All posts by Miranda Hassett

Sermons

Sermon, Feb. 7

What do you see when you look in the mirror? I tried it while I was writing my sermon. I saw that I haven’t been taking good care of my skin,that the purple streak in my hair is overdue for re-dyeing. I saw that I need new glasses, and that my sweater had shrunk in the wash. I saw that I looked tired. Do you know what I didn’t see? The glory of God.

Do you see it when you look in the mirror? The glory of God, shining out of your very pores? The apostle Paul says we should – we could. It’s not just the Big Holy People, Moses and Jesus,whose faces glow with the reflected brilliance of God’s presence. It’s us too.

Listen to the end of today’s passage from Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth: “All of us are looking with unveiled faces at the glory of the Lord as if we were looking in a mirror. We are being transformed into that same image from one degree of glory to the next degree of glory. This comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”

And a few verses later Paul continues the thought: “God said that light should shine out of the darkness. The same God shone in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ.” Do those words sound familiar? They’re in our Eucharistic Preface for Epiphany,and they’re the reason it’s my favorite preface.

Paul says, Jesus Christ is the image of God, shining with God’s glory; and knowing, recognizing that, lights us up too, within and without. We are being transformed, bit by bit, by the power of God, into the shining likeness of Jesus, who is himself the likeness of God. With this metaphorical mirror, Paul says, Look at God’s glory, in Christ, and see yourself. Look at yourself and see God’s glory.

This isn’t an easy text, this chunk of 2 Corinthians. It’s a somewhat arbitrary chunk of a longer arc of rhetoric. And it smacks of anti-Semitism, as Paul describes the people of Israel as having minds hardened, veiled, closed to the truth and light of God in Christ. It’s important to read this in the context of what we know from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles,in which we read that Paul and his companions,in their missionary travels,met resistance and hostility from many Jewish leaders.

But it’s even more important to point out that Paul’s intention here is to contrast two mindsets, and the mindset that concerns him is by no means found only in the synagogues. The reason he’s writing this passage is that he sees that mindset among Christians, as well.

In 2 Corinthians, Paul is on the defensive. He has a complicated relationship with the church in Corinth. It sounds like some leaders in the church have been questioning Paul’s qualifications, and quality, as an apostle and teacher of the faith. There were lots of preachers and teachers circulating among the young churches in those days,and apparently some of them made Paul look a little second-rate. Maybe their preaching was more compelling,or their personal story was more powerful, or their teaching was clearer and bolder than Paul’s ambiguous and cantankerous poetry of grace.

So in this letter, Paul is restating who he is and the core of the Gospel as he knows it – presumably over against what he’s hearingabout the teachings of some of the other guys.  And he’s focusing, in this passage, on the contrast between two mindsets. The noun here is hard – the one I’m glossing as “mindset.” In Greek it’s diakonia, from which we get “deacon,” and it’s usually translated as “service” or “ministry.” “Ministry of Death” makes a great band name,but it’s not that helpful as a translation, and Paul seems to use word in a somewhat different sense here. Various versions of the Bible translate it as “way,” “dispensation,” “agreement.” The Message renders it as Government – the Government of Death versus the Government of Living Spirit. I think that Paul means something, a way of being and thinking, that is both external to us, that we live under, like a government, and internal to us, living inside our heads and spirits, like a mindset.

In the verses that come just before today’s lectionary text, Paul says, God has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant. This new covenant is not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. That mindset of death, chiselled in letter on stone tablets, came in glory – such glory that the people of Israel couldn’t even look at Moses’ face. So how much more will the mindset of Spirit come in glory? If there was glory in the mindset of condemnation, then the mindset of justice and righteousness will truly abound in glory!

That’s the hope Paul means, in verse 12, as our text begins: the hope of this new mindset, this new way, a way that frees us from the limitations of the Law. A new dispensation in which divine glory isn’t restricted to a few who dare to approach God, but in which the brilliance of God’s presence is planted and growing in each of us, shining out, transforming us from within.

Elsewhere in his letters, Paul says more about the limitations of the Law. He means the ritual laws of Judaism, but he also means more than that, a whole way of thinking and being that is based on meeting standards and fulfilling requirements. With the Jewish prophets who went before him, Paul says, The Law is righteous but in human hands it goes wrong. We take a tool and make it a weapon, subjugating others, shaming ourselves. We turn God’s map of holiness into a check-the-box approach to righteousness which is crazymaking, destructive, and faithless. Remember, Paul says: I was righteous under the Law. Before Jesus’ glory blinded me, I was a good Jew. I followed all the rules. I met the standards. And… it didn’t save me from my deep brokenness.

In our Advent virtual book group, several of us read Brene Brown’s book Daring Greatly. As I dug into 2 Corinthians, I saw a lot of overlap between that letter, and this book. I think Paul and Brown are talking about the same two mindsets, though Paul uses a theological language he is inventing as he goes, a messy hybrid of Jewish and Greek thought, while Brown uses the therapeutic idiom of early 21st century self-help literature.

Instead of a “Ministry of Death,”Brown points to a pervasive culture of scarcity that holds us all captive.  She writes,  “Worrying about scarcity is our culture’s version of post-traumatic stress. It happens when we’ve been through too much, and rather than coming together to heal, we’re angry and scared and at each other’s throats… It’s not just the larger culture that’s suffering; I found the same dynamics playing out in family culture, work culture, school culture, and community culture.” (27)

That culture of scarcity, as Brown tells it – and I recognize it; do you?  – that culture fills us with the persistent haunting fear that we’re not enough. More specifically, that we’re not something enough.You’ll have a few words of your own that fill in that blank. Not disciplined enough. Not patient enough. Not organized enough. Not smart enough. Not pretty enough. Not creative enough. Not thin enough. Not spiritual enough. Have you thought of yours yet? …

That inner yardstick, that imagined ideal, against with we measure ourselves, consciously or not, and find ourselves wanting – that’s the Ministry of Death of our time, the Law that binds us instead of freeing us. Brown says that the upshot of this culture of scarcity is an epidemic of shame….which sounds a lot like the “mindset of condemnation” Paul names. Brown defines shame is “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and … unworthy of love and belonging.” (69) And our shame drives a whole set of behaviors that we use to defer, deflect, or hide from shame – disengagement, fear of connecting or investing; criticizing and ridiculing self and others; cynicism and pessimism, scapegoating, perfectionism, numbing behaviors like our various addictions… She says, the things we do to try and avoid or manage shametend to make us into the people we least want to be.

The other mindset, the new dispensation, the Government of Living Spirit – it’s harder to put words to that. Paul says – again, in chorus with many prophets of Israel – that true holiness is a matter of spirit, not of law. It’s a way of freedom and of trust. He’s not under the illusion this Way is easier than the alternative. If anything, it’s probably harder. The guidelines are few and, frankly, poorly-defined: Love. Generosity. Justice. The rules are those we discern and take on for ourselves. The standards are perplexing; we seem to be welcomed and loved just as we are, while also called to literally impossible feats of mercy. But this is the Way we were made for. It’s how God wants us -not as subjects, slaves, or employees, following orders, but as children, formed by the heart and spirit of our loving Parent.

Brown says the opposite – the antidote – to our culture of scarcity and shame is, simply, the idea of enough. Trusting that we are enough, that we’re fundamentally OK and still worthy of love, even when we mess up or aren’t good at something.  Knowing ourselves to be enough allows us to lay down the armor and weapons that we stockpiled to protect ourselves from shame and scarcity,and instead to be present and real. To take the holy human risks of connecting, engaging, and growing.

Brown – a practicing Episcopalian – doesn’t say, but could: You are enough, because God don’t make no junk. But Paul says that, more or less. Paul talks about enough, too. In verses 5 and 6 of this chapter, he writes, “We are not enough, of ourselves, to claim anything as coming from us; our enough-ness is from God, who has made us enough to be ministers of this new covenant.” You’re enough because God makes you enough. And more than enough: God makes you shine.

But. That’s not what most of us see, when we look in the mirror. That’s why Paul wrote these letters, urging the early Christians to turn away from the mindset of death that made them think they weren’t good enough for God. That’s why Brown wrote this book, helping us identify the role of shame and scarcity in our lives, and offering tools for turning the corner into a new mindset.

Which brings us… to Lent. The season of the church’s year which begins this week. A season honored with repentance, turning from and turning towards; with self-examination and reflection; with practices of personal discipline such as fasting. It all sounds a little like we’re right back at the Ministry of Death. But I don’t think so.

So much of the worst of human behavior springs from fear, scarcity, shame. I think the call of Lent is to work on quitting all the stuff we do to convince ourselves that we can be … something enough, if we just keep trying; and instead to think and pray and live as people who know that we are enough, enough in God, enough for God.

For example. I marked up this book a lot, as I read – notes for the book group, for my church, for myself. In chapter four, Brown talks about perfectionism, as one of the forms of armor we use to protect ourselvesin the dispensation of condemnation. She says, “Perfectionism is a defensive move. It’s the belief that if we do things perfectly…, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame…. Most perfectionists grew up being praised for achievement and performance… Somewhere along the way they adopted this dangerous and debilitating belief system: ‘I am what I accomplish.’ … Perfectionism is not a way to avoid shame. Perfectionism is a form of shame.” (129 – 130)

I was sure as heck not going to mark up the Perfectionism page. I’ve told myself for decades that I’m not a perfectionist – and I’m genuinely not the stereotypical, cartoon perfectionist. I’m not judging your punctuation, folks. I let things be Done instead of Perfect every day. I cut myself slack. I’m OK with my limitations and my growing edges. In fact, I even took an online quiz, designed to assess how much you practice compassion towards yourself – one measure of perfectionism. And I scored REALLY WELL.  So there.

