Category Archives: Sermons

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Sermons, Stories

Sermon, Dec. 18

“Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.”

That’s all Matthew’s Gospel has to say about Mary’s pregnancy. It’s Luke’s Gospel that gives us the stories that the Church tells in Advent and Christmas: the angelic appearances to Zechariah and Mary, the visit to Elizabeth, Magnificat, the journey to Bethlehem and the birth in a barn, the shepherds visited by an angelic host. Two more of the four Gospels, Mark and John, tell us nothing about Jesus’ birth. John focuses on Jesus’ cosmic nature as the Word that was in the beginning with God. Mark has Jesus as bursting on the scene as a full-grown adult.

And Matthew begins with a genealogy – sixteen verses of Jesus’ ancestors, from Abraham to Joseph. Those first verses tell you something about Matthew: he is intensely interested in Jesus as the continuation – and the completion – of the Old Testament story of God’s relationship with humanity. It’s a theme throughout his account of Jesus’ life, including in today’s Gospel, in which Matthew tells us – for the first time of many – that Jesus fulfills an Old Testament prophecy. “All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel’.”

If you’ve been paying attention this morning, you know which prophet Matthew is quoting – this passage comes from today’s text from Isaiah, chapter 7. We hear a lot of Isaiah in Advent; the Church throughout the ages has followed Matthew’s lead and interpreted many passages from Isaiah as pointing towards Jesus. I think that’s okay; we believe that the Bible is inspired text that can, by the power of the Holy Spirit, speak in fresh ways, its meaning never locked down or exhausted. But I also think it’s pretty important for Christians to understand that these texts aren’t only ours. That they had a prophetic word to offer before Jesus was born, and that they continue to be holy texts of hope for people who do not see Jesus as the Messiah.

The gist of this passage from Isaiah 7 is that God is telling King Ahaz, through the voice of Isaiah, that their current crisis – an attack on Jerusalem by two neighboring peoples – is nothing to worry about and will be over soon. That image of the young woman and child is basically giving a timeline. Take a young woman who is currently pregnant – (the Hebrew word here is almah, a young woman of marriageable age; this is a perfectly normal, non-miraculous pregnancy) and by the time the child she bears is old enough to know good from evil – twelve years at most – the nations that currently threaten Judea will be empty. Utterly defeated by another enemy. And Judea will be living high off the hog, curds and honey for days. The child is to be named Immanuel, meaning, God is with us. Meaningful names like that are very common, in the prophetic books – I guarantee you that it did not even cross Isaiah’s mind that anyone would think that the child itself was God. Because the point of this passage, for Isaiah and his first hearers, wasn’t the child, but the promise that their deliverance would come soon.

Now, Matthew knows the Hebrew Bible well, and he reads this passage, and connects it with what he knows and believes about Jesus, whom he does believe is God. He interprets the text in a new way, becoming one of the first to read the Hebrew Bible through the lens of Christian faith. And he quotes this Isaiah text, as he begins his account of Jesus’ life and teaching.

I think Matthew is quoting another Old Testament story, too. It’s less obvious; there are no direct quotations, more of a narrative parallel. But given how well Matthew knew the Hebrew Bible, I think it’s not just a coincidence. The story I have in mind comes from the book of Judges, from the time when the people Israel were living in the promised land, but before their first kings, Saul and David. It’s the story of the birth of Samson, famous for his great strength; less famous for his poor impulse control and anger issues.

Judges chapter 13 begins with, well, with an annunciation. There was a certain man of the tribe of Dan, whose name was Manoah. His wife was barren, having borne no children. And the angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, ‘Although you have borne no children, you shall conceive and bear a son. Now, be careful to avoid wine and unclean foods, and keep yourself pure during your pregnancy, for the boy shall be dedicated to God from birth. It is he who shall begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the Philistines.’ Then the woman told her husband, ‘A man of God came to me, and his appearance was like that of an angel of God, most awe-inspiring; I did not ask him where he came from, and he did not tell me his name; but he said to me, “You shall conceive and bear a son. So then drink no wine or strong drink, and eat nothing unclean, for the boy shall be dedicated to God from birth to the day of his death.”

