died are sitting beside those still living, those who have been betrayed pass the communion tray to their betrayers, those who have killed are next to those who have been killed – it is enough to raise goose bumps on your arms. In their songs, in their prayers, in their hearing of the word, in their acts of confession, absolution – but most of all, in the bread and blood of Christ – God is glorified and they are saved.

When Jesus sat those five thousand hungry people down in the grass, and fed them from the boy’s five barley loaves and two fish – it was a miracle. It’s the one story that is found in all four gospels – they all four of them remember it and tell the story but John’s gospel goes further. For him it is far more than miracle. It is Sign. It is a sign of Holy Communion – it points to the reality that eating with Jesus stretches your heart so wide that the very kingdom of God enters in, forgiveness is a given, and a community is born that stretches boundaries in all directions – breadth, length, height and depth – those people rise up from the Table knowing the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge and reason.

Let us "bow our hearts before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name and pray to him who by the power of God at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen." Ephesians 3:21

Resources: Working Preacher, The Rev. Rolf Svanoe

Life is what happens....

2009-06-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

Ever feel like your plans for the day keep getting interrupted? One of my mentors in the ministry told me that he didn’t even make plans for his day. He just prayed in the morning – “well Lord, here I am. How do you want to use me today? I’m game for whatever you have in mind!” When he recommended this to me, I found it difficult to imagine – offensive actually. I love my calendar, and planning, in my mind, is a Godly activity.

But the more time I have in the ministry, the more I have come to see the wisdom of this older clergy’s approach. I’m sure, he too, at one time, had loved his calendar. After all, before he was a priest, he was a military officer! But now I think he was experienced enough with our Lord to know this basic truth – when someone is suffering or in need, God rather casually sweeps our plans aside so that we can be instruments of hospitality and healing.

If Jesus is a clear window to God, given what we see Jesus doing throughout his lifetime, it is pretty clear that God is interested in relieving suffering far more than he is in our plans and time lines.

In last week’s gospel, Jesus crossed the sea – it was a stormy crossings – as crossings usually are when you are reaching out to others who are not within your own circle. On the other side of that storm, he healed a man who’d been so destructive and disorderly that his neighbors had chained him up a good long distance from town. When Jesus spoke to him and healed him, he was thrilled, but his neighbors were not. Upset would be a good word for how they took it. “Go away”. They said. “Go back to where you came from. This is too much for us.” So he did.

He crossed the sea again. And suffering met him as soon as he set foot on shore. In that way – the people on both sides of the sea were alike. In this way, all people are alike. In the need to be included, held and healed – it doesn’t matter whether you live in Salinas, California or in Kerala, India, or in Jalalabad, Iraq.

“Come help me. My daughter is dying.”

And if you or I are going to respond to that kind of plea, - whether it is from a neighbor, or a family member, or a community far away, it most likely means that we are going to interrupt some other plans that we might have had. It most likely means that we are going to change the way we spend our money and our time. It might mean that we are going to change the way that people see us.

Jairus’ interrupted his life and laid his reputation and status and future on the line on behalf of his daughter. For us, who will go to any lengths for our children, it is almost impossible for us to grasp how much he risked.

First of all, he was a member of the elite - the same elite who harassed and ridiculed Jesus at virtually every turn. His friends included him in their scorn when he arrived home with Jesus in tow.

Secondly, he acted against common sense. In his time, it was not unusual for a child to die. In many parts of the world, it is still the case that many children die before adulthood. And it is still the case in some parts of the world that a girl child is less valuable than a boy child.

Thirdly, being around an almost dead girl child, would have bordered on unclean and it certainly would have negated his credentials to lead the community.

But Jairus – whose name means Enlightened in Greek - was a father first and foremost.

He was a father who loved his little girl – beyond all measure of what was appropriate or wise or in his own best interest. And so, he interrupted his entire life and future to kneel in the dust at the feet of this itinerant rabbi to plead for her life.

And Jesus was a healer first and foremost. He lived and breathed hospitality and healing and wherever he went, he bent himself towards the relief of suffering. He allowed himself to be continually interrupted in order to respond to someone else’s need. In fact, this happened on his way to the little girl’s bedside.

An older woman, sick for the same length of time that little girl had been alive – 12 years, had been isolated and held at arm’s length for so long that she had forgotten what it was like to have someone protect her or touch her or love her. It required tremendous courage or total desperation or both to reach out and touch this man – even anonymously.

But once she reached out, she didn’t stay anonymous for long. Jesus called out. “Who touched me?” And in that moment her isolation and her illness were completely disrupted. Because when she came away from the crowd, and stood on her own, she had no way of knowing what would happen to her. She had violated all propriety and law. Stoning could easily have been the result.

