All posts by Miranda Hassett

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Kid-friendly, Sermons

Sermon, Easter Day

(With the children in the congregation) Let’s open our wooden tomb…  Where is Jesus?…. (Wait for them to find the resurrected Christ figure)  Where else is he? He’s in US. WE are the resurrected Christ. Jesus is alive in the world today because Jesus is in us, and WE are alive in the world today! It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?…Do you know who else thought it was amazing? Tiberius Caesar, the Emperor of Rome. He was the ruler of the whole wide world,  back in Jesus’ time. And he heard the story about how Jesus rose from the dead from a woman named Mary – Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene had been a friend and follower of Jesus. She came from a wealthy and important family, so after Jesus was killed by his enemies and then rose from the dead, she went to Rome, to complain to the Emperor, Tiberius Caesar, that the Roman governor in Judea, Pontius Pilate, had allowed himself to be tricked into executing Jesus,who was innocent and good. Now, because the Emperor was so important, everyone who came before him was supposed to bring a gift. Mary Magdalene brought – an egg. Not a very fancy gift, is it?

She told the Emperor all about Jesus, the amazing things he did and said, and that even death couldn’t stop him.The Emperor listened, but he listened with this kind of look on his face…and then he said, A dead person can’t come back to life! That’s impossible! Just like it’s impossible for that white egg in your hand to turn red!….

And then, do you know what happened? The egg in her hand TURNED RED. We use all different colored eggs at Easter, but Orthodox Christians use red eggs, to remember Mary speaking the Gospel to the Emperor, and the holy sign that was given to her. Here are some eggs for you to color! Use markers or crayons or colored pencils or stickers. (Send kids back to their places) 

What do we know about Mary Magdalene? Less than we think, perhaps. There’s been a long tradition in Christianity of glomming all the women in the Gospels together, so that Mary Magdalene is ALSO Mary the sister of Lazarus and ALSO the woman who was forgiven her sinful life, and so on. In fact, Jesus probably just had a lot of women followers and friends, just like he had a lot of men followers and friends. And Mary was a common name, so there were quite a few Marys, including his mother. That’s why the Gospels call this particular person Mary Magdalene – to set her apart, like your first grade class might have had Jason D. and Jason R. Magdalene was probably a place name, meaning that she was the Mary who came from the city of Magdala – though it’s also possible that the name means that she was a hairdresser by profession!

Here’s what we do know. She was part of a group of women who traveled with Jesus, just like the (male) disciples, though they are barely mentioned until the Crucifixion. Here’s the Gospel of Mark, chapter 15: “There were also women looking on from a distance [as Jesus was crucified]; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger…, and Salome. These [women] used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.”

The fact that Mary and the other women are named as providing for Jesus may mean that she was wealthy, as the later story about her visit to Caesar assumes. Or she may have just been stubborn enough to leave home and family and follow Jesus, and resourceful enough to help make sure he and his group of friends always had somewhere to sleep and something to eat.

So, Magdalene is one of this group of faithful female followers of Jesus. But she stands out even among that group. ALL FOUR GOSPELS name Mary Magdalene as one of the first witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection. Now, our four Gospels – the four books of the Biblethat tell the story of Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection – they agree in the general shape of the story, and they complement each other in many ways.They agree on the big stuff, the central truth they’re telling. But they differ on details a lot. So it’s actually really something that they all agree on this detail: that Mary Magdalene was one of the first to discover that Jesus had risen from the dead.

John’s Gospel, the Gospel we heard a few moments ago,tells of that discovery so beautifully. Jesus’ body was buried in a hurry, before the Sabbath,when it was not acceptable to touch dead bodies. So it hadn’t been washed and anointed and cared for in all the ways that those who love him would have wanted. So as soon as the Sabbath is over, early in the morning, Mary goes to the tomb where Jesus was buried. In the other Gospels she’s with several other women; in John’s account she’s alone.

She finds that the great stone that covered the opening to the tomb has been removed – and she immediately assumes that Jesus’ body has been taken by his enemies. She runs to find the Simon Peter and John, leaders among the disciples, and they all run back to the tomb together. They look inside and see that the linen cloths are still there,the ones that were used to wrap Jesus’ body, but Jesus himself is gone.They’re not sure what to think – verses 8 and 9 say that they believed, but did not yet understand. Then Peter and John go home. Nothing else to see here.

But Mary stays. She stands weeping outside the tomb. And she looks into the tomb once more, the way you do, the way you confirm terrible or amazing news one more time. And this time there are angels there, who ask why she is weeping. She tells them what she told Peter and John: “They have taken away my Lord,and I do not know where they have laid him.” Hear her longing and grief – she had wanted to embrace her friend and teacher once more, to clean and anoint and care for his body, to honor him in death as she did in life. She turns away from the tomb, blinded by tears, and there’s someone standing nearby, maybe a gardener, and she asks her desperate question, “Sir, please, if you have taken him somewhere, tell me where,” and he says her name – Mary! – and she recognizes the voice and cries out Rabboni! My teacher!

John doesn’t tell us what she does in that moment but I imagine a desperate, fierce embrace,the way you hug a loved one lost and found. And I think I must be right about that because the next thing Jesus says is, Don’t cling to me, Mary. I still have to leave you. I can’t stay. I must go to be with my Father in Heaven. But tell the others what you have seen and heard. And Mary Magdalene went and told the disciples, I have seen the Lord!

Listen. Christianity was born in a patriarchal culture, in which men made the decisions, owned the property, ran the world. Christianity has matured and diversified and spread around the world as a patriarchal culture among patriarchal cultures. Many Christian churches still don’t admit women to leadership. Many Christian churches that do admit women to leadership are still burdened and blinded by structural sexism that means that few women are actually invited onto the higher rungs of the ladder. Far too often, and for far too long, in institutional Christianity, we have followed the script of the Gospel of Mark: telling and living a story that centers on men, and then, four-fifths of the way along, suddenly remembering to mention, Oh, there are some women here too. They’ve actually been here all along.They’ve actually made the whole thing possible.

But. This story, of Mary Magdalene, whom Eastern Christians call the Apostle to the Apostles for her role as first witness to the Resurrection – This story of Mary Magdaleneis not feminist fan-fiction. It’s not something somebody wrote last year to correct the lack of women in the Gospels. It’s in the Gospels. All four of them. Which I think allows us to say two things: One, it’s true. She really was the first to receive the good news of Easterand tell it to others. That fact was so well-known among early Christians that all four Gospel writers acknowledge it. And two, these guys, these four men, Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, formed as they were by the male-dominated cultures of Judaism and Rome, these four men were also formed by their faith in Jesus Christ in a way that led them to write Mary into the story where she belongs.

That’s the thing about Christianity. For all its flaws, its crimes, its failures. At its best, at its heart, what it’s all about is people gathering to help each other and ourselves to follow Jesus. Jesus who carried forward the vision of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the other prophets of God who went before him,in holding the social and political order accountable to God’s vision of justice and mercy.  Jesus whose words and actions taught his followers to look beyond the rules of respectable morality and social status and view each person as a beloved child of God. Jesus who called and sent forth a people to live and proclaim a Gospel of love that transcends the labels that divide us – We are no longer Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.

At its best, at its heart, our Christian faith equips and empowers us to reflect critically on our world, our culture, in the light of God’s vision of justice and mercy. Ours is a way of faith that always contains the seeds of its own renewal, and of the renewal of the society around us. Ours is a way of faith that casts a vision so radical that there is ALWAYS farther for us to go, in living into it. A Way that stands against our human tendency to stigmatize and exclude, and tells us we are not whole until we learn to welcome, hear, and love the stranger and outsider. A Way that stands against our human tendency to laud the rich and powerful, and calls us to honor the poor and the marginalized, and to strive for a more just and sustaining common life. A Way that stands against our human tendency to value each other differently on the basis of race, gender, age, and more, and gives us a Gospel in which – against the grain of their culture, and, still, against the grain of ours – women and children and foreigners and disabled people and criminals are treated with respect and compassion, as if they were fully worthy of understanding and love…!

No wonder Mary wept at his tomb, thinking him dead. To hear that voice silenced, to see that vision crushed. To believe that it was over. No wonder she wept. And no wonder she cried even harder when she heard his voice, saw his beloved face, and knew that not only was it not over, it was only just beginning.

That’s what matters about the Resurrection. About Jesus’ rising from the dead, the joyful mystery we celebrate today. What matters about the Resurrection is that it validates everything Jesus did and said to teach everyone who would listen about the heart of God and the worth of humanity. The meaning of Easter isn’t, Hey, some guy was dead and came back to life! He must be God! Let’s worship him and have a party! As our Presiding Bishop said in his Easter message, This is not a fairy tale.

The meaning of Easter is that the guy who said all THAT stuff, about justice and kindness and redemption and God’s fierce relentless love for each and all of us, THAT guy came back to life. THAT guy is God with us. His message, his inexhaustibly radical message of a world turned upside down by God’s love and God’s priorities, his message is ratified by the empty tomb.