Then Manoah begged God, saying, ‘O Lord, I pray, let the man of God whom you sent come to us again and teach us what we are to do concerning the boy who will be born.’ God listened to Manoah, and the angel of God came again to the woman as she sat in the field. But her husband Manoah was not with her. So the woman ran quickly and told her husband, ‘The man who came to me the other day has appeared to me.’ Manoah got up and followed his wife, and came to the man and said to him, ‘Are you the man who spoke to this woman?’ And he said, ‘I am.’ Then Manoah said, ‘Now when your words come true, what is to be the boy’s rule of life; what is he to do?’ The angel of the Lord said to Manoah, ‘Let the woman give heed to all that I said to her. She is not to drink wine or strong drink, or eat any unclean thing. She is to observe everything that I commanded her.”

Is Matthew deliberately echoing this story from Judges? If he is, he’s probably doing so in order to evoke that sense of a baby dedicated to God from birth, a baby who has been seized by God’s holy and redemptive purposes, called to deliver his people from bondage, since even before he was conceived. Now, Samson went on to be a pretty ambiguous figure, but Matthew might still choose to play a few notes from his birth narrative.

Now, I believe – 100% – that the author of Judges intends this story to be funny, in an ironic way. What I can’t decide is whether I think Matthew is in on the joke. He describes Joseph as concerned about marrying Mary, when she turns up pregnant with no sensible explanation, and he seems to find that concern quite legitimate. (By way of contrast, Luke tells us exactly nothing about how Joseph made his peace with the situation.) But while Matthew seems sympathetic to Joseph’s need for his own angelic visitation to settle his fears, the author of Judges is poking fun at Manoah for not believing his wife, who is much more ready to hear God’s good news than her husband. When the angel comes a second time, in response to Manoah’s prayer, it disses Manoah and appears – again – to his wife. SHE has to go find her husband. And the angel’s words emphasize that it’s already been over this: “Let the woman give heed to all that I said to her… She is to observe everything that I commanded her.’

The angel in Matthew’s Gospel is much kinder to Joseph, but the fact remains that we’ve already been told that Mary’s child was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and yet an angel still has to come angelsplain the situation to a reluctant husband.

Maybe Matthew isn’t in on the joke. Matthew isn’t, generally speaking, a playful or humorous gospel. Perhaps he doesn’t realize that evoking the story from Judges casts the shadow of Manoah’s ridiculousness over Joseph. I have to admit that there’s a part of me that wants Matthew to be outside the joke. Because I don’t like how he tells this story. I don’t like that he gives a man’s concerns about paternity and honor more weight in the narrative than a woman’s risky Yes to God. And I don’t like that he displays what strikes me as an unnecessary and counterproductive level of interest in the state of Mary’s ladyparts.

But. But. Just when I’m ready to dismiss Matthew as a clueless misogynist, there are the grandmothers. You’ve been hearing their stories. Tamar getting the son Judah owed her, by any means necessary. Rahab using the only resource at her disposal to save her family and claim a new future. Ruth the vulnerable outsider, whose loyalty and love made her part of God’s story. These are not easy stories to tell, especially not with kids in the room. But Matthew evokes them, in those sixteen verses of genealogy, just north of today’s Gospel text. Among Jesus’ ancestors, he names: Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar. Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab. Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth. All women with messy histories of wife-hood and motherhood. Women are not usually named in Biblical genealogies. But Matthew names these women. Evokes their fierce, heartrending, hopeful stories.

It feels like a discovery, to me, to read this story of Joseph this year in light of the genealogy that precedes it, and especially the stories of those surprising women. Maybe what Matthew is up to here is putting Joseph in line with those grandfathers. With Judah, Salmon, Boaz, Manoah. All respectable Jewish men, of some standing and wealth, who had deep-seated cultural assumptions about manhood, marriage, and fatherhood. All men who had to loosen their grip on masculinity and mastery, paternity and propriety, control and comprehension, in order to let God’s purposes play out. All men who, graciously or reluctantly, quickly or slowly, opened themselves to fatherhood and family in ways that were not what they had expected or hoped for.