But… Still. I recognize myself in some of Brown’s words about perfectionism.It’s not a demon I can vanquish with ONE MORE good test score. My parents did their best – in first grade, when I got a pink slip for bad behavior, my mom took me out for ice cream to celebrate. But I became, somehow,  a person who’s deeply invested in my own competence. Who believes, at a deep level, that I am what I accomplish. Turning from the mindset of condemnation, the culture of scarcity, for me, means teaching myself to trust that I am enough, that I’m worthy, regardless of whether I’m currently being showered with kudos, gold stars, and pats on the head.

What do you see when you look in the mirror? Can you see the glory of God, shining there? A flicker? A glimmer? Maybe the purpose of the disciplines of Lent is to rub away at the tarnish and grime, or – to use the image Paul plays with – to strip away the layers of veiling – that obscure God’s light, God’s glory from shining forth in and from us. So that that mirror – metaphorical or actual – will show us ourselves as we truly are. Enough, through God’s grace, and ablaze with Christ’s light.

Giving Campaign, Sermons, Stewardship

Sermon, Jan. 24

Today is Annual Meeting Sunday, the Sunday in January when we pause to take stock of what we’ve accomplished in the previous year, and where we’re feeling led to growth in the year ahead. It’s my custom, as it is for many Episcopal clergy, to have my sermon also be my Annual Meeting address – my reflection on where we’ve been and where we’re going. It’s always a bit of an awkward hybrid, this thing that is both sermon and State of the Parish address; but I do really value the way the exercise keeps me grounded in Scripture. This year, the struggle was, WHICH Scripture? The lectionary hands us a bunch of powerful and relevant texts, today. They each have a word or two for us, I think, at this moment in the life of St. Dunstan’s.

The first word is… Time. The year of the Lord’s favor. Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. In our Gospel today, Jesus is talking about time – about a particular kind of time. The Greek used in the New Testament has two different words for time. The first is Chronos, which is clock time, calendar time, linear, predictable, orderly, ordinary. It’s the kind of time that tells you when to leave for work, or when your car will be paid off.

The second kind of time is Kairos. The word points to a special kind of time – often translated as “the opportune time.” It means the right moment, the moment that fizzes with potential, when everything falls into place or when new possibilities emerge. The time when things are brought to crisis; the decisive moment we’ve all been waiting for. In today’s text from the fourth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is talking about kairos-time as he quotes chapter 61 of the book of the prophet Isaiah, and then says, This is the moment; and I am the man. Jesus doesn’t use the word “kairos” here, but he uses it elsewhere, all over the Gospels. It’s one of themes of his teaching, really: recognizing, discerning the right time. Reading the moment and knowing, This is it. The moment to act, to step up, to respond, to make a change. It’s almost as if this were one of the gifts, one of the challenges he offers to those who follow him… reading the signs, recognizing the moment, carpe-ing the diem.

I started to get the feeling that maybe a particular kind of kairos moment had arrived at St. Dunstan’s sometime last summer. Let me back up and offer just a little bit of history. When I came to St. Dunstan’s, we were running some pretty substantial budget deficits – between $40 and $70,000. It made my stomach knot up just to look back at it all, preparing these remarks. In 2013 we used $52k of our reserves to meet our expenses. That was what we needed to do – and we had the funds to do it.

But that year we also decided it was time to make a change. Our reserve funds were getting low and it just didn’t make sense to go on like that.  We called a Budget Repair Task Force to make sure we were using our financial resources as wisely and effectively as possible. We did some hard, hard work, and were able to present, adopt, and, though your pledges, achieve a balanced budget for 2014, and again in 2015.

I’ve been rector of St. Dunstan’s for five years – five years and 21 days, to be exact – and for basically all of that time, I’ve been caught in the tension of wanting to keep expenses tight and live within our means, and wanting to build, add, develop, enhance – which often requires some investment. We’ve done pretty well – we’ve been creative, resourceful, and patient; and diocesan grants and special funds within the parish have allowed us to invest in Christian formation, youth and young adult ministry, a new worship service, and more.

And then, this past summer, I started to get this feeling. This feeling that maybe we were entering a new chapter. That maybe it was time to ask the parish to commit to a budget that would sustain and expand all the good things that have been developing here.

I am – you are – so blessed in our parish leadership. Your wardens and treasurers and vestry are, without exception, open-hearted, thoughtful, committed, both wise and smart, both compassionate and playful. I asked the Wardens and Treasurers: What if we presented a budget for 2016 that asks for more – not just because we think we could do more, but because we’re already doing more, and need the parish’s support to keep it up? And the Wardens and Treasurer said, Yeah. It’s time.

So we took it to the Finance Committee – I’m so grateful for our Finance Committee, for those smart, skilled people who oversee the financial life of our parish. And the Finance Committee said, Yeah, it’s time. And we took it to the Vestry, and the Vestry said, Yeah, it’s time.

And so, friends, we took it to you, in the fall Giving Campaign. We asked you to raise our pledged giving by almost 10%. It felt audacious and terrifying. And you said, Yeah, it’s time. You did it. Our pledged income in our 2016 budget is fifty thousand dollars more than it was in our 2011 budget.  A 25% increase. I don’t even have words for that. I’m just staggeringly grateful – and humbled, and hopeful.

We’re not going to run out and buy a Porsche. We’re going to be just as watchful and mindful in a season of growth as we were in the seasons of scarcity. We’ll keep a close eye on our budget this year, make sure we haven’t overcommitted ourselves, and strive to plan wisely for the future. But I think it’s OK to take a moment here to just … exhale, and smile.

That kairos moment of Jesus, that moment in the synagogue, was of cosmic importance; but he teaches us that we should expect kairos moments in our lives and our institutions and communities, too. Moments when God’s will is fulfilled in our hearing, before our eyes. Moments when God’s purposes take hold, when human impossibilities give way to God’s possibilities.

I want to be clear that, while I’m talking about money, I’m absolutely not just talking about money. Money stands for something. You absolutely wouldn’t have stepped up the way you did if your parish leadership had just said, Hey, guys, we’d like some more money, please. You give, and many of you have increased your giving, because you believe in our common life, in what we’re doing and building here together. And I want to be clear, too, that while I’m talking about money, I’m absolutely not just talking about money, because there is no way we would be where we are without your contributions of time, energy, skill, food and art supplies, and so, so much more. We couldn’t be St. Dunstan’s if all we had was the money.

So, I keep talking about doing more; what more? Our 2016 budget doesn’t include big dramatic changes. It’s a budget that invests in the body. That’s the second word for today, from our second reading, Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth: Body.  Paul uses this wonderful metaphor of the body to explain to the church in Corinth, the way you might explain it to a four-year-old, that their church is a body, that all the parts matter for the body’s healthy functioning, and that they really need to work together to get anything done.

The increases in our 2016 budget are investments in areas of our common life that will bind the body more closely together, and serve some of its assorted parts. We’ve increased the hours – not a lot, but some – for our Organist & Choir Director, an investment in developing our life together as a people of song, one of the deep and formative ways we experience ourselves as a body. We’ve increased the hours for our Office Coordinator – not a lot, but some – an investment in developing our parish communication systems, the ways we know what’s going on in the body, and hear about ways to participate, contribute, and be nurtured; and ways that that those who are not yet part of the body may find, and be found by, St. Dunstan’s.

We’ve taken several ministries that had been launched with the support of grants or designated funds, and made them part of our budget, because they’re not experiments anymore – they’re part of who we are. Our Sandbox Thursday evening service, our monthly young adult nights at the Vintage, our Middle High youth program – all serve different parts of this body, and help to sustain and connect those who participate.

We’ve boosted our budget lines for a couple of key areas that help hold the whole body together. Think about what it feels like to be hungry: low-energy, headachy, cranky. We don’t want to be Hangry Church. We want this body well-fed. Sharing meals is powerful; we learn that from Jesus himself. Eating together isn’t just pleasant and practical – it’s a sacrament of sorts. It builds community, helps people gather and focus, and makes it easier to integrate church into daily life. Many of our best and deepest conversations take place over shared meals. And while the occasional “potluck” is wonderful, often people just need to come get fed – in every sense. Our Fellowship budget line provides the funds to make sure we can keep table fellowship central to our common life.

Also this year, we’ve funded a budget line for Welcome and Integration ministry. The people who’ve become part of St. Dunstan’s over the past few years are really amazing, interesting, gifted folks. We’ve got two of them standing for election to vestry right now. It is a tremendous sign of health to have people actively involved in the life of this parish whose time at St. Dunstan’s ranges from fifty years to less than one. And to be a body that is able to incorporate – that word literally means, to make part of the body! – the needs and interests and gifts of newer members. Funding that Welcome & Integration line in our budget ensures that we have resources to do that work well, but it’s also a statement to ourselves that this work matters.

Finally, this year’s budget inches up our investment in Outreach, the ways we support service and advocacy work in our city, our state, and the world. This year we raised the percentage of your giving that we pass on to others to 6%. Of course, monetary gifts are only one way we contribute; we’re seeing broader hands-on participation in some of our Outreach ministries, too. Watch this space! It’s my conviction and hope that, the stronger and better-connected the Body grows, the more we’re able to act together to serve our neighbors and join in God’s work of healing and transforming a broken world.

One last word on the church as Body: It’s important to keep asking, Are any of the parts neglected? Is there an ear or a pinky toe that’s not feeling connected, or getting what it needs? Let’s keep striving to be a Body in which all the parts respect and care for one another, and work together.

One more Scripture passage, with two words for us, church. The passage is this scene from the Old Testament book Nehemiah. And the words are, Celebrate and share.

This story needs a little context. A century and a half earlier, Babylonian armies had conquered Jerusalem, destroyed the great Temple, and taken most of the people away from their homeland, into exile. Fifty years later, the Persian empire conquered Babylon, and the Persion emperor, Cyrus, gave the Jews permission to go home. But being allowed to go home is not the same as having a home to go to. Jerusalem was in ruins, and other tribes and peoples had taken over the surrounding territory. Many Jews stayed in exile, where they had built lives for themselves, waiting to see whether they would someday have a homeland again.