Take heart, Mary. Take heart, children. Love wins. Alleluia!

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Current Events, Worship

Maundy Thursday Homily

Relations between blacks and whites are tense. Systemic racism and its deep patterns of inequality and injustice are driving protests among black folk and their white allies, demands for profound and substantive change, demands that many white Americans find terrifying. Relationships between the police and African-American communities are particularly fraught – police are seen not as allies in dealing with the crime that goes hand-in-hand with extreme poverty, but as part of the system of oppression. There is deep mistrust in both directions, and often violence, in both directions. In some places police force is used to subdue and discourage protesters, making the police seem less like servants of the people and more like guardians of an unjust status quo.

The year is 1968.

And in a Presbyterian church in Pittsburgh, two men are making friends. One of them is a young black man with an extraordinary voice. He dreams of becoming a professional singer. But he grew up in the ghetto and has already overcome huge odds to get this far; he isn’t even sure he can make rent next month.

The other man is white. He’s forty – the age, I like to think, when our youthful idealism and our mature pragmatism begin to find a fruitful balance. He is, in fact, an ordained Presbyterian minister, but he’s just attending church, not serving as a pastor, because he has a full-time job as a TV star. His name is Fred Rogers.

Who here has never seen Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood?… It was a children’s television show, with this man who talked to the TV as if he were talking to a child, and invited us into adventures with his puppet friends. Sing it with me, folks: “Let’s make the most of this beautiful day; since we’re together, we might as well say, Would you be my, could you be my, won’t you be my neighbor?”

I watched some of it, as a child. In my teens and young adulthood, Mr. Rogers was punchline. We made a joke of his weird puppets, his gentle voice and careful words, his cardigans, his deliberateness, his overwhelming kindness.

But sometime along the road, we all started to get it. Maybe it was his death in 2003 that finally made us all re-assess. Maybe it’s the quotations that circulate on Facebook. Something made us all take a better look and realize that Fred Rogers was the real thing, an honest-to-God saint walking among us, preaching basic human decency on syndicated television, no less.

So. Back to 1968. Fred Rogers hears this young man, Francois Clemmons, sing at church. They become friends. And Mr. Rogers asks Clemmons to come on his show. He said, “I have this idea. You could be a police officer.” Clemmons was not enthusiastic. Where he came from, the cops were not friendly neighbors. In a recent StoryCorps interview, he said, “Policemen were siccing police dogs and water hoses on people [at that time]. So I was not excited about being Officer Clemmons at all.”

Still – there was the rent to pay. Clemmons eventually said yes. He would serve as Officer Clemmons in occasional appearances on the show for 25 years – while living out his dream of being a professional singer.

Reminiscing about his years on the show, Clemmons recalled a particular scene early on, in an episode that aired in 1969. Rogers was sitting in his back yard resting his feet in a plastic wading pool, as relief on a hot summer day. Officer Clemmons stopped by, and Rogers invited him to come rest his feet in the water too, which he did. You can find a photo online, these two grown men sitting next to each other with their shoes and socks off and their pant legs rolled up and their feet in this wading pool. It’s the sweetest, dorkiest thing. And – it was kind of radical.

The first interracial kiss on television was in a Star Trek episode in 1968, just a year earlier. White flesh and black flesh sharing space was still a big deal. (It still is, sometimes, some places, in America; let’s not kid ourselves.) During the 1950s, groups of black and white folks together had worked to integrate Pittsburgh’s public pools, in a united effort supported by the NAACP, the Urban League of Pittsburgh, and the Pittsburgh Presbytery – the church jurisdiction that ordained Fred Rogers in 1962. Still, as late as 1962, a city pool in Pittsburgh, where Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was filmed, had a sign outside saying “No dogs or niggers allowed.” 

So this kiddie pool in Mr. Rogers’ TV back yard, with black feet and white feet in the same water – that, even that, would have pushed some folks’ buttons.

And then it was time for Officer Clemmons to get on with his children’s television show police officer duties. So Fred Rogers got down on his knees with a towel and dried Clemmons’ feet. One a time. I haven’t found footage, but I’m sure he did it with his usual deliberateness and gentleness.

Recalling the scene, Clemmons used the word “icon.” An icon: a holy image that shows us something about the divine, in visual form. Clemmons says, “I think [Rogers] was making a very strong statement. That was his way.”

I don’t know how much I really need to connect the dots here. There’s that word, icon, that Clemmons uses – a holy image that reveals the Divine. There’s Fred Rogers, a disciple of Jesus, actively striving to bear witness to God’s love in simple humble ways that even a child can understand, casting a black man as a friendly policeman and then kneeling to wipe his feet dry, on national TV. There’s Jesus on his knees, towel in hand, telling his friends, You need to let me do this for you. And you need to do this for one another.

In the interview, Clemmons shared another memory – an ordinary day on the set of the long-running show. Rogers wrapped up the program, as he always did, by hanging up his famous cardigan sweater and saying, “You make every day a special day just by being you, and I like you just the way you are.” Clemmons was standing around off-camera, and this time, Rogers looked right at him as he spoke. Once the cameras were off, Clemmons walked over and asked him, “Fred, were you talking to me?” Rogers answered, “Yes, I have been talking to you for years. But you heard me today.”

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Sermons, Worship

Easter Vigil Homily

This is the night. So says the Exsultet, the ancient hymn chanted at the beginning of the Easter Vigil, after we have kindled the New Fire. The Exsultet is at least 1200 years old; for a dozen centuries Christians have gathered to keep vigil the night of Jesus Christ’s passing over from death into new life, and marked it with these solemn holy joyful words.

This is the night! The Exsultet’s theological poetry builds upon the testimony of the Gospels, that Jesus’ last meal with his friends was a Passover meal, commemorating the last night of the people Israel as slaves in Egypt, before they set out for freedom as God’s people. The Exsultet says, If the Last Supper was Passover, then this night, the night of Resurrection, this is the same night, the very same night, when, millennia earlier, Moses led God’s people across the Red Sea on dry land. This is the night when bondage gives way to freedom, when wickedness is put to flight, and sin is washed away. This is the night.  This is the night when we gather in the firelight to hear the ancient stories of God’s saving work, God’s fierce relentless love for humanity.

Through our stories, songs, and prayers, this becomes the night when God completes the work of Creation, gazing with joy and satisfaction upon our world. This becomes the night when Noah and his family sleep restlessly aboard the ark, waiting and wondering: will the dove return this time? This becomes one of the nights that Jonah spends in the belly of the great fish, reconsidering his decision to run away from God’s call to proclaim repentance and hope.

The Exsultet, at twelve hundred years old, is one of the younger parts of our Easter Vigil. Our liturgy tonight includes the Easter sermon of the fifth-century Saint Euthymius. We Western Christians tend to think that Jesus spent three days just being dead, lying quietly in the tomb. Eastern Christians believe that Jesus spent that same time tearing Hell apart, breaking doors and locks and chains, freeing all those who had been bound by death, starting with Adam and Eve, our first parents. Euthymius’ sermon invites us into that moment – the moment when Jesus breaks down the doors of Hell and calls the dead back into life. Arise, work of my hands! This is the night!

Our liturgy tonight includes, too, the words of the fourth-century saint John Chrysostom, who playfully and joyfully invites us into the great feast of God’s saving grace. You that have been faithful long, you that are new to God’s grace, you that have fasted faithfully, and you that have… not, celebrate this day! Join in this banquet of grace! For Death is conquered and Christ is arisen! This is the night!

And then our Eucharistic prayer does what it always does – it makes us God’s people, once and always. We are one with our ancestors in faith as the prayer recounts, again, God’s work in human history and human lives: “When our disobedience took us far from you, you did not abandon us to the power of death… In your mercy you came to our help, so that in seeking you we might find you. Again and again you called us into covenant with you… and in the fullness of time you sent us your only Son to be our Savior.”

This is the night. Time and space collapse to one moment, one place, one people. We are one with the communion of saints, all God’s people past, present, and yet to come; we are one with all those who celebrate this feast tonight, near and far. The light in your hand isn’t just a candle – it’s the light of Christ returning to the world. The affirmation of our baptismal vows becomes our opportunity to say YES. YES to the story, the light, the mystery, the hope.

We are God’s people, once and always. We will be God’s people, saved and saving, loved and loving.  This is the night, the fulcrum of history. The story – all the stories, the whole story – is about us. It’s ours. It’s true. It’s beautiful. And most of all, it’s now.

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Sermons

Sermon, March 20

Imagine the scene, as Luke tells it in his Gospel. Jesus is seated on a young donkey – maybe his feet nearly scrape the ground. A few cloaks tossed over its back offer a makeshift saddle. His friends and followers are crowded around him, a ragtag bunch,men and women and kids, people of all ages and all stations in life. They’re just outside one of the gates of Jerusalem, the city of David with its ancient walls of golden stone. A crowd has gathered to greet him – the poor, the desperate, the hopeful, the angry. They’ve heard so much about Jesus, this preacher and wonder-worker from Galilee.They hope he may be the promised Messiah, who will throw out the Romans and bring them the fulness of God’s saving power. In excitement and hope, they’re casting their cloaks down on the road. The other three Gospels say they cast down branches, too. Think of the red carpet for royalty or movie stars,the ancient symbolism of creating a special pathway for an honored person.