The midcentury theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Who among us will celebrate Christmas correctly? Whoever finally lays down all power, honor, vanity, pride, and reputation, before the manger.” Long before the baby in Bethlehem, Judah, Salmon, Boaz, Manoah, Joseph, were all called to lay down honor, vanity, pride, and reputation before the manger. Before the humble, perplexing, messy ways God chooses to step into our lives and change our stories.

In a few moments, we’ll sing a song that’s become a ritual of Fourth Advent for us: Cloth for a Cradle, cradle for a child… And you’ll be invited to come forward and lay a strip of cloth across our little manger, as a sign of our intentions to prepare our hearts to welcome God, at Christmas and always. May the rich stories of God’s people that we’ve gathered around us this season, stories of brokenness redeemed, emptiness filled, fears transformed and respectability transcended, inspire us to look for what we may be called to lay down before the manger, as a gift of gratitude and humility, and to make room for God to be born anew.

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Sermons, Spiritual Practices

Sermon, Nov. 20

Today we conclude our annual Giving Campaign, the weeks in which we invite members and friends of the parish to make a pledge of financial support for the coming year, so that we can develop a budget and move ahead on a sound footing. In a few moments we’ll bless the pledges we’ve received. And we’ve celebrated with pie, which is the best way to celebrate.

But I have to say: This has been a TERRIBLE year for preaching about financial stewardship. For hitting the usual themes of generosity and gratitude and laying up treasure in heaven… First, there was an election. As your pastor and preacher, I could hardly pretend that wasn’t on everyone’s minds, including my own. And now we end the Giving Campaign with the Crucifixion? Seriously?

The lectionary does this every three years. Today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday in the church year – the first Sunday in Advent, next year, is our New Year’s Day. On Christ the King Sunday, our liturgy and scriptures invite us to reflect on the cosmic and paradoxical kingship of Jesus. In one year of our three-year cycle of readings, we have the parable of the Sheep and the Goats, which reminds us that we serve our King by serving those most in need. In one year we have Jesus’ conversation about kingship with Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. And this year – Year C, the year we end today – we have the scene from today’s Gospel: Jesus on the cross, alone, defeated, dying. Not much of a king.

It’s not an easy thing, but I think it’s a good thing, that the lectionary places the Crucifixion in front of us now and then when we aren’t expecting it, when it’s not Good Friday and we don’t have jelly beans and Alleluias stashed in the cupboard, all ready for Easter right around the corner. Of course at St. Dunstan’s, the Crucifixion is always in front of us. It’s unusual for an Episcopal church to have a crucifix – an image of Jesus on the cross – as its focal point. But that’s the choice our elders made, here, back in 1963 or so. So we worship with the Crucifixion, Jesus’ moment of greatest pain and weakness, right in front of us, all the time. Some of you are OK with it, and some of you really don’t care for it – I don’t know of anyone who claims to love it? Kids notice him, and guests, but for a lot of us the image has become so familiar that we don’t really see it, let alone think about it.

Let’s think about it today – about the Crucifixion, and more to the point, about the kingship of the Cross. I’ve got a few thoughts to share – roughly in order from Things I Understand Pretty Well, to Things I Find Deeply Mysterious But Still Believe.

Thought number one: Following this King – this one, the one hanging from a cross in shame – claiming to be subjects of this King should give a certain skepticism, a kind of critical distance, to our views of any human king – or president, principal, mayor, et cetera. Really, ANY leader – the ones we like as well as the ones we fear.

On Good Friday afternoon, every year, I invite kids here to walk the Stations of the Cross with me. And when we come to the eleventh Station, Jesus is Nailed to the Cross, I tell the kids: Sometimes the people in charge are wrong. Maybe because of a mistake or a failure, maybe because their priorities or intentions are not good, but one way or another, sometimes, the people in authority, our leaders, teachers, principals, moms and dads, policemen, presidents, can be wrong. I always half-expect a parent to grab their child and march out in indignation at that part, but nobody has. We all know it’s true; it’s just hard to admit to our kids. But it should be easy for us to remember, with the Crucifix before us every week. Our God was executed as a criminal. Knowing that must help us remember to question our leaders, and the mechanisms of power and punishment in our time, holding them up to God’s standards of justice and mercy.