Now, Nehemiah was one of the Jewish people living in Persia. He served in the court of King Artaxerxes, who was king after Cyrus. He was grieved by word from Jerusalem about how bad things were, and he asked the King for permission to go and help rebuild.  So Artaxerxes sent Nehemiah to Jerusalem to be its governor, with wood and other resources to support the project. The Bible tells us that Nehemiah and his people rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem in 56 days.

The scene in our reading today is a moment of rebirth, a true kairos moment. Nehemiah the governor and Ezra the priest have called together all the people of Israel who have returned to begin life again in their homeland – men and women and even children old enough to understand. Ezra reads aloud from the books of the Law, the Torah, that tells them how to live as the holy people of a holy God, the customs and practices of their faith that had been largely forgotten during their time of exile. And the priests and Levites walk among the people, helping them understand, explaining, interpreting. And the people are weeping and mourning, because they have been so far from God, so far from the ways of their people and their faith.

But their leaders tell them, It’s okay. Don’t weep, don’t grieve. You’ve lost many years, and suffered much, but we’re home now, and we’re beginning again. This is a holy day, a kairos time, and God is with us. Celebrate! Go on your way rejoicing, eat rich foods and drink wine, and share from your bounty with those who have nothing.

Our thin years here hardly compare with the great exile. But this Body has been through some hard and anxious times, and we’ve arrived with hope and humility at the threshhold of a new chapter, a koinos time. Let’s take this day, and this season, to celebrate – and to share from our blessedness, in every way we can.

Uncategorized

Sermon, Jan. 10

Today we honor the feast day of the Baptism of Jesus. Just two weeks ago, he was a tiny baby lying in a manger; last week he was a sassy independent twelve-year-old; and today he’s a grown man, ready to step into the public eye and begin his life’s work.

And he begins by being baptized. By John the Baptist, who was preaching repentance and transformation, and dunking people in the River Jordan as a symbol of their desire to be cleansed and live a new life. Later, Jesus tells his followers to baptize new believers, making baptism by water and the Holy Spirit the rite by which one becomes a Christian.

There are libraries of theology about baptism, what it is, does, and means – as there are about the Eucharist – but ultimately it just is what it is, simple and mysterious, as is the Eucharist. Water, bread, wine, human hands, God’s grace; something happens – we do, we wonder, we trust.

The Gospel of Mark, the first, the shortest, the most to the point of our Gospels, begins and ends with the baptisms of Jesus.In the first chapter, Jesus’ baptism by John in the river Jordan, very much as Luke describes it in our Gospel today. And In the next-to-last chapter, Jesus’ death on the cross at the hands of the Roman government, which is what Jesus means in the Gospels when he talks about his baptism. This baptism, the baptism the Church celebrates today, was only the beginning. As our baptisms are only a beginning.

Who here was raised in a church that doesn’t baptize babies? That teaches “believer’s baptism”? In those churches – and there are many of them – what is normal for us, to baptize babies within their first year of life, is seen as a deeply mistaken practice. Christians in those churches understand faith as contingent on individual belief, on a person’s confession of Jesus Christ as Lord, so infant baptism seems nonsensical, even superstitious.

Those ideas go back to the time of the Reformation,the great time of religious change, creativity, and violencethat swept across Europe in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. One of the great themes of the Reformation, was that ordinary people should be able to understand the Church’s Scriptures and rites, and participate as believers in the Church’s sacraments and services. Many of the Reformed churches that developed in those decades moved away from the Roman Catholic practice of infant baptism. It didn’t fit their emphasis on conversion and belief. How could a baby be converted to faith in Jesus? How could a baby participate in baptism as a believer?

The great minds who shaped our way of faith, the Church of England, the Anglican way, had to deal with all that. They shared many of those Reformation convictions, but instead of crafting new ways of worship, they adapted the ancient sacramental patterns that we still share with the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.Those practices included infant baptism.

Thomas Cranmer, the early 16th century Archbishop and architect of our prayer book, and Richard Hooker, the late 16th century scholar who laid the foundations of Anglican theology, both dealt with Reformed objections to infant baptism by stressing that baptism is just a beginning, a first step in the life of faith rather than a completion – a life of faith that will be lived within the Church, the body of Christ, the family of faith, that will nurture and form that child into a mature Christian. They saw baptism as a moment of receiving God’s grace which is then grown into over a lifetime.  Hooker uses the image of baptism as planting a seed: “For that which we there professed without any understanding, when we come to fuller understanding later, we are simply bringing to ripeness the seed that was sown before.” (V.64.2, my paraphrase).

That theme of gradual development is key; elsewhere he writes, “Christ imparts himself [to us] by degrees… we are confident that we will eventually receive all of him.” (V.56) Both Hooker and Cranmer stressed that that ongoing, gradual growth in faith happens in the church, in and through its rites, teachings, and fellowship.  Hooker describes baptism as a birth, the Church as the mother that cares for and raises the child, and the Eucharist as the meals that feed and sustain. And Thomas Cranmer constructed a baptismal rite that intentionally reminds adults of the promises made at their own baptisms – as the rite in our prayer book does – to remind and call us to continue living into, and up to, our baptism.

So the wisdom of Cranmer and Hooker and the others who shaped our way of faith made us into a church that sees baptism as birth into a new life that, like physical birth, assumes there’s a lot of growth ahead. Baptism, in our church’s understanding, is both complete in itself – as our Prayer Book says, “Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s body the Church” (298) – and it’s also a beginning, a birth, a threshold. Look at what the congregation says, after the baptism: “We receive you into the household of God.” There’s that image of joining a family, an oikos! The newly-baptized – regardless of her age – is welcomed as a newborn baby into the waiting arms of a family of faith that commits to care, feed, and teach.

Baptism, as a beginning, a birth, an initiation, leads us straight to discipleship. Discipleship isn’t a very Episcopalian word – it’s the kind of thing Evangelical Christians talk about – but I’m increasingly convinced that it’s an important word, with which to name the lifelong process of learning and growing, of receiving and becoming Christ. We use the word “disciples” to describe Jesus’ posse. Although I admit that I often refer to Jesus’ friends, instead – because disciples is a clunky awkward word, and we don’t really know what it means. But we should know what it means. And Jesus’ friends weren’t just his friends.They were his followers. His students. His padawans. He was their rabbi, their master, their teacher, their Jedi master, their sensei.

Disciple means learner, or student. It’s related to discipline – but please don’t think of spankings; instead, think of the discipline of an athlete or artist or a monk, anyone highly-skilled, highly-focused, highly-committed. Their discipline is the set of practices that make them able to do what they do. Discipline in this sense is close kin to training: improving our skills, extending our capacity, meeting and rising to new challenges. Being dissatisfied. Struggling. Improving. Failing. Keeping at it.

We are disciples.Try that on. I’m a disciple. Someone learning and growing, seeking and striving, to live as a follower of Jesus. We are disciples together, trying to discern and name and live out the ways Jesus calls us to follow him, in this time, this place. Because the first question of discipleship is, Well, what do I do? I want to be like you. I take you as my Teacher. I trust your Way. How do I begin? How do I act? How do I think?

Our baptismal rite maps out a path of Christian maturity, a way of living and being that flows out of baptism. It’s on page 304, if you want to take a look. Those five questions – our Baptismal Covenant – identify five hallmarks of living as followers of Jesus: faithfulness in worship; resisting evil and repenting when we mess up; proclaiming the good news of God’s love; serving our neighbors; and striving for justice and peace.

Those are some important guideposts to point us in the right direction on the road of discipleship. But I think we could get more fine-grained than that – both in terms of getting a little closer to the ground,talking about what baptismal living and discipleship look like in daily life; and in terms of getting more particular to this community, this oikos. Churches aren’t interchangeable; if you’ve ever been church-shopping, you know that. St. Dunstan’s is a particular church with a particular culture and call, just like every other church. The people who come here, and stay here, are connecting with something distinctive about this household of faith. We’ve made our homes here, some for decades, some for months, because of some sense of fit or belonging or finding what we’re looking for or finding a group that’s at least asking the right questions together. And once you’re here, once you’ve chosen this as your oikos, your household of faith, we interact. We shape each other. We become St. Dunstanites. So it stands to reason that the way we understand the path of discipleship, the work of living our faith, might be distinctive, different in some matters of substance or emphasis from the way it’s understood across the parking lot at Foundry, or up the road at St. Bernard’s or Advent Lutheran or Blackhawk, or even across town at our sister Episcopal parishes.

Up in St. Paul, Minnesota, an Episcopal parish, St. Matthew’s, went through a process together of mapping out their common understanding of the Way of Jesus.The path of discipleship that they share, as a household of faith. A small group led the congregation through conversations and other kinds of group reflection, over the course of several months, circling around questions of discipleship, following Jesus and living our faith, in daily life. Out of those data, they distilled a number of hallmarks that define how they understand and practice discipleship together. St Matthew’s list boils down to six words. I’ll give you just one example: Hospitality. That’s a core value that we can easily ground in Scripture, and that operates at multiple levels – individual, household, parish.You can see how this theme of hospitality would call forth people’s memories, stories and reflections; you can see how, having once identified hospitality as a central element of discipleship, that value would help guide choices and practices in the future.

In the next couple of months, we’ll go through a similar process here at St. Dunstan’s. We’re calling it the “Towards Discipleship” project. PLEASE don’t go Google St Matthew’s and look at their list – I’ve carefully not looked very hard at it myself! I really want our core values, our hallmarks of baptismal living, to rise organically out of our conversations and experiences, not to plagiarize another community’s list. We’ve started this already, through our Church, Faith, Life survey and conversations last summer. Some themes that have already started to emerge, and we will use those data, but we’ll also invite the congregation into some new conversations, over the next couple of months. The questions this time around will be similar, but not the same. I expect the conversations to be just as powerful and lovely as the ones we had last summer. I hope that even more us of will participate, this time around.

