Neither Heaven Nor Hell

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

"I Sing a Song"

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.

God's Household is for Everyone

Epiphany 2, Year C

The Rev. Linda Campbell

“God’s household is for everyone.”

Epiphany – it’s fun to say. And it’s great when it happens to you. Epiphanies are those a ha! Moments. Those times when you slap your forehead, “Oh, I get it!” When the light bulb goes on. When the fog clears and the light shines. I’ve read that in Israel, the dawn comes quite suddenly. It’s black as night, and then the sun comes up and boom – it’s light. Arise. Shine! Your light has come. Morning is here. The darkness has vanished.

Epiphanies are like that. Like what happened to Paul as he was on his way to arrest some of the followers of “the Way”, as the early Christians were called. He was passionate about the Law, about following the Rules of how to please God, and he was on a mission – God’s mission. But then he was confronted by the living reality of God – blinded by the Christ light of God’s intense love for him personally, confronted by God’s justice and Christ’s Question – Why do you persecute me?

Paul alluded to this experience in his letter to the Ephesians – “surely you have already heard….how the mystery was made known to me by revelation…” This epiphany permanently changed Paul’s life – it changed his life from that of a zealous Pharisee who focused on strict adherence to rules about how to please God, to that of a disciple of Christ who focused on being known, accepted and loved by God, and proclaiming the new things God was doing in the world.

And the new thing that God revealed to Paul was that Gentiles and Jews had a permanent place in the kingdom. That God’s household was inclusive. That God’s household was a place where everyone belonged – where no one was left out. This is the mystery revealed by the grace of the Spirit – in Paul’s words – “the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.”

The truth is, the Source of our Life is not about slavishly following the rules to please God – it is about bowing down, with open hands and hearts before the awesome, incredible mystery of God’s steadfast, faithful, permanent, unfailing, active Love that flows out toward us, reconciling us and drawing us into God.

The truth is, the Source of our Life is God’s active love – and the way to tap into that source of life is to open our hands and heart in trust and dependence. The two traditional stances of prayer reveal this to us. One is to stand with open hands, reaching up to receive and praise. The other is to kneel in humility and trust.

And when the living Christ revealed himself to Paul, Paul’s stance completely changed from clutching stones to throw at his enemies, to opening his hands in radical inclusion and friendship.

This is the mystery of the ages that Paul proclaims - the eternal purpose that God carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord – to gather up all things – all peoples and nations, things in heaven and on earth – into himself. Proclaiming this is what got Paul imprisoned. Living it is what got Jesus crucified. Because the world, the powers that be, for the most part, are about walls and boundaries and judgements about who is good, who is evil, who is acceptable and who is not.

This is as true today, as it was then. Our world is deeply polarized, and life is often held up in terms of absolutes. In our own Episcopal church, as well as in government and international forums, we hear a lot about us vs. them, good vs. evil, orthodox vs. revisionist. And, as the past Presiding Bishop, Frank Griswold, said, “rather than listening to the other with an undefended heart and a spirit of graced curiosity, people feel obliged to defend their points of view.” But, as he went on to say, “The mystery of our baptism is that in Christ we have all been made irrevocably one – beyond all imaging or desire. Within our own community of faith, we are being called to a radical encounter with Christ in one another, which is not easy when “the other” holds views very different from our own….This is not an easy season in the life of our church, and yet it is in precisely times such as these that a deeper, and more costly, understanding of what it means to be limbs and members of Christ’s body is literally being pulled out of us by the very circumstances we are called to live as a community of faith.”*

The uneasy season in the life of our church to which the Presiding Bishop referred is the decision by the last two General Conventions. The first to include homosexuals in the full life of the church. And the second is to institute the first woman as Presiding Bishop.. Referring to the first, Bishop Spong concluded that “our Church has done an audacious thing. This is … a cause for rejoicing that another in a long list of human prejudices has begun to fall. This is not "cultural trendiness," nor is it a denial of "doctrinal clarity."” Rather, it is the binding together of an ancient faith with the insights of our contemporary world, insights that gender and race and sexual orientation are simply biological givens.

So, our Episcopal church is audacious – but the church was founded in audacity. Paul was an audacious person doing an audacious thing – insisting, to the point of imprisonment, upon the full inclusion of Gentiles in the life of the church - something that had not even been considered possible, much less desirable. But God is persistently, quietly without fanfare, and loudly in the public eye, doing new things – and we, as much as the first Christians, are called to always be on the lookout for what God is up to. In this, we follow the magi, who traveled halfway around the world, to see what new thing God was initiating.

In our modern age of cynicism and easy hopelessness, it isn’t easy to be like the wise men – it sounds foolish and gullible – childish even. It is easy for us to succumb to the despair that things are hopeless and will always be hopeless – look how many billions of people are starving, there is really nothing we can do about hunger. Look how many are without homes, there is really nothing we can do about homelessness. Look how the nations spiral into violence, there is really nothing we can do about war. Look how the politicians are so slick, there is really nothing we can do about campaigns and finance reform and the restoration of civic, democratic discourse. Look how the church degenerates into name calling and threats.

But there is hope, and we are a piece of that hope. We have been baptized into a new identity, and given light and a new set of eyes with which to see – we see with the eyes of Christ and we live in his light. And in this light, we see God active in the world, urging us to offer back the gifts we have been given in order to serve God’s purposes. We see that the first step is to fall on our knees in worship, in homage and in trust that what we have to offer - our open hands, our hearts and lives – is sufficient for God to work miracles.


* Encountered by Love, Episcopal Life, January 2004