The donkey stumbles unwillingly forward, crushing leaves under its hooves, grinding cloaks into the dirt, while the gathered crowd cries out, Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven! (That last bit is only in Luke’s account of this scene; he is intentionally inviting his readers to remember the words of the angels announcing Jesus’ birth, way back in chapter 2 – ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven,   and on earth peace among those whom he favours!’)

So: is that scene in your mind? The dusty road strewn with clothes and branches?The chaotic eager shouting crowd? The solemn man seated awkwardly on the too-small donkey?…

Now, place that scene, that little cluster, on a stage. A big stage. Big enough to dwarf this little gathering. And behind our cluster of the humble and hopeful, there is a huge, brightly-colored backdrop,showing another scene happening that very day, elsewhere in Jerusalem, outside another city gate. The Roman governor of the province of Judea,the territory of the Jews, is arriving in Jerusalem. Leaving his luxurious seaside villa up north to put in an appearance at the capital. No donkeys here; big, fine horses for the Governor and his generals, while the soldiers march on foot – that disciplined, steady, united march that carries Roman troops and Roman rule inexorably into Israel, Egypt, Syria, France, Germany, Britain, and beyond.

Today the Great Empire arrives in Jerusalem – to make sure the presence of Rome is felt as the Jews celebrate their feast of Passover. Keep your little customs, says Rome, they do no harm; but as you celebrate this feast of freedom from bondage,as you remember thwarting Pharaoh and escaping Egypt, just remember who’s your master now. The God-Emperor on his throne in Rome recalls the God-King Pharaoh, and his hardness of heart; but Rome will not make Egypt’s mistakes. Rome is stronger than Egypt ever was.

Today the Great Empire arrives in Jerusalem – embodied in Pontius Pilate, the Governor, seated high on his horse,dressed in clean bright colors. Hard-eyed and unimpressed. Embodied in the golden letters SPQR on tall standards carried among the troops, the letters that proclaim Rome the capital of the world, the center of civilization and power. Embodied in the pounding rhythm of the soldier’s feet, the creak of leather armor, the clank of helmets and weapons, the blinding flash of bright impassive sunlight on shields and swords and spears.

There is a crowd here too, to witness the panoply, the power. I don’t think they’re shouting words of welcome or praise – or maybe only a few, those currying favor with the power that rules the world, those who believe their own people don’t deserve independence and appreciate the Romans’ strong law and order approach. Most stand silent, unwilling to praise this “heresy on horseback,”  the god of Roman imperial might, that dares to stand against the God of the Jews, who is the God of everything, all places, all peoples. Most stand silent, children held close lest they dart out in front of that remorseless force, and be trampled underfoot. The people watch the Governor arrive. Awed. Curious. Resentful. Afraid.

See how humble, how tawdry, Jesus’ parade and welcome seem, against that backdrop of color, power, and pomp. But see, too, with both Triumphal Entries on the stage – see the light that Pilate’s arrival casts on Jesus’s. See the irony of the plainly-dressed dusty man on the donkey. See the dark and risky joke that Jesus is telling.

Placing the backdrop of Pilate’s ceremonial arrival behind Jesus on his borrowed donkey is the work of New Testament scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. They remind us – as Palm Sunday and Good Friday should always remind us – that Jesus’ teaching, his actions, the witness of his life,was both spiritual and political. That Jesus, God among us, was deeply concerned with both the ordering of human hearts and the ordering of human societies.

Debie Thomas wrote about Borg and Crossan’s vision of the day in a 2015 essay called “The Clown King.” She writes that Jesus’ little parade was “an act of political theater, an anti-imperial demonstration designed to mock the obscene pomp and circumstance of Rome…a procession of the ridiculous, the powerless,[and] the explicitly vulnerable.”

Did word of Jesus’ little joke reach Pilate, once he’d settled in at the Governor’s palace in Jerusalem? Did spitting in the face of Rome help ensure that Rome would say Yes to Jesus’ execution, when the chief priests appealed to Pilate for help? Maybe.

I wonder, looking at the smaller scene, the dustier, livelier scene: Did the crowd get the joke? I’m sure many of them did – maybe all of them. You could hardly be unaware of the power of Rome and its symbolic enactment in events like the Governor’s arrival in the city. Everyone would have known Pilate was on his way. These are the people who chose to come meet Jesus, instead.

I find that changes how I imagine the mood, the faces of the crowd. It turns their enthusiasm from tent-revival innocence to a fierce bitter hopefulness not unlike what you hear and see and feel in the the crowds that gather in downtown Madison from time to time.These are people who understood that Jesus was holding up a mirror to the soulless and heartless power of Rome, the power of all human kingdoms. That with his toes dragging the ground on that poor little donkey, he was showing them the emptiness, the absurdity, of all that nonsense.

I think that crowd got the joke. Do we? Two processions, two crowds, welcoming two leaders, representing two very different kingdoms. Thomas writes, “Stallion or donkey? Armor or humor? Emperor or clown? Which will I choose?”

Remember how much Jesus’ choice cost him. Which will we choose?

You can read Debie Thomas’ essay in full here:  http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20150323JJ.shtml

Big Questions, Church Seasons & Holy Days, Sermons

Sermon, March 13

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:10-11)

These are the words of the apostle Paul, preacher, theologian, traveler, church-starter, letter-writer, and martyr. He wrote the letter to the church in Philippi while he was in prison, though we’re not sure which time – he was imprisoned a number of times for disturbing the peace by preaching the Gospel of Christ. There are hints throughout this letter that he thought his current imprisonment might well be his last; he writes with tenderness and urgency of someone setting down his last words. Chapter 4, verse 1, summarizes the tone of the whole letter: “My brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord, my beloved ones.”

In today’s passage, from chapter 3, Paul lays out how he thinks about his own dire circumstances, probably both to ease his friends’ minds about his suffering and to encourage them when they encounter persecution and struggle. He’s also touching on one of the hotbutton issues of the mid-1st century: did non-Jewish converts to Christianity have to become Jews first, and in particular, did they have to be circumcised? Paul’s answer is an emphatic No.

That’s where he starts here: I did everything right, as a Jew – I have the right lineage, I was circumcised as a baby, I was zealous and faithful in practicing my beliefs, I even persecuted Christians. But when I turned to Christ, I realized that none of that mattered. All those ways that I measured my righteousness before now look to me like what you wash down the sewer. (That word, “rubbish,” in our translation, is cleaner than the word Paul really uses.) Paul says, The righteousness I have now isn’t even mine. It’s Christ’s, living in me, through faith.

And then he says this bold, fierce thing: I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Becoming like Christ in suffering, in death, in the hope of becoming like him, too, in life beyond death.

This in on Paul’s mind because he anticipates his own death, perhaps soon. But this idea of participating in Christ’s death is a bigger idea for him, too – it’s part of his ecclesiology, his understanding of what makes us the Church, the people of God. Christians are people who have died to self and been reborn, remade, resurrected, in Christ. In the second letter to the Corinthians, for example, Paul

writes, “For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.” And in the portion of the letter to the Romans that is always read at the Easter Vigil, Paul says, “Don’t you know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? By baptism, we have been buried with him, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.”

Paul’s language and theology of participating in Christ’s death is woven into the language and theology of our sacraments. It’s in our baptismal rite, when we thank God for the water of Baptism, in which we are buried with Christ in his death, and by which we share in his resurrection. It’s in our Eucharistic rites too, as we offer the sacrifice of our lives to God, as we accept the bread and wine that are, in some mysterious way, the body and blood of Christ, and become one with Christ, in death and in life.

Why would you choose this? Why would you want to be part of a religion that talks so much about dying? Whose founder was brutally murdered by the civil authorities? And that invites us to join him in suffering and death?  A religion whose initiation ritual – according to our ritual language if not our actual practice – involves drowning babies?

What does Paul mean, what does the Church mean, by this idea, this image, of participating in the suffering and death of Jesus? In the immediate context of today’s passage, Paul is looking at the possibility of dying for his faith. He quite literally means that he hopes to have the courage to die like Jesus, and looks forward in hope to rising with Jesus. But he’s also saying something more universal about life and death, about suffering and faith, in the Christian way. I think one thing he’s saying, maybe even the central thing, is that our suffering and God’s suffering interpenetrate. We suffer with Christ because Christ suffered with us. We die with Christ because Christ died with us. In the artful words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “I am all at once what Christ is since he was what I am.”