The goal, the endpoint we’ll be working towards is a simple, profound, powerful list of five or six or seven words – core values, hallmarks, touchstones of discipleship, as we know and follow that path here at St. Dunstan’s. Something to post on our walls, on our website. Not the same as a parish mission statement, but not entirely different, either – something we can refer to, to orient ourselves, to remind ourselves of what we’ve discerned together about what it looks like to follow Jesus in the world.

One way to visualize that endpoint is to picture yourself having that conversation. You know, the one where somebody says, “Christians are so creepy, I really don’t trust them,” or, “Your church seems like it’s really wishy-washy, are you real Christians?”, or, “Why do you go to church anyway? I just practice my spirituality on my own,” or even, “I wasn’t raised in a church, or the church I was raised in really hurt me, but church seems really important to you; can you tell me why?” And you can say,“Well, I’m part of a transformative and welcoming community that follows Jesus by practicing hospitality, and ….”

We are going to finish that sentence together, find those words, and get familiar with them, and internalize them. I’m excited and hopeful about this work.  I kind of can’t wait to see this list. To see the map we create, together, of the path of discipleship as God has shown it to us here. I think that map, that list, will help us both to identify ways to develop our daily discipleship,to live more fully as followers of Jesus; and I also think it will help us to name and affirm the ways we’re already living out our baptisms. I am 40 years old, a priest of the church for nearly seven years, with a seminary degree, and I am still learning how to name my spirituality, to name the moments and activities in my lifewhen I’m most in tune with the Divine and with God’s intentions and desires for me. I have a hunch that all of us have both areas where we’re called to growth, and areas where we’re already living out discipleship,and we’ll be deeply blessed by the holy voice of God speaking through our community to say, Well done, good and faithful servant; keep it up.

Jesus’ baptism was a beginning, a first step down a long and challenging road.Likewise, our baptisms were – or for some of us, will be – a beginning. A turning point. Crossing the threshold of the household of God. Baptism leads to discipleship, to a lifetime of learning and growing, being nurtured and challenged. May the God who has called us together here and formed us into a fellowship of faith, bless our work as we come to know ourselves as disciplesand seek to understand more fullythe walk of faith to which we are called. Amen.

Current Events, Kid-friendly, Stories

Honoring the Holy Innocents

IMG_9425The Feast of the Holy Innocents has largely been dropped from observance in the Episcopal Church. It’s a sad and grisly story, and rubs up uncomfortably against the obligatory joyfulness of Christmas and the impulse to take it easy for a while, in every possible sense, right after Christmas. I don’t know quite what led me to take a second look at this story, this year, and to decide to tell it after all – and to the children of the parish, no less. For one thing, I have a contrarian aversion to the practice of just ignoring the parts of Scripture that we find difficult or unpleasant. So while I feel the tension in holding up this story of murdered children as the coda to the Nativity, I also think there’s a deep truth and wisdom in its placement there that we may be missing. I’ve vaguely felt that way for several years. Then sometime before Christmas this year, I ran across the custom of blessing the children of the church (and, more, commending the practice of asking God’s blessing for our children and loved ones, to all our members) on the Feast of the Holy Innocents. I found that a beautiful and worthwhile custom, and it needs the story as explanation. So I drafted this. And then on Sunday morning between services, I pulled together some items to construct a simple prayer station to go with the story. After the Post-Communion  Prayer, I invited the kids – about eight of them, ages 3 to 10 – to meet me at the chancel steps and talk about this story. 

It all went fine. Nobody burst into tears. I talked with a few parents afterwards and they voiced some of the same convictions I hold, as both a parent and a person charged with the faith formation of other people’s kids: If we act like all the stories of faith are happy stories where good things happen to good people, then the faith we teach has little to do with the actual world in which we live. Kids, even quite young kids, know that bad things happen, that children get hurt or killed, that sometimes kings are evil. Let’s be brave enough to let Scripture speak in our churches with at least as much drama and danger as a Disney movie. 

I have a story for you guys.  The bad news is that it’s a scary, sad story; the good news is that it’s just a story.  To understand it we have to go ALL the way back to Moses.  Remember Moses? Remember baby Moses in the basket in the river?… Why was he in the basket?…  [We talked over that story a little bit.]

Matthew, who wrote one of our Gospels,  knew that story about Moses. And Matthew wanted the people who read his Gospel to see that Jesus is like another Moses – a great leader who calls his people into a new way of living with God.  So there are lots of little things that Matthew put into his Gospel, his story of the life of Jesus,  to make you think about Moses, and how Jesus is like Moses. And one of those things is a story about a bad, cruel king, King Herod, and how he was just like Pharaoh.  Matthew tells us that King Herod heard  that a baby had been born in Bethlehem who would become a king.  He didn’t know that Jesus was going to be a different kind of king; he thought Jesus might try to take his throne, someday. So he sent his soldiers to Bethlehem  to kill all the baby boys there.  But Joseph was warned in a dream,  so he took Mary and baby Jesus  and they ran away into Egypt to hide, and were safe.

It’s a scary story, isn’t it? But like I said: it’s probably just a story. King Herod was a bad, cruel king, and he did some pretty bad things, that ancient historians wrote about. But only Matthew tells this story, the story of the Holy Innocents, and people who study the Bible think that Matthew probably made up this story to make us think of Moses and of how he was saved, in Egypt, when all the other baby boys were being killed.  So baby Jesus escaping with his family is like baby Moses in his basket on the river Nile.

But stories are powerful even when they aren’t history. And of course there really are bad, cruel leaders in the world, and there really are children who live with danger, every day. So let’s create an altar to pray for those children. First, a red cloth – this is actually a chasuble. We use this color in church when we are remembering somebody who died for God. Next, a crown for King Herod and Pharaoh and all the kings of the earth. Next, a sword, for all the violence in our world. (NB: I asked a three-year-old girl to place the sword on the altar, guessing – rightly – that she would resist the temptation to start swinging it around.) Now, some of the sheep from our Nativity set. Lambs are a sign of children and innocence. Next, a cross, as a sign of life coming out of death. And finally, a candle in a dove-shaped holder, as a sign of hope and peace.

Now let’s pray for all those children in danger in the world.

Loving God, we remember before you the children whom Herod slew in his jealous rage, and all children of the world who face fear and danger. We ask that your love will enfold, protect, and comfort them, and we call on you to strengthen the hands of those who work for to ensure that all God’s children have safety, kindness, and hope. Amen.

One of the ways Christians have handled this hard story, over the centuries, is to use it as a time to bless their children.  Not just to have them blessed in church by the priest – that’s me –  but to learn the habit of blessing them at home –  at bedtime, before school, whatever. And remember kids need blessing not just by moms and dads, but by grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles, godparents and teachers and close grownup friends.  I’m going to teach you a simple blessing now.  You can use it for any of your loved ones. May God bless you,  and be the guardian of your body, mind, and heart.  Turn to your friend and trace a cross on his forehead and say,  May God bless you,  and be the guardian of your body, mind, and heart.

And I say it now to all of you: May God bless you and be the guardian of your body, mind, and heart! Amen.

Sermons, Youth

Sermon, January 3

Who would you want to eat frozen pizza and watch cheesy movies with?

My son offered to help me with my sermon this week, to lighten my workload during our family vacation. And I accepted, because I’d already decided on a topic where I could use his input. It was his suggestion that I start my sermon with that question. And, you know, it’s not a bad place to start. Because eating frozen pizza (warmed up in our Presto Pizzazz Pizza Cooker) and watching cheesy movies is what our middle school youth group does together every Friday evening. And what we have in today’s Gospel is Jesus as a middle-schooler, seeking a context and a community with space for his developing faith.

In this story, found only in the Gospel of Luke, we meet twelve-year-old Jesus – presumably on Passover break from seventh grade at Nazareth Junior High.   This is the only story of Jesus’ childhood that appears in any of the Gospels.  There are tales about Jesus as a child in some later texts, like the non-canonical Infancy Gospel of Thomas, written probably a hundred years later than the Gospels found in the Bible. In one story, Jesus is five years old, playing on the riverbank.  He forms twelve sparrows out of clay, and is playing with them.  But then some pious grownup sees him and says, ‘Today is the Sabbath, when observant Jews are not supposed to do any work. Making those clay sparrows was work, and you have profaned the sabbath!’   And Joseph comes over and says, ‘You bad boy, what are you doing, breaking the sabbath?’ Then Jesus claps his hands, and tells the sparrows, ‘Fly away!’ And they come to life and fly away, singing.

Other stories don’t go so well. Once a kid was running past Jesus and brushed by his shoulder, and Jesus got mad and said, You will go no further! And the kid fell down dead.  And everyone in the street said, ‘Who is this kid, that everything he says comes true?’ And the parents of the dead kid came to Joseph and said, ‘You are not fit to live in this city, with a boy like that! Either teach him to bless instead of cursing, or move away!’…

I don’t see these stories as real accounts of Jesus’ life. I think that Jesus’ life as a child and young man were mostly unremarkable and/or unknown, and that’s why those years are almost invisible in our Scriptures. Later stories like these are a product of the human impulse to fill in the blanks and create an interesting backstory.

But I think there is some insight in their portrait of Jesus – not as a perfect, holy child –  “Mild, obedient, good,” as it says in the verse of “Once in royal David’s city” that we don’t sing – but instead as a very human kid with some remarkable powers.

The Church – the big-C church, that encompasses all our churches – has taught for two thousand years  that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. Both completely a human being and completely God.  A paradox and a wonder. What it means for us in looking at this Gospel story is that while Jesus was most assuredly not a typical 12-year-old, he also was a typical 12-year-old.

A scholar named James Fowler lays out a map of the Stages of Faith Development, based loosely on Piaget’s work on child development.  It’s not a perfect framework, but it’s helpful. It points out why we study Scripture and explore faith in different ways with younger children, older children, teens, and adults. And it helps explain why youth group is so important for kids in that Jesus-in-the-Temple age group.