And let it be noted, please, that the leaders in Jesus’ day weren’t just wrong because they condemned and executed Jesus, the Son of God. They were wrong because they perpetuated a system that punished theft with brutal execution. It’s not clear from the text whether the criminals crucified with Jesus were simple burglars or violent bandits. But it is clear, from a survey of ancient sources, that crucifixion was routinely used as the punishment for theft, fraud, and other non-violent crimes, especially when committed by those of low status, the socially and economically vulnerable. The criminal justice system in Judea under Roman rule was wrong because it murdered people for minor crimes. The leaders of that time and place were unjust, because they created and reinforced a political and economic status quo that drove people into poverty and desperation, and then punished them harshly when they did the things that poor and desperate people sometimes do.

Following this King should give us a critical eye for earthly kings and leaders.

Thought number two: Jesus on the cross is God’s greatest argument against the mindset of self-preservation, of “I’ve got mine,” of looking out for Number One. Notice that three times, in Luke’s account, somebody suggests that Jesus should save himself. “Let him save himself is he is the Messiah of God.” “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”

That word “save” – Sozo in Greek – it’s the same word as the root of Soterio, Salvation. Those two words are a core concept for the New Testament. Save: rescue, deliver, free, help, heal, sustain, restore – all of that wrapped up in one word. It’s the right word for this moment, for what Jesus is doing, on the cross. But the people taunting him are pointing it in the wrong direction. Jesus will not save himself. The people mocking him think he’s powerless. “Save yourself!” is a joke because how could he? Look at him.

With the Gospel writers, we know better. We know he has chosen this. Could he have used divine power to step down off the cross? To cast himself into the arms of angels, as Satan tempted him to do, way back at the beginning? Maybe; or maybe he had laid down divine power and protection, as he turned his face towards this moment. Regardless, it’s very clear from the Gospel accounts that Jesus chose not to resist this death. Chose, even, to walk towards it. Praying in the Garden, submitting his fears to God’s purposes. Rebuking his disciples for resisting his arrest. Silent when asked to speak in his own defense. As human, and as God, he gave himself over to this. Saving himself was never the point.

Following this King means never being satisfied with our own salvation. With being safe, free, healed ourselves – as long as another is in danger, in bondage, or in pain.

Thought number three… I warned you, didn’t I, that these thoughts moved from clarity towards paradox? Thought number three: The Crucifixion, this moment when everything seems as broken as possible, points us towards reconciliation.

The early Christians used a lot of different images, metaphors, to try to capture their experience of the transformation of their lives and of the world by Jesus’ death and resurrection: Redeeming someone, buying them out of slavery. Freeing someone who’s imprisoned. Healing someone hurt, rescuing someone from danger, exonerating someone in a court of law. Cleansing and purifying someone by way of sacrifice, as in the rites of the Temple in Old Testament Judaism. Renewing a broken covenant. Reconciling the parties in a conflicted relationship, or a relationship where the parties have simply drifted apart, lost the mutuality of care, trust, and respect they once had.

Reconciliation is a key concept in Jesus’ life and teaching, as again and again he calls his followers back into a relationship of loving trust with the God who made us. And it’s a key word for the apostle Paul in his understanding of the work of the Church and its people. Jesus came to reconcile humanity to God – and to send us forth to continue the work of reconciliation. That’s how Paul sums up the Gospel, in the second letter to the Corinthians – “In Christ God was reconciling the world to Godself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message and ministry of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, [begging the world to] be reconciled to God.” And the letter to the Colossians today – written perhaps by Paul, perhaps by a disciple of Paul’s – uses that same language: “Through Jesus, God was pleased to reconcile to Godself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.”

Reconciliation is one of the core practices that we have named together, as a congregation, as a way we strive to live as disciples of Jesus. In Greek the word is katalasso, roughly translated as, Called to the side of the other. Called from our separateness into solidarity. As disciples of Jesus, we strive to live and act so as to restore unity and love among humans, between humans and God, and between humans and creation. We reconcile both by responding to the needs of our neighbors, through church ministries and everyday acts of mercy; and by working to confront and change the systems of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.