But in response to her faith, Jesus’ immediately reached out in hospitality and healing to cover her with compassion and to include her in his family. He protected her and he acknowledged her. “Daughter,” he said. “Daughter. You are well.”
My mother and I were at the Salinas Farmer’s Market yesterday morning, and stopped by the Health Awareness booth. My mom was immediately put to work – she sat in a chair and helped prop up a sign for health care reform. I met Santos, who is a nurse at the hospital. He and his wife and his 20 year old daughter had interrupted their normal Saturday routine to talk with people about health care issues and offer blood pressure checks. A young couple came by, obviously pregnant. While the daughter and I chatted about her college, Santos sat with the couple to check in with how she was doing, and to check her blood pressure. Before they left, they had signed up to receive ongoing support.

Like Jesus, Santos and his family were willing to let their lives be interrupted in order to practice hospitality and healing.

And it is a practice.

Because hospitality and healing don’t come naturally. It doesn’t come naturally to practice the hospitality to stop what you’re doing and get down at eye level with your child and give him your full and wholehearted attention – especially when it means interrupting your other plans.

It doesn’t come naturally to make a priority of listening with the ears of your heart – it takes work and it takes practice.

It doesn’t come naturally to deep down understand and agree that your time and your resources and your relationships essentially belong to God – not to you.

But it is the truth. Our lives belong to God. And growing into that takes daily practice. It means living with your calendar held a bit more lightly and praying each and every morning, “Lord, what do you have in mind today? Because here I am, ready to go where you need me.” Amen.

Get in the Boat!

2009-06-22T10:43:00.000-07:00

Good morning? Are you ready? Well, get in the boat! Cause we’re going to the other side!

It might be that you’re ready for a rest – it took a lot of work to make this transition – and you did it beautifully! The Transition Team deserves a round of applause. And I personally, want to open my arms wide, and say it loud – you are awesome! I have felt cared for since my first contact with you, and especially since you called me to come be your priest. The Transition team was never intrusive – but always thoughtful, sincerely wanting to know how they could help out. Thank you!

It might be that you’re ready for a rest – it took a lot of work to keep the parish active, up and running, vibrant and alive, without a full time priest. Or, I don’t know, maybe it made it easier! I know Wendy and Cynthia did magnificent work of keeping you spiritually fed throughout this time – I also know that a lot of you stepped mightily up to the plate – and learned to run the ship. And this will stand us all in good stead as we head out into new waters. At my interview, one of the reasons I knew I wanted to come here – was that on the Sunday following the interview, you were going to hold an eco-faith fair. A major undertaking and outreach, all under your own direction! I’m climbing on board with experienced sailors, and I love it!

You might be ready for a rest – the economy is still in the doldrums. Stocks are still bouncing around. Layoffs are happening at an alarming rate - while kids still need shoes and after school lessons, and there are bills and mortgages to pay.

The disciples must have been ready for a rest! Doing crowd control while Jesus taught and healed – they had been on their feet, literally on their feet, outside, day after day - they must have been ready for a rest.

But towards evening, Jesus said, “we’re going to the other side.” So into the boats they went, experienced sailors and tax collectors, who probably weren’t all that much help on the water – off they all went, just as the sun was setting. A flotilla of boats – crossing the sea at dusk.

Why? Why did Jesus get the disciples to cross the sea? Right! To get to the other side.

What was on the other side? Gentiles. People who had not yet heard the Word spoken by God in Jesus.

People who had not yet experienced the full and radical inclusiveness of God’s embrace.

People who had not yet felt the full force of the word of healing and new creation spoken by God through Jesus.

In other words, people that Jesus cared about.

Are you in the boat? Ready to push off and start our own crossing to the other side?

Because the truth is, the Word cannot be contained in a small and cozy space. The Word in us is nurtured here. The Word in us is fed here. The Word is heard here – heard in a way that grows us up, that transforms us, that changes us – and that Word that we hear pushes us to go beyond ourselves.

That Word commands us to expand the reach of our handshake of peace to those who have yet to know peace – and usually precisely at the moment when we think we’re ready for a rest! When we think, “ok the work is done, now we can sit back and rest a bit,” Jesus comes along and invites us to another adventure.

Ah – what adventures Jesus invites. At least some of those disciples no doubt could read the warning signs – storm on the way. But they were also sufficiently in awe of Jesus that if he said go, that’s what they did.