Why would you want to be part of a religion that talks so much about dying? That invites us to join our God in suffering and death?  Because we suffer, and we die. And so we badly need a God who suffers like us, who suffers with us. Our psalm today, Psalm 126, keenly reminds us that both struggle and joy are part of the human story: “May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.”  And our Gospel today – which I promise to preach about properly in June – gives us this moment of tenderness and poignancy, as Mary washes Jesus’ feet. It’s one of those moments we know in our own lives, when the sweetness of the present is flavored by our keen awareness that the moment won’t last. That things are always changing, and often ending. As the Dread Pirate Roberts puts it in The Princess Bride, Life IS pain; and anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

And that’s the thing about Christianity, about our faith. Christianity isn’t selling something; it’s telling the truth about human life.  In the first chapter of Unapologetic, author Francis Spufford talks about an ad campaign run by the New Atheist movement on London buses. The buses say in big letters: “There’s probably no God. Now, stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Spufford says, the part of this that offends his faith isn’t “there’s probably no God” – fine, fair enough, God is not provable. The part of this that offends his faith is the word “enjoy.” As in, “Stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Spufford writes, “Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion… Only sometimes… will you stand in a relationship to what’s happening to you where you’ll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time you’ll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion, and the rest.” (8) The slogan on the bus endorses an idea of human life centered on enjoyment, an idea borrowed wholesale from advertising. If all you knew about humanity came from commercials, you might indeed think that human life was all about enjoyment – and also that most people are attractive 18- to 30-year-olds.

Spufford invites us to imagine people watching that bus go by whose lives are mired deep in suffering. In pain or illness, in grief, in addiction and desperation. What does that bus with its message of enjoyment say to them? Nothing, and worse than nothing. It says that they are invisible. It says that they are alone. There’s no comfort, no consolation, in those peppy words.

In contrast, writes Spufford, “A consolation you could believe in would be one that didn’t have to be kept apart from awkward areas of reality. One that didn’t depend on some more or less tacky fantasy about ourselves, one that wasn’t in danger of popping like a soap bubble upon contact with the ordinary truths about us… A consolation you could trust would be one that acknowledged the difficult stuff rather than being in flight from it, and then found you grounds for hope in spite of it, or even because of it.” (p. 14)

Another of my favorite faith writers, Gretchen Wolf Pritchard, who creates the “Sunday Papers” we use for our kids, likewise writes about why we need the cross – and the suffering and death it stands for – in our story of faith, even in the story of faith we tell to our children. She writes, “The cross is a mystery and a terror; we feel we would gladly shield our children from it. … [But] children know that the world is full of terror, that no answers are easy, that no comfort comes without cost, pain, and mystery. It is not the cross that terrifies children, but the false gospel that bypasses the cross and leaves us forever alone with our pain and guilt.” (Offering the Gospel to Chilcen, p. 4)

Why would you want to be part of a religion that talks so much about dying? That invites us to join our God in suffering and death? Because we suffer, and we die. We struggle with pain, anxiety, guilt, loneliness, betrayal, grief. And our faith tells us, shows us, that we’re not alone, never alone, in any of that. It offers us a consolation we can trust, because it accommodates the truth about us, about our lives. We suffer with Christ and Christ suffers with us and nothing, really nothing at all, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

That’s why we can’t, shouldn’t, skip to Easter, however tempting it is, the eggs and fluffy bunnies and pretty butterflies, the joyful Alleluias and the relief of the empty tomb. Don’t skip to Easter. The stuff in between is so very, very important.  This Sunday feels a little to me like that pause at the top of the roller coaster. When you catch your breath, and think, Here goes. Hold on tight. Hope I don’t lose my cookies.

This coming Friday we walk the Way of the Cross in downtown Madison, in a public even that’s become a gateway into Holy Week for me. Saturday morning we welcome the kids of the parish and beyond to receive the whole story of Jesus’ final week, his death and resurrection. Next Sunday we recall Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, greeted with palms and shouts of Hosanna! … and then his betrayal, arrest, trial, and execution. On Maundy Thursday, we’ll tell and enact his final meal.

On Good Friday, we will tell – once more – the holy solemn story of his death. We’ll bow before the cross, the instrument of shame and redemption. We’ll linger round an icon on Christ in the tomb, letting grief and loss be part of the story, letting ourselves weep and wonder. Then in the deep dark of Saturday night we’ll retell our ancient stories of salvation and liberation, and then SHOUT with joy as we mark the moment when Christ bursts forth from the tomb into new life. I know not everybody can handle the late night, but I gotta tell you, the Easter Vigil is about a hundred times cooler than Easter Sunday. But Easter Sunday is great too! – music and flowers and food and kids getting grass stains on their best clothes running around looking for plastic eggs.

We need it, all of it, the whole arc, all those moods and moments. If you’re away from your home church, as you may well be, I hope you’ll find another church with whom to walk this path, or spend your own time in prayer with each day, each chapter. We need the whole story because we need a God, a faith, that isn’t selling something. That tells the truth about our lives, and meets us there. That is the gift of God in Christ, and this is the time in the church’s year when that gift comes to us most fully and vividly, in all its messy prickly grace-filled complexity and completeness. Catch your breath, and hold on tight.

Big Questions, Sermons, Stories

Sermon, March 6

It’s hard to preach on this Gospel, because this story of Jesus, the story we know as the parable of the Prodigal Son, is itself one of the best sermons ever preached. I’m going to start by just telling the story again, with a few details added or explained. I invite you to listen, notice, imagine, whether you’re hearing this for first time or the hundredth.

Jesus was making his way slowly towards Jerusalem, preaching and teaching and healing along the way. And among the people who gathered to hear him and be near him were the lowest of the low. The scum of the earth. Prostitutes. Tax collectors. People rendered unclean by illness or work or sin. Now, there were also religious people, even religious leaders, who were drawn to Jesus’ teaching. And they grumbled about having to share space with those other  folks. They said, “This Jesus fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” So Jesus told them a parable. He told them three, actually; the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and this one.

There was a man who had two sons. He was a landowner and farmer, and reasonably prosperous. His two sons were grown, young adults, maybe in their 20s or 30s. In that place, as in the traditional American farm, adult children would stick around and help run the farm, eventually taking it over when the patriarch retires or dies. The oldest son would inherit most of the property, but the younger son had a share coming to him too.

However. The younger son didn’t want to help tend the farm. He wanted to see the world and taste its delights. He wanted that so much that he did something pretty unthinkable. He went to his father and said, I want my inheritance now. Imagine that happening in any family that you know well. Really imagine. It’s almost as if the son is saying, I can’t wait for you to die. He is definitely saying, I don’t want to be part of this way of life we share as a family anymore.

And here the father’s gracious nature first reveals itself. He doesn’t say, You are no longer my son, you selfish ungrateful twerp. He doesn’t even say, Nope, sorry, no can do, you’ll just have to wait. He finds a way to give his son what he asks, perhaps selling some land to turn it into cash. Breaking up the family estate, diminishing the land that supported the household. Our translation says he divided the property, but the Greek noun there is “bion” – the life, the livelihood of the family.

It probably didn’t surprise anybody when a few days later, the younger son packed up his newfound wealth and cut out.  He makes his way to a far-off country, someplace where his family can’t find him, where he can live his own life, make his own way. And he proceeds to blow his inheritance on dissolute living.

Dissolute – profligate – prodigal. That word – asotos in Greek – is where this parable gets its name. Prodigal is a wonderful old word, rarely used now beyond this parable. Its first meaning is: Wastefully extravagant. Reckless, spendthrift, imprudent. The text allows us to draw our own conclusions about the specific nature of this young man’s dissolution. I think we can assume that it involved wine, rich food, gambling, and the kinds of friends – male and female – that you make by throwing a lot of money around.

I’m sure it was fun while it lasted. But it didn’t last. It never does. He ran out of money. And about that time, a severe famine took place in that country. And he began to be in need. All those friends he’d made weren’t returning his calls. His favorite restaurants and wine bars wouldn’t let him in the door. So, desperate, he took a job working for a local farmer, feeding the pigs. He’d been raised a practicing Jew, believing pigs were unclean, impure; but now he has no choice but to spend his time in their company.

The situation is so bad that he’s actually jealous of the pigs. Even though he has work, the pay is so low and food is so expensive, due to the famine, that he’s starving. He watches the pigs scarfing down carob pods and plant husks and thinks, I wish I could eat that. And no one gave him anything. Because nobody cared whether he lived or died.

Imagine a morning, another morning of this grinding, awful life. His once-fine clothes are filthy and tattered, and they hang on him, he’s lost so much weight. His skin is grey with hunger and poor health, his hair is matted and dirty. He’s tossing out the pods for the pigs as the sun rises, beginning to soften the dawn chill. And he comes to himself. I love that phrase so much: He comes to himself. He remembers who he is, and who he once was. He sees that he can’t go on like this, and he sees – maybe, just maybe – a way out.  A way home.

He says – out loud – My father’s hired hands have plenty of bread, and here I am, dying of hunger! I will stand up and go to my father. He has no reason to welcome me home, after everything I’ve done. So I’ll apologize, and ask for mercy. I’ll say, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”‘ Then maybe he’ll have mercy and take me in as a worker, and at least I’ll have food and a place to sleep.