Reconciliation is a powerful concept – and also sometimes a slippery one. We can fall into thinking it means the same thing as niceness. And niceness, as I mentioned in a sermon a few months ago, niceness is not a Christian virtue.

Liturgical scholar Derek Olsen wrote this week, “In this ministry of reconciliation [described in 2 Corinthians], we are not being called to be nice or pleasant, or to smooth things over with those who disagree with us. We are called to work on the reconciliation of humanity with God, and God’s vision of the world that God created… This is a vision that puts the poor, the people at the margins, the “alien in your midst,” … as the central figures for our care and concern… If we are exhorting the Christian faithful to be… reconcilers, then we need to be clear that [the call of the Gospel on us is to work] to reconcile the people and society around us to the vision of the world that God intends.”

Reconciliation, for Christians, doesn’t mean pretending things are fine, or ignoring the ways in which the world around us falls short of God’s intentions for us and for all. There is nothing nice about the cross, about a death like this. But following this King means accepting this as an icon of reconciliation: messy, ugly, painful. Necessary. Holy.

Thought number four… There’s a word in the Colossians text, in verse 19: Fulness. “In Jesus, all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell.” It’s easy to read right past it, but it turns out there’s a lot of theology packed into – and flowing out of – that word. Fulness, pleroma in Greek, is used a number of times in the Epistles, the letters of the first Christians – as is its opposite, Kenoo, which means emptiness, inadequacy, incompleteness. Those words, dancing around each other, trace the outline of a theology of the cross: In this moment, Jesus emptied himself (Phil 2:7), to make room for the fulness of God. His weakness makes room for God’s strength, his brokenness opens the way for God to restore and heal. And early Christian leaders and teachers see in this a path of discipleship – they urge one another, especially in times of struggle and fear, to empty themselves. To let God’s fulness work in them. To trust, in the words of Paul, that whenever I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor 12:10)

This idea is mystery and a challenge for me. When something is difficult, I respond by trying to put more of myself into it. And sometimes – I believe this – sometimes the better response would be to put less of myself in. To let my inadequacy, my weakness, my emptiness drive me to a more profound openness to God. To serving God less like an independent contractor. More like an instrument or tool.

Following this King challenges us to find grace, to find hope, even in the moments when we feel like we have nothing. Like we are nothing. Because when we are weak, God is still strong. Now, over the next few weeks, we’ll be revising and refining our church budget for next year, based on the pledges we’ve received. And I would, frankly, prefer to be talking about gracious plenty, than about the opportunities offered by inadequacy. But I’m trying to be faithful, in this as in many things….! Faithful to this King – Jesus, my King. And to the ways of his kingdom, which is so profoundly different from the kingdoms of this world. A kingdom that should give us, as its subjects, a critical eye for earthly leaders. That urges us never to settle for our own salvation. A kingdom in which emptiness can be strength, in which brokenness can reconcile, in which dying can lead to eternal life.

Derek Olsen’s essay may be read in full here: http://www.stbedeproductions.com/?p=3740

Big Questions, Current Events, Sermons, Stories

Sermon, Nov. 13

Today’s lessons may be read here. 

How do you know when a story has ended? When it’s over, and everything that’s going to happen has happened, and there’s no more to be told?

Maybe nine months ago at Sandbox, our Thursday evening worshipping community, I shared one of those wonderful stories from Scripture that the lectionary never gives us on a Sunday. It’s a story from the time before King David, told in the first Book of Samuel. The Israelites were at war with the Philistines, their perennial enemies. They suffered a defeat in battle, and the Philistines capture the Ark of the Covenant, the holy golden chest that contained the stone tablets on which God had written the Ten Commandments. It was their holiest object, a sign of God’s presence with them, and it was at the front with them because they believed it to be an object of great power. And they lose it, in battle.

The Philistines carry it off in triumph to city of Ashdod, and place it in the temple of the god Dagon, one of their gods. They put the Ark at Dagon’s feet, as a sign of their god’s victory over Israel’s God. It’s a terrible moment, a real low point. If the story ended there… it would not be a good ending for Israel or her God. But the story doesn’t end there, with failure and defeat. In the morning, the Dagon statue has fallen over. So they pick it up again, and think nothing of it. But the NEXT morning, Dagon has fallen again – and now both its arms broken off and flung all the way to the threshold of the temple.