So what’s going on with middle school age kids? The ten-to-thirteen-ish age group? These kids are beginning to move out of  what Fowler calls the Mythic-Literalist phase, the phase of our older elementary kids. The Mythic-Literal stage of faith development is the stage in which a child begins to take on for herself the stories, beliefs, and practices of her community. The playful imagination of younger children gives way to more linear and cohesive thinking. Rules, beliefs, and stories are all very important,  and are held firmly and literally. The stories and explanations of faith orient the child in the world, telling him who he is and why things happen. Deeper symbolism isn’t consciously understood, though it is at work, most assuredly.

As kids move into their middle school years – especially bright, inquisitive kids, and especially in a faith community that encourages thoughtfulness and questioning – they start to notice and wonder about some of these stories and teachings. Contradictions within the texts, and between the texts and daily life,  start to motivate deeper reflection and engagement.

Pre-teen and teenage youth begin to move into  what Fowler calls the Synthetic/Conventional phase of faith. Here’s what Fowler says about it: “In Synthetic-Conventional faith,  a person’s experience of the world now extends beyond the family  [to include school, peers, … work, and more]. Faith must provide a coherent orientation in the midst of that more complex range of involvements.  Faith must synthesize values, [information and lived experience]; it must provide a basis for identity and outlook…” In this stage, “trust is shifted from stories and explanations and is now placed in the need to belong to a group…. One finds one’s identity by aligning oneself with a certain perspective [or community] ….  Authority [may be] located in … traditional authority roles [and] in the consensus of a valued, face-to-face group…. One of the hallmarks of this stage is [imagining] God as extensions of interpersonal relationships. God is often experienced as Parent, Friend, Companion, Beloved, and Personal Reality. The true religious hunger of adolescence is to have a God who knows me and values me deeply.”

So: In this phase, our worldview and experiences broaden, so faith is exploratory and inquiring, working to put the pieces together. And our social worlds broaden,  so faith is social and interpersonal, grounded in connection and belonging.

Let’s come back to our Gospel story,  and look at Jesus as an extraordinary, but also and ordinary,  twelve-year-old kid. We see a Jesus whose experience of the world now extends beyond his family… a Jesus who needs independence and freedom  to follow his own interests and questions. I can’t even begin to imagine  how terrified and furious his parents would have been,  after losing him for FOUR DAYS.  But there’s something abidingly true about this scene – “WHAT were you THINKING? Don’t you know how worried we were?” “Look, I just needed some time, OK?”

That’s why I treasure having a church community in which my middle-school kid, and all our middle-school kids,  can connect with other faithful adults, people who respect them and love them, who’ll be there for them  when they need a break from their parents, but still need somebody to trust.

We see a Jesus who has questions – and answers – of his own.  A Jesus who is actively working on putting the pieces together.  Digging into the holes and the contradictions, working on making sense of it all, weaving what he’s learned  into a way of understanding self, God, and world that can guide him into adulthood.

That’s why I treasure having a church community in which my middle-school kid, and all our middle-school kids,  can ask their questions, and share their provisional answers. Where there are open-minded, thoughtful folks around willing to share their viewpoints and stories, and also willing to listen, respond, encourage. Sharon and JM, our Middle High Youth leaders, are stepping up to be the designated hitters  for the curve balls and spit balls our youth may toss their way; but it’s not just them. Many of you know our kids,  not just their names, but what they like, what they care about, what they struggle with. I’m so grateful for that, as both a pastor and a mother.

And we see a Jesus seeking community.  Seeking relationship with a group that will give him affirmation, connection, and direction.  Maybe the other twelve-year-old kids in Nazareth weren’t interested in the same kinds of things as Jesus. Maybe his local synagogue didn’t have a youth group. So the best peer group he could find  was the teachers in the Jerusalem temple.  As we talked about this story, my son remarked,  “Jesus was probably kind of a quirky kid, and having a youth group where it was safe to be quirky  might have been really important to him.”

That’s why I treasure having a church community that has chosen to invest in creating and sustaining  that space for our youth. That’s committing funds and space  and a LOT of volunteer time to developing a community for our youth,  a group where it’s safe to be their quirky selves, to laugh and struggle and wonder and share, and grow into kind, thoughtful young adults  with hearts turned towards God and the world.

Independence and questioning  within the safety of a trustworthy community.  That’s what Jesus found in the temple, when he was twelve. That’s what our kids –  as many as six of them, when they all show up and bring friends! – that what our kids are finding here,  what they’re building here. This is holy and important work. Please keep it, and them, in your prayers.

This Gospel was just asking for me  to tell you about our youth group – a new and growing ministry at St. Dunstan’s – and talk a little about the who and what and why. But I hope there’s more here too. My favorite thing about this particular Gospel story from Luke is that it gives us this vivid moment of Jesus’ humanity.  Maybe it was the God in Jesus that drew him to the Temple and kept him there, but there is so much of the human Jesus here too – failing to mention to his parents that he had this plan to just, you know, stay in Jerusalem when they left; and sassing them – let’s call it what it is – when they finally, frantically track him down.

I asked my son, How does it feel to think about Jesus as a twelve year old? And he said, ‘It feels like I’m more like Jesus.  It feels like, we will all be twelve, or we’ve all been twelve, and so was Jesus. Knowing that Jesus went through his teenage years too is reassuring.‘

Our prayers and hymns, our rites and Scriptures place so much emphasis on the divinity, the God-ness, of Jesus. And rightly so;  that is what makes us Christians.  But I welcome and treasure the moments in the Gospels that remind me of Jesus’ person-ness.  That invite us to imagine him  sprawled over a chair in the youth room, eating frozen pizza and watching cheesy movies  with the rest of the gang, and probably fitting right in.

Sermons

Sermon, Christmas Eve

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness, on them light has shined…” I’ve been hearing these words at Christmas for probably forty years. I was raised in the Episcopal Church – and this text from the prophet Isaiah is almost always used at Christmas, to accompany the Nativity gospel from Luke. Its message and images go along with the themes of Christmas – the kinds of words that come printed in gold on Christmas cards: Peace. Hope. Joy.

But there are some bits of this passage from Isaiah that don’t fit so well with that Christmas-card Christianity.  God’s people rejoice in their salvation… “as people exult when dividing plunder.” Does that sound like your living room on Christmas morning? It’s really an image of war, of conquest. Of the glee on the faces of enemy soldiers as they take whatever they want from the homes and barns and shops and synagogues of a conquered town.

And then a couple verses later, another image of war: “For all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire.”  I looked up this passage in several translations  and found that it’s really trying to call to mind the sound of those boots – the ominous and overwhelming clomp-clomp-clomp  of a marching army. Not your army. The other guys. Marching down your street while you and your family huddle terrified in your home, or flee into the countryside with nothing but the clothes on your back.

Plunder. Blood. The trampling boots of an invading army.  And that fire – the fire that both destroys and cleanses.  Very Christmassy, isn’t it?…

The prophet Isaiah lived in the 8th century BCE, 7 centuries or so before Jesus’ birth. The Biblical book we know as Isaiah, scholars believe,  actually contains the words of two or three different prophets, spread over a century or more,  but this early passage from chapter 9  is probably the voice of the real, the original Isaiah.  Isaiah was called by God to speak God’s words to the people of Israel.  Parts of what was once King David’s great kingdom had already been conquered by the Assyrian Empire.  Judah, the Southern Kingdom, was feeling threatened too,  as Assyria eyed their territory.

The message of this portion of the book of Isaiah is essentially this: Bad times are coming,  because God’s people have turned from God’s ways, worshipping other gods, perpetrating and tolerating injustice towards the poor and vulnerable, and mistakenly placing their faith in wealth and military might instead of in God.  But God is faithful even if God’s people are not; though much will be lost, some will be saved; God’s people will begin again, on the other side of the struggles to come.

In these verses from Isaiah –  a tiny snippet of a much longer text – the prophet Isaiah speaks of hope beyond the present danger, and of a child who will bring in a new time of peace and prosperity for Judah, living faithfully as God’s people.  “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

This text, like the rest of the Old Testament,  is shared by both Jews and Christians. Jewish interpreters see this passage as describing Hezekiah, the new king of Judah in Isaiah’s time. Hezekiah was faithful to God  and worked for reform and restoration of right living and right worship among his people.   Christians, on the other hand, see this passage as one of many in the Old Testament that point towards a coming Messiah, a Chosen One sent from God to reconcile God and humanity and usher in a whole new way of living as God’s people.  We read these words as a description of Jesus,  seven hundred years before his birth.  Who’s right? … I’d prefer to avoid the question! Prophetic texts, like poetry,  resist having their meaning pinned down once and for all.  I rather like the idea that the text could point to both Hezekiah and Jesus,  could mean both of these things, and more.

Anyway. Back to those bloody cloaks and tramping boots.  Those images were all too vivid for the people who first heard Isaiah’s prophesies. Their sister kingdom had recently been conquered. Surely people had fled south into Judah;  surely nightmarish stories had been shared, of pillage, murder and destruction.  Isaiah’s words intentionally evoke the violence and terror of war in order to overturn them with this vision of a new Kingdom of justice, righteousness,  and peace – ENDLESS peace! – under God’s authority and protection.