The truth is, the Gospel of Mark was written to a community that was in very troubled waters – storms of violence were raging between the Jewish people and the Romans. The enormous and beautiful Jerusalem temple – the center point of the Jewish religion and culture and state - had just been utterly destroyed because of the war. Relations between temple Jews and these fledgling Jewish Christians had grown rancorous and troubling. There were persecutions. Jesus had not returned, the way they had thought would happen. The tiny ship of the church was in danger of being swamped and overturned and the personal lives of this community to whom Mark writes were in trouble.

"Lord, don’t you care that we are perishing?" The question must have risen often in their minds. And if you’re anything like me, you know that you have uttered that question more than once as well – when the inevitable storms of life just about had you swamped - "Where are you? Don’t you care, Lord?" In our time, we face the potential environmental collapse of very frightening proportions. "Where are you God? We are perishing!"

Jesus slept peacefully on the pillow someone had thoughtfully provided – a first century Transition Team perhaps!??!

Sleep, of course, is another word for death. The dear crucified Lord, asleep in the nave of the ship. You sit in the nave of the church! That’s the architectural and liturgical term for the body of the church - where you are. That’s where Jesus is. In the nave. And this is a resurrection story. Because the crucified Jesus wakes up – rises up – and speaks his powerful word of calm. He rebukes the forces of destruction and death and chaos. He restores their confidence. .

But then the disciples are filled with an even greater fear than before! At least they understood the storm. It might kill them – but it is within their comprehension.

But the power of this man – whom even death cannot hold - This shakes them to their very core. Who is this asleep and then rising in our very midst. Who is this in the nave of our ship, the church? Who is this who rebukes all forces bent on destruction, and they obey. Who is this who can cast out the demons of fear and cowardice and restlessness and restore order and calm and peace and joy and patience and courage under hardship and tribulation and disaster? Who is this quietly asleep on his pillow, in their midst?

It is Jesus, of course. With us this very day.

Jesus heard his terrified friends, got up, reprimanded the wind and said to the waves, “Peace! Be still!” And the Bible tells us the wind died down and peace came. His friends cried to him and he listened, and he moved and spoke to the storm and said, “Be still.”

Can the same thing happen inside of you and me? Like the storm, can our hearts also hear and be calmed, and somehow rest in his peace? I’ve seen it happen. I’ve known men and women in the darkest moments of their lives, whose families were in peril, whose children were being sucked down some dark hole, or folks who experienced devastating financial loss, but who in the middle of the crisis were heard to say, “God is carrying me. I can’t explain it. I know it sounds crazy, but I have peace!”

A friend of mine is now in her second bout of breast cancer. In the midst of painful and debilitating treatments that may or may not stem the tide of this cancer, she radiates beauty and peace. Why? She says it is entirely due to the prayers of the church. She is not a normally non-anxious person, I can verify this! But she testifies that God is present in some new kind of way with her – so that she faces these treatments and her possible death with a kind of peace that she had not thought possible.

Jesus is able to calm the storms in your life. And whether the storms abate or not, he is able to give you peace and courage and confidence in scary times.

Jesus is able to take the helm of the boat of Good Shepherd, and steer it safely to the other side. He is able to inspire us with the words and the actions that relay the message of his peace and power to those who need that peace and power.

As we offer the handshake of peace to each other this morning, let us pray that we, in some small way, this week, can cross over whatever troubled waters someone else might be in – job loss, family troubles, sickness, general malaise - to offer them God’s peace and God’s power.

Let us pray.

Christ sleeps in the deepest selves of all of us, and whatever we do in whatever time we have left, wherever we go, may we in whatever way we can call on him as the fishermen did in their boat to come awake within us and to give us courage, to give us hope, to show us, each one, our way. May he be with us especially when the winds go mad and the waves run wild, as they will for all of us before we're done, so that even in their midst we may find peace...we may find Christ. Amen.

* Prayer from Frederick Buechner

The Story of Pentecost

2009-06-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

The Story of Pentecost
Last Sunday at St. Alban's Episcopal Church
May 31, 2009

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.”

It doesn’t matter whether they were a large group or a small one. As it happens they were small. Gathered, waiting, praying, just as Jesus had told them to do, directly before he left them to return to his Father in heaven. Many of them, like Peter, still shamed by the fact that they had deserted their dearest friend at the very moment that he most needed them. In their fear of also being tortured and killed, they had run away, and left him to face death alone. Still, Jesus had risen from the dead, had breathed his peace into them, and had told them to wait and to pray – which is exactly what they were doing

"When suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. (Jack plays flute)

The Hebrew word for Spirit is Ruah – breath. It was the Ruah of God that swept over the primal chaos, over the first waters – the Ruah of God that created life.