And then other things started to happen in Ashdod. People start getting these horrible growths all over their bodies. And there’s also a virtual plague of mice in everyone’s houses and fields, eating everything and pooping everywhere. It sounds funny, but it’s really not – in a subsistence agriculture economy, this is the stuff of famine. Ashdod wants to get rid of the Ark, so the next town over, Gath, says, Send it here. But then the same things start happening in Gath. So they send it on to Ekron, and guess what?…

Then the five lords of the Philistines got together and said, You know what? LET’S GIVE IT BACK. Let’s send it home to the Israelites. And they ask their wise people, what should we do? Should we send an offering to make peace with its God? They answer, Yes. Send the Ark back with five gold tumours – like the growths that appeared on the people – and five gold mice – one for each lord of the Philistines.

So they load up the Ark on a wagon, and put with it five gold mice and five gold tumors, and they hitch two young cows to the wagon, and they send them off, and the cows immediately pull the wagon straight towards the land of Israel, the city of Beth-Shemesh. The people were harvesting there, and saw the Ark coming. They welcomed it with great joy, celebrated and made offerings. That’s where you’d want to end the story, if you’re looking for closure, for just deserts. The people Israel dancing and singing with joy; the Philistines looking on at a distance, relieved to be rid of the thing, and having learned that Israel’s God was serious business…

If you want a tidy ending, stop there. If you go on, another verse, another chapter, the story gets messy again. As stories do – at least, the real ones. At Sandbox I had people make little golden mouse plaques. See, here’s mine. To remind us that the story might not be over yet. When we feel defeated and lost, God might still have some golden mice up God’s sleeve. The story is still moving.

Today’s lessons from the prophet Isaiah and the book of Luke give us two moments – not even chapters, but paragraphs – from another long, sprawling story, one of the central stories of our Scriptures: the story of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was conquered by David, not too long after the story I just told; he brings the Ark there and makes it capital of his kingdom. His son Solomon builds the Temple there. Jerusalem becomes the Great City of Israel, and takes on a symbolic meaning far beyond its reality. It’s a city, a real place with real beauties and real problems; it’s also The City, the religious and political and cultural heart of a people and their faith.

Both Isaiah and the visionary John who wrote the Book of Revelation imagine God’s ultimate salvation and redemption of the world in terms of a vision of a redeemed Jerusalem, a holy city. A City of peace and plenty, of freedom and health. Jerusalem is named over 1000 times in our Bible. Sometimes those writers are talking about the literal place. Sometimes about the symbolic place, the City of God. Sometimes they mean both at once… In the book of Tobit, as in many places in the Bible, the image of the return from exile and rebuilding of Jerusalem is used as shorthand for the redemption of God’s people, the setting-right of all that has gone wrong, the restoration of everything that has been lost. So Jerusalem is Jerusalem, and also often much more than just Jerusalem.

In this short passage from the book of Isaiah, the prophet is looking from one of the bad times towards the good times. These late chapters of Isaiah were probably written around the time of the return from exile, when the people Israel were released to go home by Cyrus, the new emperor of Persia. They had a LOT of rebuilding to do, in every sense; people had been scattered for two generations. But it was a moment of hope and possibility. A few verses before today’s passage, the text describes the destruction and loss that God’s people have lived through: “Your holy cities have become a wilderness, Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and beautiful house, where our ancestors praised you, has been burned by fire, and all our pleasant places have become ruins.”

If you stopped the story then, things would look pretty hopeless. But the story was still moving. That destruction and loss is the context in which the prophet offers this holy vision of the City’s future: “No more shall there be in it an infant who lives only a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime… They shall build houses and live in them; they shall plant vineyards and enjoy their fruit. They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity… They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the LORD.”

Five centuries later, Luke’s Gospel brings us Jesus talking about Jerusalem – this time, looking from one of the good times towards a bad time. At this moment, things are superficially fine – the Romans, King Herod, and the chief priests all getting along great, sharing the work of extracting wealth from the people and keeping any eruptions of dissatisfaction under control. Jesus sees how thin and tenuous it is; he sees that it’s not going to hold. How close the people are to the breaking point. He sees things with God’s eyes, yes, but to be honest any perceptive observer could probably have called this.