Context matters, for understanding our texts from Scripture. Those of you who hear me preach regularly know that I often do something like this – offer a little bit of explanation  of what was going on when these words were first written down.  I’m not just trying to show off – and for the record, I don’t just know this stuff.  I dust off seminary notes and check trusted Internet sources, and generally do just enough research to sound like I know what I’m talking about. I do that research because context matters.  Not to divert our gut responses into intellectual conversation, not to move the impact of these texts from heart to head; but because sometimes the context  helps us understand more deeply, helps us find where the world of the text overlaps with our world, how the time of Isaiah is not that different from our time. For the semi-automatic weapons, the pipe bombs, the suicide vests, shall all be burned in a cleansing fire,  and God shall usher in an age of justice and peace… 

Noticing the hard parts of this text,  these images that reveal the trauma of war, makes the word Peace stand out so much more.  This isn’t Christmas-card peace they’re talking about,  a day when your cell phone doesn’t ring and the kids don’t fight and you can drink hot cider and watch an old movie.  This is the bone-deep desperate longing  of people who see war coming,  who are listening every day for those tramping boots,  who plant their fields and raise their children and wonder if it’ll be next year or next week or tomorrow that the world bursts into flame. Peace. Please, God. Peace.

And you know, it’s true of the Nativity Gospel, too. We’ve let it become sweet, even saccharine.  We’ve romanticized the darker details,  or they’ve become so familiar that we don’t hear the overtones, we don’t read between the lines.  But there’s plenty to read, if we try.  Starting with “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus…”  Those words are Christmas for me; I’ve heard them so many times on nights just like this, in the pine-scented joyful darkness; I speak them and my heart fills.

But this is not a happy moment the text is describing.  Luke, our Gospeller, is reminding us that the moment when God comes to us as a baby is not one of the better moments in Israel’s history. Israel is under Roman rule,  and its own king, a puppet for the Romans, is corrupt, cruel, and possibly crazy. This registration that sends Joseph and Mary on their journey –  this is an empire’s management of a conquered people.  The registration had two purposes: taxation – figuring out whom to take money from, and how much – and conscription – registering men for the possibility of being taken to serve the Roman empire as soldiers.

I could go on.  I could wonder why this young pregnant woman  was dragged along on this journey instead of left with her mother and other older female relatives, as you’d expect, and hypothesize that her family cast her out  over her unexpected pregnancy. I could talk about the stony hearts of people  who wouldn’t make room for a woman in labor.  I could talk about how the straw on the stable floor  was probably less shiny and pristine than it usually looks in our pretty Nativity pictures.  I could talk about birth, the agony and mess and danger.  But I think you get the idea.

I worry about our Christmas-card Christianity. I do. I understand why we don’t have images of bloody war-cloaks, or governmental oppression, or filthy animal stalls,  on our Christmas cards.  Our real world has enough dark and troubling images in it.  We need the solace that we can find in images of peace and beauty. The serene baby, the adoring mother. The animals gathered round, clean and friendly as pets. Pure colors, warm lights, hovering angels. We need that.

But at the same time…  We citizens of 21st century media culture know that images are powerful.  And I worry about what we say, without meaning to say it,  with these images of Christmas,  of the moment of God’s incarnation among humankind.  Are we saying, or seeming to say, that God comes to us, that God is vividly and truly present with us, in moments of peace and simplicity, of beauty and love? Because that is true – so deeply true. I know it, with gratitude.

But it is also deeply, importantly true that God comes to us, that God is present with us, in moments of struggle, terror, grief, and despair.  And God is there, powerfully present,  in the moments of our lives where what is sweet and good and lovely rubs up against what is dark and difficult and painful.  In that troubling tension, destructive or productive, God is there too.

Noticing the hard parts of our Christmas scriptures can help us get past Christmas-card Christianity.  Those big words, Hope, Joy, Peace – they are so much more than just words printed in gold.  They have sustained people a lot like us, in times a lot like ours, for centuries and millennia. They are words that strive to name a Truth that is strong, and real, and enduring, the Truth of a loving God who is never not with us. Who never doesn’t love us.

Sometimes peace seems like a warm blanket that enfolds us,  sometimes it seems like a cruel joke, but God is here.

Sometimes joy is a fountain bubbling up to water our souls, sometimes it’s a half-forgotten dream or a mirage – but God is here.

Sometimes hope is the bedrock that lets us stand firm and unshaken, sometimes we struggle to see even a glimmer in the darkness; but God is here.

God is here.  Born among us, born for us, once and always.  Merry Christmas.

Sermons, Worship

Sermon, Dec. 20

Who is Mary for us?  We know who Mary is in the great Gospel stories of this season.Today’s story from the Gospel of Luke follows directly on the Annunciation – the angel’s announcement to Mary that God has chosen her to mother God’s child, a child who will transform the world. Mary affirms God’s plan and consents to her role in it. Soon thereafter, she goes off to visit her aunt Elizabeth, and we’re given this wonderful tableau of two pregnant women – one young and probably barely showing yet, one old – like, 40! – and six or seven months along – greeting one another in holy joy.

Virgen_de_guadalupe1Who is Mary for us? We don’t actually see a lot of her, hear a lot about her,outside of the Advent and Christmas Gospels. For many Christians throughout the ages and around the world,she has a status second only to the Holy Trinity, and is revered and adored as more than a saint -as a mother, as a holy friend, as one who carries the prayers of the faithful to the throne of Christ. There’s a Roman Catholic family who lives around the block from us that has a small Mary shrine in their front yard. That’s how important she is to them -important enough to have a place to honor her at their home,important enough to share her with the neighborhood.

We share the same Gospel stories with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, and yet Mary is almost invisible to us. One of the biggest divisions between the Protestant and Roman Catholic ways, at the time of the Reformation, was over whether to approach the Divine through a wide range of images, saints and symbols, or strictly through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And though, through a long and complex history, the Episcopal Church – the daughter of the English Reformation in this country – now straddles that line, honoring saints as part of our way of faith, Mary is still largely absent from our churches, our songs and our prayers.

Who is Mary for us? What do we say about her – or sing about her? As I began work on this sermon, I had the idea of taking a survey of what our hymns say about Mary, then quickly discovered that music scholar Michael Linton had already done so, humorously and incisively. Linton writes,

‘Most folks don’t read a lot of theology in December, but we do a lot of singing. Who is Mary in our carols?… A better question is “Where is Mary?” since, surprisingly, she’s mostly absent. In looking at the texts of 381 English-language Christmas carols…, Mary (or the “virgin,” or “mother,” or even “woman”) appears in 27 percent of them. She’s slightly behind the angels and shepherds (who both are in 28 percent of the songs) but significantly ahead of the wise men (who come in at 13 percent)….But Mary’s presence is even less than this low percentage at first suggests. Shepherds, angels, and the wise men are frequently mentioned in multiple verses of a carol. Mary typically is mentioned only once, and sometimes that reference is itself oblique….. “Away in a Manger” mentions the livestock and “Joy to the World” [mentions] problematic shrubbery (“thorns infest the ground”), and there are lots of angelic choirs – but no Mary.’

Linton continues, “So why is Mary largely AWOL in our Christmas singing?…. Our carols are primarily nineteenth and early twentieth-century Protestant inventions…, [a time when Roman Catholic/Protestant relations were strained.] Mary can’t be excised from the Christmas story completely, but in the carols she’s mentioned as little as possible, for fear of turning her into an object of cultic devotion – something… Protestants have accused Roman Catholics of doing for a long time.”

So who is Mary in our carols and songs? Well, often she’s just a body part – “Offspring of a virgin’s womb” or my favorite, “Lo, he abhors not the virgin’s womb”! … (Ick. Wombs.) Here’s the handful of hymns that say anything about Mary as a person and not just a uterus: In The Bleak Midwinter mentions her “maiden bliss”…Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming calls her “the virgin mother kind”…Once In Royal David’s City says, “Mary was that mother mild…” So, that’s Mary: Blissful, kind, and mild. Songs, poetry and prayers of the Annunciation tend to strike a similar note, praising Mary’s purity, meekness, and obedience.

It’s informative to hold up what our songs say about Mary against what Mary says in song, in the Magnificat, the song placed on her lips in Luke’s Gospel. I’ll use the Common English Bible here, a new translation, to help us hear the familiar words afresh. Mary is fiercely joyful – “With all my heart I glorify the Lord! In the depths of who I am, I rejoice in God my savior!”

Mary is confident and, dare I say, proud! She sees the significance of what she’s being asked to do: “From now on, everyone will consider me blessed, because the Mighty One has done great things for me.” Please note that while the church tends to shift focus to the holy baby and treat Mary as a container, a means to an end, she doesn’t. Even though to everyone around her at the time, she looked like a teenager pregnant out of wedlock, hardly something to celebrate, Mary claims her blessedness and her importance. Meek? … I’m not seeing it.

And Mary is courageously – audaciously hopeful that God is still present in the world, still working for good, still faithful to the promises. “God has pulled down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly! God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty-handed! God has come to the aid of the people Israel, remembering God’s mercy and the promises made to our ancestors!” People like to stress how young Mary must have been – betrothed but not yet married, likely no older than her mid-teens. That makes me think that Mary’s parents must have been a lot like my parents. Deeply faithful people who taught their daughter, from childhood, to set the world as it is over against the world as it could be and should be. To believe in the possibility of a better, more just, more merciful order of things, and to orient her life, in whatever small ways she could, to making it so.  And to trust and hope in God as the source of hope and strength.

Last Sunday I was practicing for the pageant with Dave and Rachel, the couple who’ll be portraying the Holy Family this year. I told Rachel, “Okay, as this scene starts, you’re sitting on a stool and sewing, and looking demure…” Then Mary’s bold hopefulness rushed into my mind and I said,“Sewing flags for the revolution, maybe?”

We’re in our third year, here at St. Dunstan’s, of hearing and singing and praying a version of Mary’s song that really brings its urgency and beauty to life -The Canticle of the Turning, by Rory Cooney. Cooney works in snippets from elsewhere in Scripture – Revelation, Isaiah – to bring a new fulness to Mary’s prophetic song of hope. The chorus goes like this – “My heart shall sing of the day you bring. Let the fires of your justice burn. Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn!”

