Hatched Open Hearts

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

Comfort. Hope. Peace.

Advent 2B

This week, I was visiting our senior warden, Louise, and her daughter Olivia who is going with other high school students to our President-elect’s inauguration! – we were sitting in the living room talking about what dress Olivia might wear to the inauguration events - and Louise suddenly said – it’s hard being Episcopalian these days! And brought out the New York Times. There we are, headlined on the front page – above the fold! “Episcopal split as conservatives form new group. And in smaller letters “Threat to Frail Union”.

The San Francisco Chronicle headline was a bit more tame: “Conservatives form rival group to Episcopal Church:” “Theological conservatives upset by liberal views of U.S. Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans have formed a rival North American province

"The Lord is displacing the Episcopal Church," Duncan said in a news conference in Wheaton, Ill., where the proposed constitution for the new province was drafted.
Our dear Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, responded in her unflappable calm and comforting voice that "there is room within The Episcopal Church for people with different views and we regret that some have felt the need to depart from the diversity of our common life in Christ." Isn’t she great!

But despite it’s headlining status, this news of trouble in the Episcopal church is not really the main news of the week. On the same front page, above the fold, were articles on the rapid warming of the planet, the trouble that the automakers are in, and this headline – “When a Job Disappears, So Does the Health Care.” “As jobless numbers reach levels not seen in 25 years, another crisis is unfolding for millions of people who lost their health insurance along with their jobs, joining the ranks of the uninsured.” Starla, 27, 8 months pregnant with her second child, rushes to the hospital to have early labor induced and then is delivered by Caesarean section. She did this before her plant closed, leaving her with no health insurance. These are the stories of our neighbors – and I know actually, of some of you. Cuts - leaving you without insurance, and with little explanation of where to go next.

And then, of course, there are the non-headlines, the everyday aches and bruises of life – surgeries that don’t fix the pain, chemo that destroys the appetite, spouses that leave, children that grow up, stress that gets in the way of sleep, debt that piles up.

Second Isaiah was called by God to speak words of comfort – to be a voice of comfort in a time when the Israelites were in exile – their homes destroyed, their way of life gone, and them carried off to a foreign place. “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people.” Handel’s Messiah begins with this magnificent chapter of Isaiah. Calvin and Luther, those old time theologians, insisted that this chapter pre-figured and even contained – the whole of the gospel of the good news of Jesus Christ. You might think of the God of the Old Testament as a God who wreaks vengeance and destruction on people, and the God of the New Testament as Loving – but that’s not so. Here, God comes to his people, in the words of his prophet, with the tenderness of a mother whose child is in pain, with the tenderness of a shepherd, whose lambs have been scattered and who are in need of direction and protection.

“Speak tenderly … cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received double for all her sins.” I have been in Ecuador and in the Holy Land this year – and in both of those places I have been with people who are at the bottom of the heap, the children of indigenous people in Ecuador, and the children of Bedouins in the Holy Land – I have seen hunger, and the distressing way that hunger stunts growth and dims the light in a child’s face. My friend Khalil Zhakaria, a Gaza resident, asks for prayers for his mother, who has cancer, and who is utterly reliant on the prayers of other Christians, because Gaza has been sealed off from any form of outside medical or food aid for weeks now. Of course, we are all paying the penalty of the sins of greed and lust for quick profit and power and revenge – but there are those who pay double and triple for those sins – they are the ones whom Christ called the “meek” – the ones who will enter the kingdom first. These children of hunger and war are the lambs whom God carries closest to his bosom.

So, Isaiah is called and anointed to preach comfort and hope – in a comfortless and hopeless time. But Isaiah asks – as you and I might very well ask – “what shall I cry?” All people are grass, their constancy, their fidelity – is like the flower of the field. It fades so quickly.”

Have you, especially you long time believers – ever felt like – what’s the point? In all these years – have we really made any dent in the world’s bent towards self-destruction? Has the sweet and compelling voice of Jesus, spoken through the church, stopped any wars, thwarted any famines, reconciled any families, healed any emotional distress? The short answer actually is yes – it usually doesn’t make headlines, but I KNOW healing happens, because people appear almost every week in my office telling me about healing of one kind or another – and I myself have experienced God’s healing. So – even though our constancy and fidelity to God can’t be counted on – God’s faithfulness can be. So God tells Isaiah: “Lace up your sneakers, climb the highest mountain, and shout it out – Here is your God. He comes with might and power. He feeds his flock, he gathers his lambs, he gently leads the people home.”

The truth is, our hope is NOT in our own faithfulness and reliability – our hope is not in any President-Elect, no matter who it is – our hope is not in labor unions and bail outs – our hope is in God - whose word is powerful. Whose word is constant. Whose word is reliable.

But where is God? The people that Peter wrote to were wondering – and I don’t know about you – but I wonder that too. Where is God? Just this week – someone exploring the Christian faith asked me – why doesn’t God intervene in times of trouble? Why does God allow such pain and suffering? Peter’s response is one of the many responses that the church gives to this delay in God’s putting things to right –God does not want any to be lost and therefore God is patient. God’s time is not our time – but even so - before the “end of time and the healing of all creation” – God does come into our world and our lives, with signs and wonders, with power and with tenderness.

Sometimes, God comes in big ways with miracles of healing. My Gazan friend, Khalil, is convinced that his mother, through the power of prayer, is being healed of her cancer – and I do not doubt his word.

Sometimes, God comes in big ways with miracles of peace. One of the people I met in Nazareth, was the Catholic Christian Mairead Maguire, the Nobel Peace winner from Northern Ireland. When her friend’s daughter was killed in the fighting between the IRA and Britain, Mrs. Maguire went from house wife to activist and was instrumental in bringing peace to Ireland.

Sometimes God comes in big ways with miracles of liberation. In Jerusalem, I met Bernard Lafayette, who worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the American civil rights movement, not just forty years ago – and now we have an African American President – elect.

And sometimes, God comes in small ways, in ways virtually unnoticed and unremarkable – as in a baby born of a peasant woman in a barn in Bethlehem, almost 2000 years ago. But that baby was the beginning of the good news of God’s miracles of healing and peace and liberation for all people, not just a few, not just the chosen, not just the elite and well born – but for all.

The beginning – but not the end.

The Gospel of Markleaves off with the women running from the tomb, so astounded that they do not say anything! It is an odd ending – until you go back to the start of this gospel – The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God – and realize that this Good News is still unfolding … we are a part of it. We are now the ones to continue the unfolding and the telling of that Gospel – We are the Isaiah’s - the ones baptized and called to lace up our sneakers, climb the mountains, contribute our pledges, and lift our voices with strength to cry out the good news of Comfort. The good news of Hope. The good news of Peace. The good news of Jesus.