He set off at once, leaving the pigs to their pods, and walked the long journey home to his father. I like to imagine him practicing his little speech on the road: “Father, I have sinned against you,” etcetera.

But while he was still far off, his father saw him. Give that detail a moment’s thought. His son had been gone for months, at least – maybe longer. How many times, during his absence, had his father checked the road? Cast his eyes into the distance to see whether, by any merciful chance, his son was coming home yet?  This time – he sees a figure in the distance. And somehow he knows that it is his son, his lost son. And the father is filled with compassion. He runs to meet him. Listen, grown men don’t run; it’s undignified. But this father runs. And he throws his arms around his son’s neck, embraces him, filthy clothes and all, and kisses his dirty, beloved face.

The son begins his speech, the one he planned out among the pigs: ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son….” But his father doesn’t let him finish.  A crowd has gathered, the slaves and servants of the house gathering round, and he tells them, Quickly, bring a robe, the best one, and put it on him, to cover his rags with dignity! Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet, so that he looks like a child of this house again. And kill the fatted calf, the one we keep ready for a special occasion. We will eat and celebrate! For this son of mine” – Notice, he refuses, refutes his son’s words, I am no longer worthy to be called your son – “This son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

So they began to celebrate. But somehow nobody thought to tell the older brother. Or maybe lots of people thought it, but nobody wanted to do it. So he knows nothing of the homecoming and the party until he’s headed in from the fields, where he’s been working, and he hears… music. He calls a slave and asks what’s going on, and is told, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.” The older brother is furious. A party? For that loser? After all the trouble and grief he has caused? After his selfishness nearly killed their father? A party? He refuses to go inside. So his father comes out to plead with him.

The older son lays out his grievance: LISTEN. For all these years I have worked for you like a slave. I’ve always done what you wanted. But you’ve never even given me a young goat for a party with my friends. But this son of yours comes back, after wasting your property on prostitutes, and you kill the fatted calf as if he were an honored guest!  Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours – and he is still your brother – this brother of yours was dead, and has come to life. He was lost, and has been found.”

Jesus leaves the story hanging right there – it’s up to the religious leaders in the crowd to decide: does the older son, the good son who follows all the rules, does he find it in himself to celebrate the return and restoration of his reckless, thoughtless, sinful little brother?

The word “prodigal” has a second meaning, related to, but distinct from, the first. It can also mean giving lavishly, generously. Prodigal: abundant, unstinting, unsparing. Who’s prodigal in this story, the younger son or the father?

I don’t want to explain this story, so rich in meaning and beauty, so like and yet unlike our real lives and families. I don’t want to reduce it to any simple moral lesson. Instead I want to reach out and grab our Epistle for today, and bring it up alongside this Gospel parable.

Our Epistle comes from Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth. Paul is talking here about what 20th century theologians call the missio Dei. The mission of God. This idea arose as an alternative to the older idea that the Church as God’s people was primarily responsible for carrying out God’s mission in the world. The theology of missio Dei says, Actually, God is already in the world, carrying out God’s mission, doing the things God does. In the words of one of my favorite prayers, working through our struggle and confusion to accomplish God’s purposes on earth.

Our job, as the Church, God’s people gathered and sent, is to notice where God is at work in our world, our city, our neighborhood or school or workplace or family, and join in. Help it along. Become allies, partners, co-conspirators with God. This theology invites us to seek God’s action in the world by looking for the kinds of things God does – known to us from Scripture, tradition, and our own walks of faith. God works in minds and hearts, in families and communities and institutions, to heal. Restore. Renew. Liberate. Transform. And to reconcile.

Paul says, in today’s text,  “All these gifts of grace and renewal are from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their sins against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal to the world through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”

To reconcile means, simply, to bring back together. To restore relationship. The re- prefix assumes an original unity or connection that has been lost – whether particular to a situation, or the fragmentation that besets us all, as children of one God and one planet who forget those facts so easily.  To reconcile is to re-establish or mend a relationship, to create harmony or compatibility. I was interested to learn that in Greek as in English, reconcile has a monetary meaning too – I stumbled on this definition: “To reconcile is to make one account consistent with another, especially by allowing for transactions begun but not yet completed.” I like that: the idea that sometimes you have to get numbers or people to match up somehow, even knowing that everything isn’t settled yet, that there are still bills to be paid, balances to be resolved.

Turn your mind and heart back to the parable – to the father’s embrace, his reckless loving welcome, his refusal of his son’s effort to write himself out of the family. This parable gives us a bright, full-color, finely drawn image of God’s reconciling heart. Everything isn’t settled yet; there are debts to resolve; we don’t know whether the older son will be reconciled, soon or ever. But this parable, the prodigal hug on the road, shows us in story what Paul tells us in theory: that God longs to reconcile the world to Godself, to embrace and welcome home, regardless of sins, mistakes and failures.

Reconciliation is one of the core activities of God. A sign of God’s presence we can seek; a gift of God’s grace we can receive, and not just receive: encourage, help along, initiate. God is working to reconcile humans to God, to each other, to the cosmos. And God calls us to be ambassadors of reconciliation, to carry the ministry and message of reconciliation. To join God’s movement to heal the many brokennesses that divide and separate us. In the words of somebody who was probably not St. Francis, we are instruments of God’s peace – God’s reconciliation – invited to participate in God’s quiet persistent loving work of sowing love where there is hatred, pardon where there is injury, trust where there is doubt or fear, hope where there is despair.

Now, just about every week when I’m working on my sermon, I ask myself, will people be able to connect this with their lives? Because if it’s all too abstract, if you can’t reach and touch what I’m talking about, then I have failed. And this is a thing we’re trying to learn to do, here – to talk about our daily lives and work and relationships through the lens of the Gospel, the lens of faith.

SO. Today you’re going to finish this sermon. First, take a moment to think of a time in the past week when you saw God’s reconciliation at work – perhaps when you were able to help it along; or perhaps a moment when you wish you’d taken that “ambassador for reconciliation” role, but you didn’t. Recognizing both successes and missed opportunities is really important! So, in silence, think back, find a moment…

NOW, Turn to a reasonably friendly-looking stranger sitting nearby. Let’s do this in threes. Kids too!… And I invite you to share about that moment you thought of, as you’re comfortable. There’s no pressure to share anything overly private. I’m going to give you two minutes, so keep it simple, and whoever goes first, please leave some time for others too! Start by sharing your names, then tell each other about what being an ambassador for reconciliation could look like in your daily life.

Uncategorized

All-Ages Sermon, Feb. 28

Jesus told this parable:  “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none.  So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none.  Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ The gardener answered, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good;  but if not, you can cut it down.'”

Have a seat, and let’s talk about the story.

First, I have a question for our younger kids who were in Sunday school last week…. [show Mustard Seed image] What is this?…. What does the mustard seed do? …  This is one of the parables of Jesus. Parables are like little stories that you can just keep thinking about, aren’t they? Well, in Luke’s Gospel, in the story of Jesus the way Luke tells it,  the mustard-seed parable – AND the Yeast parable –  are close to another parable:  the parable of the Fig Tree. (They’re also very close to the time when Jesus calls King Herod a fox and himself a mother hen!…)

What we learn in the parables of the mustard seed & yeast is that things GROW! The seed grows into a big tree that is home for many birds; the yeast grows and makes bread big and fluffy and delicious. But sometimes things DON’T grow when you want them to… That’s the deal with this fig tree. It’s not giving fruit.

Giving fruit, in the Bible, is a metaphor.  A metaphor means we’re talking about one thing, as a way to talk about another thing. There are lots of places in the Bible where God’s people are described as plants – trees or vines… And when we’re bearing fruit, that means we are doing the things God wants us to do. Being kind and fair and loving. Caring for our neighbors and for the world. It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re getting straight A’s or getting promoted at our job; but it means we’re making the most of what God has given us, whatever that means for us.

So the question Jesus is raising, with this story, is, What do we do about people who aren’t bearing fruit? Do we say, Too bad! They’re failures! They’re no good!Chop them down!  Or do we ask … why? Why aren’t they bearing fruit? Are they just lazy or selfish? Or is there a real reason?…

[Show them the kumquat tree]

We got this tree three years ago. I thought it would be neat to have a tree that lives inside that gives fruit. But it’s given exactly one kumquat in the time we’ve had it.  Have you ever had a kumquat?… Here, try one…

So why isn’t our kumquat tree giving us kumquats? See here, Tree! We want fruit! What’s the problem?!? Well… I know what the problem is. Or what the problems are.

This kumquat doesn’t have what it needs to bear fruit. Trees have to be happy and healthy to give fruit; otherwise they put their resources into just staying alive. Our kumquat is doing OK,  but it’s not flourishing. And that’s not the tree’s fault. It’s my fault.

What do plants need? You know this…

Water – yes. Okay, I think this is the one thing we do pretty well; we are pretty faithful about watering our tree regularly.