And the final verse ends like this – “This saving word that our forebears heard is the promise which holds us bound, ‘Til the spear and rod can be crushed by God, who is turning the world around.” Those words always make my heart clench with mingled grief and hope. Mother Mary, we wait for those days with you, we share your urgent longing!…

Who is Mary for us? A character in the Gospel, a few words in our hymns. Who could Mary be for us? Who is she for other Christians? I think that our church, in its fear of courting heresy or idolatry by focusing on and elevating Mary, has missed out on something of beauty and power. I brought forward our resident image of Mary to look at together, today. She’s been here for about 18 months, on long-term loan from a friend of mine. When we first put her up, Talia, who helps us out with the kids, said to me, “I wondered why you didn’t have one before.”

I wondered why you didn’t have one before. It’s a good question. I can explain, as I have here with very broad brush strokes, the history of how honoring Mary became taboo in Protestant Christianity – so that we mostly lack the statues and shrines, the special prayers and offerings and holy days centered on Marythat are part of the fabric of faith for many of our brother and sister Christians. I can explain the cultural gulf that means that many of us gringo Christians have never heard of the Virgin of Guadalupe or Juan Diego.

But those explanations don’t really address the basic question. Why don’t we have Mary? Why don’t we claim – reclaim – her?

This statue represents a particular apparition of Mary. Over two millennia of Christian faith, there have been a number of times when people of faith have received visions of the Virgin Mary. Sometimes she brings words of consolation or guidance; sometimes simply her appearance gives inspiration and hope. These appearances, or apparitions, of Mary are now primarily honored within Roman Catholicism, though some of them predate the great division of our churches.

The appearance of the Virgen de Guadalupe actually happened right at the time of the English Reformation – in 1531, while Henry VIII and his advisors were busy building the case for a church and state independent from Rome, with the English King as its head. But the Virgin’s appearance happened far, far away from the political and religious events that were rocking Europe, on Tepeyac Hill outside Mexico City, where a native peasant named Juan Diego was working. Juan saw a beautiful young woman, who spoke to him in his native language, Nahuatl, told him that she was the mother of the true God, and asked him to build a church there in her honor. Juan hurried to tell the Bishop in Mexico City.

In 1531 Christianity had only been in Mexico for two decades. The bishop was a Spanish Franciscan who had arrived in Mexico three years earlier, sent with the purpose of evangelizing and protecting the Indians, the native Mexicans, who were being brutalized by colonizing Spanish. At first he was skeptical of Diego’s story – I’m sure he seemed like a superstitious, possibly drunk peasant. But the Virgin kept appearing to Juan, and finally, thanks to a miraculous healing and the unlikely appearance of Spanish roses on Tepeyac Hill, Juan Diego’s encounter was accepted as a true theophany, an encounter with the divine.

A church and shrine were built at Tepeyac, and many native Mexicans became Christian because of Maria de Guadalupe. The Virgen was THEIR Mary, not a Spanish import, but God’s Mother appearing to them on their own soil, with tan skin like theirs, and wearing the blue-green color of their pre-Christian gods. In the following decades and centuries, she becomes a powerful symbol of Mexican faith, unity across many cultures and linguistic groups, and political independence… Leaders in Mexico’s war of independence and, later, the Mexican Revolution against rule by oligarchs, carried flags bearing the image and name of Maria de Guadalupe.

The apparitions of Mary are alien to us in both faith and culture. Do I believe in the Virgen de Guadalupe? The anthropologist in me translates the question: Do I believe that children and peasants, and other marginal and uneducated people, can have a direct encounter with the Divine? Yeah. I do. And I think that’s one gift that reclaiming Mary can have for us – this idea that God and God’s holy ones long to connect with so deeply that they come to us, that they appear in this world, in our lives, in forms we can see and understand.

Last weekend was the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Talia invited me to join her family at her church Friday night for part of the celebration. It was wonderful – bright decorations in red, green, and white – children dressed up in traditional Mexican peasant clothes; my favorite was a baby dressed as Juan Diego, complete with mustache – mariachi music, including the music during the Mass!

A large statue of the Virgin stood in an elaborate shrine decorated with balloons at the front of the church. Around her were probably twenty big tubs, mostly empty when I arrived. Over the course of the evening, people brought flowers -mostly bunches of red carnations, but others too – and came up and placed them in the tubs, until the shrine was an explosion of color and beauty. Talia told me that people bring the flowers to say thank you for a good year, for all their blessings. People also brought their own statues of the Virgin from home -ranging from tiny, cheap figures or plaques, to one that rivaled the statute in the shrine! They looked so beautiful, all those Marias, all shapes and sizes, gathered together in front of the altar – each one carefully added to the arrangement by its owner, not just tossed into a pile. At the end of the Mass, the statues were blessed with holy water, and then their owners reclaimed them to take home.

The offerings of flowers, the blessing of the statues – those practices are so beautiful and so meaningful to me.They are hallmarks of a sense of the holy as tangible, everyday, domestic, woven into the texture of people’s lives. You can honor and thank the Mother of God with grocery-store carnations. Why not? You can keep the Mother of God in your living room or kitchen, and pray and talk with her as you need to. Why not?

Look at her. She is lovely. And she is unfamiliar to most of us – but she doesn’t have to be. Why don’t we claim – reclaim – Mary? The Mary of the Gospels, Maria de Guadalupe, any of the other ways Mary is known and loved and honored by those who claim the faith of her son?

I find it hard to be concerned that we’ll go seriously amiss in our faith by moving Mary from the very edges of our faith and spiritual practices, towards the center. I feel convinced that God has a robust forwarding system, and that prayers addressed to Mary, to various other saints, even to departed loved ones, get to God’s mailbox nonetheless. The way our brothers and sisters in other churches talk about is: No, Mary isn’t God. She was a human being like us, though with a unique calling. That’s why people find it easy to go to her with their prayers.

Why not claim – re-claim – Mary?  As an icon of faithfulness and audacious hope? As a saint among saints, a holy Mother whose kind face may welcome our anguished prayers in moments when God seems hard to approach, a divine Friend at home in our living rooms and kitchens?

 

Linton’s essay is here, and well worth a read in full: http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2008/06/looking-for-mary-in-christmas

Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, Dec. 13

Homily for our Service of Lessons & Music on the life of John the Baptist, December 13, 2015

It’s been a hard few weeks, in the world. Violence at home and abroad. Racist and inflammatory rhetoric in the public square. Anguish about our environment. I’ve heard a number of folks saying, I’m having a hard time with Advent this year. I’m having a hard time finding hope, trusting the promises. Can God’s light dawn in times this dark?

And I’ve heard other folks say, But that’s just what Advent is – that’s what Advent is for. A season to look around with open eyes – to see the struggle, to hear the clamor, and to know: God loves anyway. God redeems anyway. The years when the world’s brokenness weighs heavy on our hearts and minds – those are the years when we experience Advent most truly and fully.

Alfred Delp described Advent as not just a season in the church, but a season in the life of the world. He wrote about it from a Nazi prison in 1944. I stumbled on Alfred Delp’s essay on Advent in this book –Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas. My first thought was, Sheesh, the essay for December 5 is really long. Then I read it. Then I thought, This is a sermon, and I want to preach it.

So I’m going to read you part of it – Delp’s words on Advent, and on John the Baptist as one of the central figures of Advent.

First, a few more words about Delp. He was 37 when he died, executed by the Nazi regime for speaking his convictions, not unlike John the Baptist. He had been a teacher in Jesuit schools since his youth. During the early part of World War II, he worked at a Jesuit magazine until the Nazis shut it down, then served two churches in Munich, where he was part of the network that secretly helped Jews escape from Germany. Delp was arrested in July 1944, in the crackdown on the Catholic resistance to the Nazis that followed an attempt to assassinate Hitler. Though he hadn’t been involved in the plot, Delp was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. He spent six months in prison, during which he wrote this essay on Advent, among other spiritual writings. On December 8, a Jesuit leader came to visit Delp in prison and received his final monastic vows, completing his commitment to the Order. Delp was executed by hanging on February 2, 1945. On his way to the gallows, he turned to the prison chaplain and whispered, “In half an hour, I’ll know more than you do.”

In Delp’s essay on Advent you’ll hear that he sees God as the source of the chaos and darkness of the times, at least to some degree. Here he stands firmly in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, who tell Israel again and again that her struggles are a message from God – that if the rulers had been just and righteous, if the people had been faithful, then these calamities would not have fallen upon them. I am hesitant to say that the tragedies and brutalities of World War II represented God’s desire for humanity in any way. But Delp and the prophets who went before him have always faithfully named a simple and lasting truth: when we go wrong, things go wrong for us. Sometimes in big dramatic obvious ways, sometimes in subtle long-term ways. Call it God’s will, call it natural consequences, but when we, as a people, tolerate or even choose paths that lead us away from mercy, justice, righteousness, and peace,  when we go wrong, things go wrong for us.

Here are Delp’s words on Advent, and on John.

Rev. Miranda read portions of the introduction and the section on John the Baptist from Alfred Delp’s essay “The Shaking Reality of Advent.” A portion of the essay may be read online here. 

Big Questions, Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, Dec. 6

There are probably a dozen or more people in this congregation who have had this experience in the past 18 months:  getting into a conversation with me about matters of faith… suffering… God… Jesus…  and having me thrust a book into your hands: always the same book – Francis Spufford’s book Unapologetic. The subtitle is, “Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense.”

One of the things I really love about Spufford’s take on faith is that he immediately moves the conversation away from belief, and towards emotion. He diagnoses – accurately, I believe – that in our post-Enlightenment cultural context, we think belief is something that happens in your brain. That to believe something means that we agree with it intellectually. Sure, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of the triangle. Sure, Jesus Christ rose from the dead and ascended to a heavenly throne.

Spufford says, that’s not really what’s going on inside a Christian. It’s not that our doctrines, our teachings don’t matter, but the heart of our faith is really about… well, about the heart. About emotion, the ways we experience and respond to the world and other people. That really rings true for me – and I heard it in our focus group conversations about faith in daily life last summer, too. We know ourselves most as people of faith in our frustrated patience as we struggle to deal with difficult people; in our grief and anger in the face of catastrophe and injustice in the world; in the love we give and receive in this community, and the other communities which we call home.