That same Ruah creates and sustains you now. Take a deep breath in, and out. Feel the Spirit breathing you. Breathe into this space. This time. This place. Whenever you are troubled or feel like things are falling apart, breathe. Let the Ruah of God, the breath of God fill you and still you, and help you know what to do next.

This Ruah that filled the entire house where they were sitting was like a violent wind – lifting their hearts, lifting their spirits, filling them with enthusiasm and expectation. What was happening? What was God about to do? Send fire!

“Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. (Jack plays drum) All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”

Fire. Tongues. Praise.

This is my last Sunday with you. So I can do anything, right? I want you all to stand up and praise God! Share something that you are really and truly thankful for. You can tell your neighbor. You can tell God. You can keep it to yourself if you want. But stand up. God is here and God is good and God is everlastingly faithful and remembers your every need, your every desire – and has your good continually in mind. If this is your first Sunday here, don’t worry. We do not normally do things like this.

So, what are you thankful for? What are you thankful for in the church? In the world? In creation? In your life? “A tongue rested on each of them and they began to speak …..”

“Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem.”

Pentecost was a Jewish festival – celebrated fifty days after the first barley harvest. That’s why there were Jews from many different nations gathered in Jerusalem. To celebrate the harvest.

“When they heard the sound, a crowd gathered and they were bewildered because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? They were amazed and perplexed. Some of them wondered what it meant. 13But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.””

What do you do when something happens that you don’t understand? Something that you don’t immediately like? If you’re like me, there are several things you do.

One is, you simply ignore it as not relevant. We screen out all kinds of data that doesn’t fit with our world view. It may cause a blip on our screen – but after that it becomes background and quickly disappears.

OR, You create an explanation for it. You create a story about it, leap to a conclusion. My kids will tell you that I’m especially adept at this. I can see two people on the street in an argument – and I can create the background story and the outcome – all from one little snippet of information. And the truth is, I’m creating it out of whole cloth- it has no correspondence to actual reality.

OR, you can be curious and wonder – with an open and non-judging mind.

“Everyone was amazed and perplexed.” Some of them stayed in their curious mind, open and wondering – I wonder what this means? Others of them leaped immediately to their judging mind – Well, it means that they are drunk.

I don’t know about you – but I aim to stay more and more in my curious, wondering, Godly Play sort of mind - simply observe what’s going on around me and stay open to it, without leaping to conclusions.

I urge you to do this as well – especially during this time when the Search Committee and Vestry are working so hard to call a Rector. When you don’t understand – be curious – and ask wondering questions. When you don’t agree – say so, and enter into respectful conversation. But try to steer clear of sneering and making up stories.

“Peter raised his voice and spoke out loud to the whole wondering, sneering crowd. What happened to the man who ran away? He was transformed into a new man – a leader now. And he spoke on behalf of the whole group -

“You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know— 23this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. 24But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.”

There are a lot of sermons in the book of Acts – and their purpose was not to be intellectually brilliant. It was to have an effect. The apostles preached in order to transform. Their words were intended to be a vehicle for the Spirit of God to reach peoples’ hearts -

“37Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” 38Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.””

These people were not really looking for Jesus. These were people who God called to him. Peter wasn’t telling these people – save yourselves. He was saying – let yourselves be saved. Let God in. Let this new life happen to you. Salvation – or healing – as the root of the word is –is not about earnest striving, about human effort to learn each new meditation technique and yoga pose – good as those are.
This primal healing that Peter is talking about is God’s doing – it comes from outside. It is a gift. And you can ask for it. God wants to heal you. Wants your salvation. Wants you to experience being fully alive.

“What shall we do?”

Repent – leave your small mind and enter into the large mind of God.

And be baptized – learn a new way of living. A way of life that you enter into, that you learn day by day. Not a difficult way with lots of do’s and don’ts. A way of life that brings joy and connection to all creation.

And so they did. “42They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.”

The church doesn’t try to resuscitate emotional highs week after week. It doesn’t drift from emotion to emotion. But it devotes itself to teaching what it’s all about. The church experiences fellowship – koinonia. This is far more than warm hearted brotherly and sisterly feeling – it’s a fellowship that produces signs and wonders. It’s a muscular kind of fellowship – things happen because these people have come together. The church breaks bread together. Deep friendships across race and class lines are formed. And the church prays.

Teaching.
Fellowship.
The deep friendship of the sacraments, of breaking bread together.
And praying.

These are the essentials of being church together. Everything else is icing.
So, where are you in this Pentecost story? Wherever you find yourself – come to this Table this morning, with a glad and generous heart – praising God for his never failing goodness.