Sunlight. Yes. This tree gets OK light but not great light. It would be happier with more. It’s a warm-climate tree, so it needs to be inside for the fall and winter and spring. And while our building has a lot of windows, we don’t have windows where the sun really shines in. The architect probably did that on purpose, because human beings don’t like the sun shining right on us. But trees DO. And last summer – I am embarrassed to say this – last summer, when it could have lived outside for a few months, getting sun and air and warmth, I never got around to taking it outside. I owe this tree an apology. I’m sorry, tree! …

And another thing it needs – there’s a hint in the story: what does the gardener say she’s going to do? … Right – she’s going to dig up the soil around the tree and add some manure. What’s manure?… Why is the gardener going to put manure around the tree?… Do your parents talk to you about eating healthy food? Food with the right nutrients and vitamins in it? Well, trees and plants need particular nutrients too. To be healthy enough to give fruit, this tree needs fertilizer. When I got the tree, I got some fertilizer. But it’s not exactly the right kind, and I haven’t been careful about giving it the fertilizer regularly. So the tree hasn’t been getting the right kind of food for it grow well and give fruit. Just like us, if we’re not eating well, and getting our basic needs met, it’s hard for us to bear fruit and be the people we want to be.

You know what else this tree needs, to bear fruit? It needs a community. It needs other trees like it, and it needs pollinators – insects that will come to its blossoms and carry pollen from flower to flower, to fertilize the female blossoms so a fruit can start to form. And there, this tree is just out of luck. It doesn’t have tree friends here, and there aren’t the right kind of insects around to pollinate it. Two summers ago, when I did take it outside, it was happy and healthy enough to have some flowers! And I took a paintbrush and moved pollen from flower to flower, trying to do what a pollinating insect would do. And it sort of worked – it grew a few fruits, though only one of them managed to stay till it got ripe. But if it had friends, if it had the community it needed of other trees and insects, it would be a lot easier for it to bear fruit. Instead, it’s alone.

So this kumquat is like that fig tree in the story: it’s not bearing fruit. Do you think I should chop it down?

Do you think we should try to take better care of it, so that it will be a happier, healthier tree, and will give us fruit?

But remember, when Jesus and the Bible talk about trees, they’re not just talking about trees, they’re talking about people. So when we feel mad at somebody because they’re not being good or doing right things or helping other people as much as we think they should, maybe we should wonder Why. Is there something they need that they’re not getting, that’s making it hard for them to bear fruit? And is there any way we could help?

And when we feel mad at ourselves, for not bearing fruit the way we think we should, maybe we should ask Why too? Do we need more sunlight or more community or better food or something, to help us be the person we feel called by God to be?

Do you remember back in January, I taught you to bless each other, marking a cross on the forehead and saying, May God bless you and be the guardian of your body, mind, and spirit? Well, my daughter taught me another version of that, and I think it’s a good way to end today:  May God bless you and be gardening your body, mind, and spirit!

Bless each other while I put our tree friend away!…

Sermons, Spirituality

Sermon, Feb. 21

Cast your mind back over the other churches that you have attended or visited. Think about the art, the holy images, that adorned their space. Stained glass, icons, painted reredos, images on or above the altar.  Did any of those holy images happen to include… a chicken?

At St. David’s Episcopal Church, in Bean Blossom, Indiana, their altar area includes an image of the Holy Chicken. More specifically, a mother hen, with a halo, and her wings spread over her chicks. The presence of the Holy Chicken image at St. David’s goes back to 2007, when one of their associate clergy, Tim Fleck, preached a sermon on this very Gospel text that comes to us today.

Here’s the image – I know it’s hard to see from a distance; come take a closer look later, it’ll be with our other holy images around the font. Tim took this photo himself, in Palestine, in a little church on the side of the Mount of Olives. The church is called “Domine Flevit,” or “The Lord Wept,” and it commemorates the spot where Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem – its stubborn cruelty, its hopelessness, its inevitable doom.

The chicken image is a mosaic on the front of the altar. It depicts Jesus as a protective mother hen, a visual interpretation of his words in our text today: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

Tim recounts having this image up on his computer screen, as he reflected on the sermon at his day job, and having his co-workers find it HILARIOUS. There’s just something funny about chickens, and this chicken in her heroic and noble pose was definitely LOL-worthy.  Others were a little bothered by the depiction of Jesus as something as humble, ordinary, and stupid as a hen.

Tim says, “The lowly hen doesn’t have much of a biblical pedigree… God and the prophets are compared to eagles, to leopards, to lions: to tough, macho animals. But this scripture and its parallel in the Gospel of Matthew are the only places in the canonical scriptures that even mention the chicken.”

Chickens are not strong, or fierce, or beautiful. They’re close to the bottom of the food chain. They can’t even fly. Jesus calls King Herod a fox, in this passage, just before he likens himself to a chicken. When a fox and a chicken enter the ring, we know who’s going to come out at the end of the match – with feathers on his snout. The smart money is always on the fox. But Jesus sides with the chicken.

All the chicken has going for her is what you see, right here: her protective love. A love so strong that she will put her own body between her chicks and the teeth or claws of a predator. If someone wants to get to her children, they’re going to have to go through her, literally. That won’t deter most predators much;  her beak and claws are no match for a fox, hawk, or raccoon; but given the choice between abandoning her chicks as tasty snacks for whatever’s after her, and making a getaway herself; or sacrificing herself in the hope of saving them – she chooses the latter. The foolish, the loving, the holy choice.

In an essay on this text, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “If you have ever loved someone you could not protect, then you understand the depth of Jesus’ lament. All you can do is open your arms. You cannot make anyone walk into them. Meanwhile, this is the most vulnerable posture in the world –wings spread, breast exposed — but if you mean what you say, then this is how you stand.”

I should say, here, that I know very little about the nobility and self-sacrificial tendencies of actual chickens. Jesus is alluding to what chickens are said to do -just as the images of pelicans, found in many churches, show a mother pelican feeding her young with her own blood, nourishing them at the cost of her own life- a beautiful and rich image that probably has nothing to do with any actual pelican behaviors. (By the way, if you don’t know where St. Dunstan’s pelican is,

you should go on a little hunt later…!)

Jesus identifies with that allegorical chicken. He sees the danger that surrounds Jerusalem, that stalks God’s children, hovering low overhead, or creeping through the tall grass nearby. What danger? All kinds – wretched poverty, the oppression of greedy and merciless rulers, disease, political and religious instability,  the kind of kill-or-be-killed mentality that develops in desperate and marginal circumstances. Remember: forty years after Jesus’ trial and execution, Jerusalem will lie in smoking ruins, the great Temple torn down, not one stone left upon another.

Jesus sees this future; he sees the suffering and struggle of the present; and his heart aches, aches, for the people of Jerusalem, God’s people Israel, who have lost so much, and have yet more to lose. But like the hen, all he has to offer is his stubborn love.  Tim writes,  “All the hen has to offer is her refusal to abandon her children and her willingness to die for them, even as they ignore her and wriggle out from under her wings. All the hen has to offer is her faithfulness.”

Let’s turn from one strange image in today’s Scriptures, to another: the smoking fire-pot and flaming torch floating around between chopped-up animal parts, in today’s text from Genesis.

This text comes from the portion of Genesis that tells the long story of God’s covenant with Abram, later re-named Abraham – stretching from God’s first call to Abram to leave his father’s house, in chapter 12, and follow God to a new land and a new destiny; through the difficult story of the binding of Isaac and the sacrifice of the ram, in chapter 22. In chapter 15, where we find ourselves today, God reiterates the promises that God has already made to Abram, in chapter 12 and chapter 13: you will have many descendants, and they will live in a homeland that I, God, will give you.

But Abram is having a little trouble with these promises. He’s an old man, and he and his wife Sarah have no children. He’s got some real doubts about this whole descendants thing, and what’s more, the land God has promised him seems to have people living in it already.  A lot of people. God’s promises seem unlikely and remote. So Abram asks, How can I know these things will happen? How can I trust you?

That’s the context for this strange symbolic scene. The thing is, it wouldn’t have been strange to Abram – at least not in its general form. This was how people formalized covenants, in the Ancient Near East. We know this from other ancient texts and images, that help us understand the symbolic assurance God offers to Abram here. When two people, or representatives of two groups, wanted to establish a covenant – perhaps about a territorial boundary, or a mutual defense agreement, or an important marriage, or some such – they would cut animals in half, and walk together between the halves of the carcasses. Maybe part of the meaning and power of the rite came from the spilled blood – blood is a potent symbol of both life and death in Near Eastern thought and religion. Maybe the cut-up animals implied what would happen to the covenant partners if one of them violated the terms of the agreement – a grisly form of “Cross my heart and hope to die.” In Biblical Hebrew, the verb that’s used for forming a covenant is “cut” – you “cut” a covenant, grammar reflecting the ritual practices of the times, invoking those animal parts on the ground.

So God is using symbols that Abram could understand and trust, to say, as emphatically as possible, LOOK, I am GOING to do this thing for you. God strives to answer, once and for all, Abram’s plaintive question: How am I to know that I will have these blessings? That the good things you promise me will come to pass?