Today’s Scripture lessons point us towards one of the key Christian emotions, an orientation of the heart that makes us and marks us as God’s people: Hope.

Hope. From the German root, hoffen. Meaning, Confidence in the future; expectation of something desired; trust in God. The Latin verb is spero, meaning to hope, expect, assume, await, anticipate.  Our English words despair and desperate both come from that Latin root, spero… to despair, to be desperate, is to have fallen from hope, lost hope.

People often name hope as one of the themes of Advent as a season. Let’s look at what today’s Scripture lessons say about hope, this quality of the heart that I think is one of our hallmarks as people of faith.

The book of Baruch is written in the name of Baruch, who was the assistant of the prophet Jeremiah. Its premise is that it contains the proclamations of Baruch, now become a prophet in his own right, to the people Israel during their exile in Babylon. It’s possible that some parts of the text go back that far, but most of it seems to have been composed much later, perhaps about 150 years before Jesus’ birth. During the brief period when Israel was again an independent kingdom, a time of religious and political renewal, before Rome conquered Judea in 63 BCE. The minds and hearts that composed and edited this text, then, were seeking meaning in the cycle of loss and restoration that Israel had experienced, again and again. Conquest, then freedom. Exile, then return. Destruction, then restoration. Perhaps these words were written in one of the good times, to hold close when the bad times roll around again, as they will, as they do.

The voice of the text explains Israel’s struggles and losses as the result of their failure to stay faithful to their God. Baruch says, You were conquered and taken away into exile because you worshipped other gods and forgot to live with mercy and justice. But then the text turns towards consolation – towards hope. Your God, the God who called you into covenant and made you God’s people,  has not forgotten you, still loves you, and will bring you home and restore you.

Chapter 4, just before today’s passage, has a wonderful refrain: “Take courage, my children, cry to God, and God will deliver you from the power and hand of the enemy. For I have put my hope in the Everlasting to save you, and joy has come to me from the Holy One… Take courage, my children, and cry to God, for you will be remembered by the one who brought this upon you. … Take courage, O Jerusalem, for the one who named you will comfort you. …”

Today’s passage concludes this message of hope: “Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God…. Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height; look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west and east at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remembered them…. God will lead Israel with joy, in the light of divine glory, with the mercy and righteousness that come from God.”

That image of looking to the east for the dawn of God’s salvation shows up again in another text we use in this season –  the Song of Zechariah from the Gospel of Luke, which our Church names as a canticle, a holy song of faith. We’ll hear it next week as we hear the story of Zechariah, Elizabeth, and their son, John the Baptist; and it’s quoted into the bidding to the Peace that we use in this season – “In the tender mercy of our God, the Dawn from on high shall break upon us, to give light to those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

The hope of the Bible, the hope of Advent, isn’t the happy-go-lucky hope of someone who assumes good things will happen because good things always happen. It’s the hard-won, courageous, improbable hope of people who have seen their soldiers cut down, their children starve, who’ve been marched away from their homeland in chains. The hope of people living under unjust and corrupt rule. Dwelling in darkness and the shadow of death, indeed, yet still looking to the east, awaiting the dawn of grace.

The introduction to the letter to the Philippians is another text of hope. Paul was in prison when he wrote this letter – and possibly on his final journey to Rome, anticipating his trial and execution for preaching Christianity. He’s upfront about his circumstances, but with typical Pauline badassery, he expresses confidence that his struggles will only inspire more believers – here are the verses that immediately follow today’s text: “I want you to know, beloved ones, that what has happened to me has actually helped to spread the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to everyone else that my imprisonment is for Christ. And most of the brothers and sisters, having been made confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, dare to speak the word with greater boldness and without fear.” And a little later, in chapter 2: “Even if I am being poured out, like oil or wine poured over a sacrificial offering on the altar, I am glad and rejoice with all of you.”

He reminds the people of the church in Philippi to stay faithful. To take care of each other.  To hold fast to the word of Life. To rejoice in the Lord always, and not worry about anything, but offer up their needs in prayer. In short… to keep on keeping on, as people of hope.

And then there’s today’s Gospel. We’ll focus on John next Sunday – John the Baptist, the prophet, the forerunner. I want to point instead to the first couple of verses – the verses which locate this story in time and place. “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.”

Those verses are easy to overlook – let the Bible scholars worry about all that! But I think there’s something important here, as Luke anchors the Gospel he proclaims in a particular moment, a particular situation. God’s word arrives … NOW. God’s dawn breaks… HERE.

And here we are, right here, right now, in the seventh year of the reign of President Obama, when Scott Walker was Governor of Wisconsin, and Michael Curry was Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. Where is hope showing up, now? What does hope look like, here? Where are you looking to spot the first rays of God’s dawn?

Our scriptures, our liturgies, our creeds and seasons seek to shape us as people of hope. To plant and nurture hope within us, as one of the fundamental marks of God’s people, a defining and necessary Christian emotion. What does hope feel like, inside of you? What keeps your feet on the ground, what keeps your heart from flying into bits, in the face of the latest piece of bad news, and the ongoing grinding bitter realities of life in these times?

I meant to preach a more concrete sermon than this. I meant to tell you what hope is and how to have it. But when I set out to write, I found that harder than I expected. Hope is hard to define; it resists being packaged or sold.

The early Christian theologian Tertullian said, Hope is patience with the lamp lit. Hope is patience with the lamp lit. Patience… plus something bright, burning, urgent. I like that.

The fictional spaceship pilot Han Solo said, Never tell me the odds. I like that, too.

The 19th century poet Emily Dickinson said, Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul –  and sings the tune without the words – and never stops – at all – And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard – And sore must be the storm that could abash the little Bird that kept so many warm.

What helps you have hope? Most of us have been through seasons of life when hope was a struggle. Maybe some of us are in a season like that now. Do you, like the Book of Baruch, take notes in the good times, when you’ve come through the storm, to hold close when the bad times roll around again? As they will, as they do?

What helps you have hope? I hope that this place – these people – what we do here – is on your list. Helping you have hope is part of my calling, my work, and the work of this community of faith.

I watched something this week – I bet some of you saw it too – that put it into words so beautifully. It’s a conversation between a man named Angel, and his son, Brandon, who is six. They were interviewed a day after the Paris attacks, near one of the sites of the violence.

Little Brandon told the reporter, ‘We have to be really careful and maybe move away…’ and his father, Angel, spoke up gently to say, ‘We don’t have to move out. France is our home.’

Brandon said, ‘But there’s bad guys, daddy. They have guns, they can shoot us.’

And Angel replied, ‘It’s OK, they might have guns but we have flowers.’

Brandon was not reassured; he said, ‘But flowers don’t do anything.’

And Angle answered, ‘Of course they do, look, everyone is putting flowers over there. It’s to fight against guns.’

Brandon said, ‘It’s to protect us?’

Angel said, ‘Exactly.’

Brandon asked, ‘And the candles too?’

And Angel said, ‘The flowers and the candles are here to protect us.’

The flowers and the candles are here to protect us. Not from bad guys but from fear, which is more destructive than any bad guy could ever be.  The flowers and the candles are here to give hope, to sustain hope. So are the bells, and beautiful colors. The songs, and the way it feels to raise our voices together, that’s to protect us too. The bread and the wine, and that solemn beautiful face up there. They’re here to protect us. We’re here to protect each other from despair and desperation, which both mean, loss of hope. We’re here to be made and remade as people who watch and wait for the first beams of God’s dawn, breaking over the here and now. We’re here to be, and become, people of hope.

Take courage, children!

Events, Hospitality, Kid-friendly, Making

Craft-In 2015 – Reflections

IMG_7881On Friday, November 27, St Dunstan’s held our second annual Black Friday Craft-In. From 1 – 4pm, we were open to the public, with our Gathering Area and Meeting Room full of tables covered with crafting materials. Crafts included decorative ornaments, flower headbands, stamped notebooks and cards, cardboard shields, tiny clay pot nativity scenes, knitting demonstrations, magnets, and more. Over the course of three hours, about sixty people came – and stayed. They stayed to make crafts together, to chat, to share cookies and cocoa, to take a break and have a little fun together on a busy holiday weekend.

IMG_7879Aside from our terrific team of volunteers, almost no members of St Dunstan’s attended. Our guests were folks from the neighborhood, other area churches, and the wider community. They came because it sounded like a fun way to get out of the house for a few hours. Grandparents, parents, and aunts and uncles brought kids of all ages, and kids and adults enthusiastically engaged with our craft stations. Strangers helped each other – my six-year-old daughter made fast friends with two sweet eighth-grade girls. Susan, one of our hospitality volunteers, remarked on how much people seems to be enjoying the time together: “Last night as I thought about the greatest reward of the arts and crafting, I felt like it was the friends, parents and grandparents involved with each other in a way that created a very memorable holiday experience; everyone seemed to be extremely grateful to be there.”

IMG_7873I was really touched that we had at least two households who had come last year, for our first Craft-In, and have been looking forward to coming again, ever since – even spreading the word and bringing friends. What a wonderful affirmation!

Last year, our Craft-In was something new, and we got a little press about it, which helped with our pre-event publicity. Planning for this year, I wondered if we’d get much turn-out without the media boost. But in fact, turnout was substantially higher, we were better organized, and the event was amazing. We ate all the cookies and used up most of the craft supplies, and people had a wonderful time. IMG_7877This is an event people like enough to talk about and plan ahead to attend. That’s really exciting! I hope next year’s Craft-In will be even bigger and better – and we’ll buy a few more cookies.

– Rev. Miranda+

 

The creative impulse originates in the heart of God. God is present, the divine energies are present, in every creative impulse. The human being, made in the image and likeness of God, shares in God’s creative energies.

-Br. Mark Brown, Society of Saint John the Evangelist