But while in this scene God uses the common cultural ritual of covenant-formation, there’s a really important difference: this covenant is one-sided.  Normally, both partners pass between the animal parts. But here, only the symbols of God’s presence, the fire-pot and torch, do so.  Abram simply looks on, a witness, a recipient.

Nahum Sarna, author of a classic study of the book of Genesis, concludes his analysis of this covenant scene, saying, “The astonishing fact [is] that [this] covenant completely lacks… mutuality. It is a unilateral obligation assumed by God without any reciprocal responsibilities being imposed upon Abraham. The use of established legal forms of treaty-making to express such a situation is a dramatic way of conveying the immutable nature of the divine promise.” (Sarna, Understanding Genesis, 127)

A one-sided covenant – a paradox, and very nearly nonsense, in the common understandings of Abram’s time and place. There will be – of course – a human side to the covenant. We get around to that in Exodus, and more so in Leviticus. Those who live as God’s chosen people will be called to live in distinctive and sometimes demanding ways, as a people set apart, the holy people of a holy God. But here, at the very beginning, the root, the heart of it all, the covenant, the relationship between God and humanity, is fundamentally one-sided. God always loves us more than we love back. God always gives us more than we give back. God always begins the conversation.

The thread that runs through these two strange images, the holy chicken and the torch floating between animal parts, is the thread of God’s tender and boundless love. Our prayers and liturgies name God again and again as Almighty, and surely God is mighty; but these images, and so many others in Scripture, tell us, too, that God is vulnerable. We can hurt God’s feelings. We can push God away. God is vulnerable to us because God loves us so damn much. Because God wants to be with us much, much more than we want to be with God.

I challenge you, as I challenge myself, to hold that in your heart as part of your understanding, your inner image of God. Every time the Holy Chicken catches your eye, think of God like that: of God’s heart revealed in the anguished love of Jesus Christ, longing to hold close a people who were just not that into him. Of God’s heart revealed in the ancient absurdity of a covenant in which one party promises everything to the other, asking nothing in return.

Of God – if you will – as that awkward boyfriend or girlfriend who forgives you too easily when you’re mean or careless, who says “I love you” first and then says it again just a little too often, or at the wrong moment; who stands in your driveway holding a boom box, playing a love song at top volume, to tell you how he feels about you, how he will always, unshakably, feel about you. No matter how many times we question. No matter how many times we turn away. No matter what the danger, what the pain, what the loss.

As Tim writes in his Holy Chicken sermon, “God will be there, putting herself between us and the foxes and predators of this world. God will be there with her wings outspread and her breast exposed, saving us at the cost of her own life.

God will be there, stretched out on the hard wood of the cross, vulnerable, but refusing to abandon her children. God will be there.”

Thanks be to God.

 

Thanks to Tim Fleck for his wonderful 2007 sermon “Chicken.” 

Barbara Brown Taylor, “As a Hen Gathers Her Brood,” (March 11, 2001), accessed at www.textweek.com March 3, 2007; quoted in Tim’s sermon. 

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Sermons, Worship

Sermon, Feb. 14

Jesus has just been baptized in the river Jordan, at the hands of his cousin John; he has just received these gracious words from Heaven:“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” He’s about thirty years old – Luke tells us that – and Luke tells us, too, that this is the moment when Jesus begins his work. Begins to preach, and teach, and heal, and stir things up. But first, there’s a time of retreat, of solitude and prayer and reflection, to get clear on who he is and what he’s doing. The Spirit alights upon him like a dove, at the moment of his baptism; then She leads him out into the wilderness, to struggle with hunger, and loneliness, and temptation. To become ready, truly ready, for the work ahead.

Someone asked me recently if I believed in Satan, and what our church teaches about the Devil,and I was embarrassed by how unready I was for the question. Let me take a moment here to talk about that, since this passage presents us withthe idea of evil personified in the character of Satan. The Devil isn’t covered in the Catechism in the back of the BCP, nor in my seminary classes.  The official Episcopal Church website has a Glossary of significant terms and names; neither Satan nor the Devil are in it… I have a hunch that if you asked a roomful of Episcopal clergywhat they believe about the Devil, you’d get a long, embarrassed, awkward silence. I haven’t tried it yet, but I plan to. So you’re stuck with my vague and jumbled thoughts, rather than official church teaching.

I don’t believe in the Devil as an excuse for bad human behavior. I have zero patience with “The Devil made me do it” as a rationale for naughtiness. I know my own heart, I have been a student of human nature, and I believe we are quite capable of all sorts and degrees of poor and flat-out evil behavior without any intervention or encouragement from supernatural beings. At the same time, I have enough epistemological humility to say, I don’t know. There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our universities. Is evil simply the absence of good, or is evil a thing, a force in itself?

There are definitely times when, looking at the world, evil seems to be an active, living, intelligent thing. If calling that the Devil gives us the courage to name and rebuke those forces, then maybe there’s power in doing so.

And there are definitely times when I hear a clear voice of temptation in my own head and heart, feeding my worst impulses, undermining my weakest virtues. If calling that the Devil gives me the courage to name and rebuke that voice, then maybe there’s power in doing so.

That’s the situation here, in the scene that Luke describes. If you’re distracted by mental images of a guy in red, with horns and a pitchfork, then imagine this whole dialogue as taking place inside of Jesus, his human desires and impulses at war with his sense of call and mission. It works just as well that way.

There’s so much that can be unpacked from this scene, rich with details and beautifully told. What I want to point out, this year,is how well Satan knows Jesus. Consider the things he could have tempted Jesus with,but didn’t: A beautiful woman. A jug of fine wine. Wealth and luxury. Given what we know of Jesus from the rest of the Gospels, if the Devil had waved those things in front of his nose, Jesus would’ve just shrugged. Not that he couldn’t appreciate any of the above…but the Devil knew those weren’t the way to trip him up.

The ways the Devil does tempt Jesus are pretty on point. Jesus is famished, Luke tells us. He hasn’t eaten for forty days. We believe that Jesus was both fully human and fully God. *I* struggle with my mind making allowances for my body, sometimes; I can well imagine that one of great ongoing struggles for Jesus might have been how much his God-self had to make allowances for his human-self. And the Devil goes right to that – so cleverly. He doesn’t offer Jesus bread; no, that’s too easy. He doesn’t actually offer Jesus anything, here; he just encourages some thoughts Jesus probably has anyway. He says, Use your power to make things easier for yourself. Use your power to get what you want. Just a loaf of bread, when you’re hungry; what’s wrong with that? But that could be one hell of a slippery slope. Jesus knows it. And Jesus says No.

The second temptation is the temptation of earthly authority. Glory, power, rule, not the divine kind but the human kind. This is the one time the Devil actually offers Jesus something, since he claims that human political power falls under his jurisdiction!… The paradox and mystery of Jesus’ authority is a theme in his life and ministry. For just one example, there’s the scene from John’s Gospelfrom Christ the King Sunday back in November. Pontius Pilate asks Jesus, Are you a king? And Jesus says, If I were a king in the way you mean, don’t you think I’d have followers fighting to save me? My kingdom is not of this world… In this moment, back at the beginning of his work, the Devil temps Jesus to break down that wall between divine and human power. To use human glory and authority to advance God’s agenda. With the benefit of 2000 years of hindsight, I think we can say that, in general, the times when Christianity has ruled through human politics have not been Christianity’s best chapters. Politics driven by Christian ethics, yes, please, by all means. A Christian political system, no; that has not worked out well. And how could it, when ours is a faith of persuasion, of heart, of conversion, which simply can’t be imposed from outside? Jesus sees the risks of entangling the ways of human power with divine. Jesus says No.

Finally, the Devil lays before Jesus the temptation to know that everything will be OK. The temptation to equate being loved by God with always being safe. Note that the Devil is quoting the Bible, here – Psalm 91, which we read today. The Psalms actually make this equation a lot – if I am righteous and favored by God, then things will always go my way, I’ll be rich, healthy, and popular, and my enemies will always be defeated. Now, there’s a lot more going on in the Psalms than that; that’s a sermon for another day. But those bits of the Psalms – well, they’re pretty easy for the Devil to quote out of context. And, well, that’s just not the deal. It never has been. The overwhelming witness of Scriptureis that living as God’s people, with love, justice, and mercy, is hard, and sometimes dangerous, and most certainly does not guarantee prosperity or even safety. That’s not why we do it. We do it because the world is better with people in it who live like that; and we do it because we believe.

But it sure would be nice if that were the deal – if only good things happened to good people. We fall to this temptation, friends, every time we tell someone who is suffering, Everything happens for a reason, or,God won’t give you more than you can handle. Those words are kindly meant, but they can be heard to imply that tragedy and pain are blessings in disguise. And I just don’t believe that’s always true. Though I do heartily believe that God is with us in suffering, and that God is always at work in our world, lives, and hearts, working to bring good out of evil and meaning out of tragedy.

Satan knows that the work before Jesus will be hard, and dangerous, and ultimately fatal. The temptation he lays before Jesus is the temptation to opt out of the pain and danger. Throw yourself off the Temple! God won’t let anything bad happen to you! Angels will catch you! It’ll be fine! But Jesus says No. I won’t test God – and I won’t make God’s goodness conditional on my personal safety. God is good whether I prosper or suffer. If Jesus hadn’t known that, deeply, truly, there’s no way he could have started down his path. We need to know it too.

In his season of temptation, Jesus’ determination, his trust in God’s love, his certainty of his own purpose and direction, holds him up as he faces his weaknesses and struggles. Jesus refuses temptation three times – but I think we should assume that those refusals were hard. As hard and harder than the hardest such moments in our lives, when we’ve turned reluctantly away from something that we wanted badly, but knew wasn’t right for us.

The church’s season of Lent, which began this week, can be framed as a season of acknowledging – with Jesus in the wilderness – our weakness, limitations, struggles and fears; while – again, with Jesus – holding fast to our desire and intention to live lives that, in ways great or small, add to the world’s measure of hope, wholeness, and delight. We stand in that space of struggle and hope as we pray the Great Litany, that big strange sprawling beast of a prayer with which we began our worship this morning.

Just as Lent always begins with one of the Gospels of Jesus’ temptation, so it also begins with the Great Litany. I’d like to say a few words about the Great Litany, because it is, frankly, one of the more peculiar and medieval things we do. I grew up with it more or less as we do it here, praying it together once a year on the first Sunday in Lent,although at St. John’s, Lafayette, the choir marched right along behind the clergy, for the long and convoluted procession that we called the “Holy Pretzel.” And despite its length, I’ve always kind of loved it. I like that it’s peculiar and medieval. I like that it marks the beginning of Lent so emphatically. I like how encompassing, how thorough it is – whatever your innermost fears or struggles, they are in there somewhere, I guarantee it.

The earliest form of the Great Litany was composed in the fifth century, after a volcanic eruption disrupted Easter worship. Archbishop Mamertius of Gaul introduced the practice of a litany chanted while processing around the city,and asking God’s protection against disasters of all kinds. The forerunners of the Great Litany were developed further in medieval Europe, as a way to respond in communal prayer to political instability and the ravages of the plagues. Martin Luther, the founder of the German Reformation, loved the spirituality and practice of the Litany. He added prayers for the wider world and for faithful ministry and witness in the Church. Luther’s Litany was the most important source when, in 1544, Thomas Cranmer composed a Great Litany in English – before going on to develop the first English Book of Common Prayer.

For 300 years the Great Litany was part of Sunday worship – many churches had a special Litany Book with its own book stand, called a Litany Desk, marking the centrality and importance of this exhaustive prayer. But in the 19th century the Litany began to fall out of favor; people found it perhaps exhausting as well as exhaustive. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer includes it only in archaic language – perhaps because of love for those rhythms of speech, or perhaps because the framers of that book assumed that only the most old-fashioned congregations would keep using the thing.

But the Great Litany continues to stand the test of time. There is nothing quite like it, in the way it weaves all our smaller prayers into its dense fabric of confession and intercession. An article summarizing the history of the Great Litany, my source for this overview, begins with the image of seminarians at the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan, on September 11, 2001. The seminary community was grief-stricken and terrified. They had no idea what was coming next, or what it all meant. They gathered in the chapel for prayer. And they prayed the Great Litany.

Mark Michael, the author of the article, says that the Litany “describes the fragility and peril of human life with particular emphasis,”evoking its origin among the droughts, famines, plagues, poverty and instability of medieval Europe. Michael writes, “This is what those at General Seminary on 9/11 surely understood anew as they took up these prayers on that dark day. Our [modern] ingenuity, reasonableness, and pluck are not enough in the face of natural disaster, bloodshed, and the sudden approach of death. We face great threats from environmental catastrophe, a fraying social fabric, and international terrorism, and the grand promises of science and technology seem to be wearing thin. In the face of evil that baffles, frightens, and overwhelms us, we [like our forebears] must beg for deliverance…. [The Great Litany] is a text that speaks to pastoral need, the Church’s gift for times of crisis. When you do not know how else to pray, there is always the Litany.”

And so, as in our Gospel Jesus takes up the work of his earthly ministry, we take up the work of Lent – in the words of the Litany, we do the work which God gives us to do,with singleness of heart, and for the common good. And we inaugurate the season by joining our voices with Christians across many continents and centuries, mingling our hopes and longings for ourselves and for the world, our repentance and determination, our fears and our hopes, into one great flavorful stew of prayer in which we marinate ourselves, once a year, need it or not. Welcome to Lent.

I am greatly indebted to Mark Michael’s great article summarizing the history of the Great Litany, which may be read here: http://www.livingchurch.org/good-lord-deliver-us

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Spiritual Practices

What is a Rule of Life?

Laura Norby, an Episcopal deacon who is part of our congregation, shared these words as part of the invitation to Lent on Sunday, February 7. 

I have a dear friend who has shared the spiritual journey with me for several decades. At some early point in our friendship, she said, “If Laura and I were presented with 2 doors, one which said ‘God’ and one which said ‘Reading About God’ we would choose the second door!  There was truth in her humor. We spent hours reading and talking about God. That’s a lot of time in the head.

These days I prefer the door which says ‘God’, because I want to BE in the presence of God.  Experiencing God happens in the heart. I believe that a Rule of Life can be a door which opens into God.  A Rule is a chosen spiritual practice or practices done regularly, ANY of which may be a means to help us open our hearts and become vulnerable to Love.

At the invitation to a Holy Lent, which will be spoken by Miranda to us on Ash Wednesday, we are halted in our tracks by words like self-examination, repentance, self-denial.  We have an unconscious negative reaction to words like rule and discipline.  We prefer words like freedom, liberation, and joy.  Part of my journey has been, and continues to be the surprising discovery that freedom and joy are the real fruits of those very practices of self-examination, repentance, rule and discipline. These words deserve some rethinking.

So here is a bit of my discovery of hidden treasure within these very old words from our Lenten tradition.  It is my experience of where the desire for a Rule begins.

I wake each morning and remember that God is God, Uncreated, a Mystery, and that each unique Created life is lived in God, including yours and mine.

I remember that I am one entity, one unity of body, mind, and spirit. No artificial divisions or priorities of body vs spirit or meditation vs activity. Changing the baby or the oil in the car is as important a place to be with God as sitting in prayer.  ALL life is lived in the here and now of God’s presence.

I try to remember that God lives through me to others, and through others to me. We are all connected in God’s Divine Web. When I am aware of this in both my heart and bones, I am moved, even compelled, to pray:  God, what does Your life look like in me?  Help me learn how to shape my life in thanksgiving for your revelation that we are all one in You. Teach me how to reorient my body, mind and spirit toward You!

In the Church we call these gift moments of awareness ‘conversion experiences’ and  this desire to reorient ourselves toward God ‘metanoia’. In actual experience, I call it WOW-I don’t know big enough words to call it by name! I can only say thank you, God, for planting the desire for You within me.

A longing for a pure heart, for communion with God, and for compassion for others is the birthplace of the call to a Rule of Life, a path to keep us headed toward the door which says God on it.  Any practice that we are drawn to may help us to live more open-heartedly and deeply present with God.  Practices of prayer and study can help us grow our trust in God’s love and forgiveness.  Repentance for our shortcomings, things done and left undone, and practices of self-denial become, not burdens, but gifts, invitations to accept forgiveness and recognize our complete dependence on God.

This isn’t about Lent. It’s about waking to God’s presence and action in us as created beings and followers of Jesus, who reveals God to us. It’s about finding the new life God offers in this moment.

But, it is also about Lent, the big ‘C’ Church’s season to meditate on Jesus’ journey and Jesus’ truth that a life completely given over to God is as close as we get to understanding Heaven while we’re here.  We pause in our busy lives to look at how our current path aligns with Jesus’ path. We intentionally look at particular behaviors where we know we can do better. We might intentionally take on an untried practice, like fasting, tithing, or study to see if they shine new light on our path.  The Church calls these practices ‘disciplines’ and ‘vows.’  I call them signs and lights and boundaries on the path from which I have no desire to stray, but often do.

Lent is bound to have somber moments if we choose to examine our own growth in Christ. Nobody’s perfect. Those moments should not overwhelm us. Recognizing that we don’t always live up to our own or others’ expectations as Jesus’ followers is the very process that shapes and molds us for good.  Our Rule of Life encourages us to see this working of God in us, as well as to see that love and forgiveness are always the low hanging fruit on the path. Taste them.  See that the Lord is good.

So I encourage you to build and grow your Rule of Life for Lent and beyond. Engage with any practice that seems to you to spring from joy and love, and then set to work on it with faith and obedience.  When you fall short, return to it. Wherever your Rule takes you, God is already there.  Most importantly, remember that whatever shape your Rule takes is good and meaningful and holy.

Have a Blessed Lent.