About thirty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Israel rebels against Roman rule; they lose. Jerusalem is destroyed, the Temple – the second great Temple, built after Cyrus sent the people home from exile – the Temple is torn down, not one stone left upon another. Luke and the other Gospel writers are writing after those events, which seemed like a terrible and final ending to many people. In the 70s and 80s and 90s, they knew that something would survive, that there was some kind of hope beyond those losses, that God still had some golden mice up God’s sleeve; but they did not know, yet, where it would lead, whether it would last. In the Epistles we hear the voices of the early Christians busting their butts to try to help write that next chapter. To make sure that neither Jesus’ crucifixion, nor Rome’s crushing of Jerusalem, would be the end of God’s people, God’s work in the world, God’s story.

Of course the story of literal Jerusalem goes on – messy and conflicted, beautiful and heart-breaking. And the story of metaphorical Jerusalem… of God’s people and our efforts to fumble our way towards that City of Isaiah’s vision, where no child is born to calamity, where everyone has a home and food – that story goes on, too. It goes on.

My dear ones. The election this week shook the country. Shook many of us, deeply. I don’t believe anyone here feels anything as simple as triumph or joy. Some of you probably feel some relief, because you trust one party’s approach to our country’s problems more than the other, and that party won.

Some of you feel deep, gut-wrenching grief and anger and fear, about what this next chapter in our country’s life will bring. I know that’s what you’re feeling, because I’ve heard from you, over the past few days.

And all of us – I’m just going to say this, because if it’s not true, it should be – all of us are deeply concerned at the widespread and well-documented reports of increased verbal and physical violence against Muslims, Latinos, GLBTQ folks, and others, perpetrated by those who see this election as legitimating hatred. Kindergarteners are bullying other kindergarteners by telling them they’re going to be deported. Young Muslim women are afraid to wear the hijab, the headscarf that is a sign of their devotion to God, for fear of being harassed or worse. A gay Episcopal priest got a note on his windshield calling him “Father Homo” and telling him that Trump will take his marriage away. However you cast your vote, as citizens and as Christians, we cannot tolerate this persecution of our fellow Americans and children of God.

There’s a lot to wonder and worry about, as we look around our country right now. There’s so much we don’t know. We’re still just trying to get our bearings in a changed landscape. Trying to stay connected, and remember to breathe.

There have been so many times in the long story of God’s people when people have thought, This is the end. The end of their people, their nation, their faith; even the end of everything. And there have been significant endings, of course – but none of them have been The End. The End, like the last page of a storybook. We’re not at that page yet. I don’t think we will be, anytime soon.

Please hear me: I’m not saying this election doesn’t matter in the big picture. I’m not saying everything will be OK. This new chapter will make new demands on each of us and all of us. Next week and next month and next year we will keep figuring out how to be the people of the story. People who work and pray for the good of the city where we dwell, faithfully and fiercely. People who stand right where Jesus told us to stand: shoulder to shoulder with those who are threatened or pushed to the margins. People who struggle to love each other and listen to each other, because we cannot afford to write each other off. We cannot.

Right now this is all I really know for sure, all I’m ready to say: This is not The End. The story is still moving. This story, our story, all our stories. The American story. The Christian story. The story of St. Dunstan’s. Still moving, still being told, being made, by our words and our choices, individually and together, and by the God whom we name as the Author of our salvation.

 

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Sermons

Sermon, All Saints Sunday

The Feast of All Saints is one of my favorite feasts of the church’s year. But it also challenges me, every year, to know how to honor and preach the day. Because there’s just a lot going on. In the idiom of writing assignments, a Sunday morning is basically a three-page double-spaced reflection paper, and all the themes and meanings that are packed into this feast day seem like they demand at least an 80-page master’s thesis!… But I promise this will be fewer than 80 pages.

What does this feast ask of us? Well: It asks us to remember. To call to mind, and name together, those holy ones who have gone before us into God’s presence. People who shined the light of God in their time and place; who did justice, and loved mercy, and walked humbly with God; who followed the right, for Jesus’ sake, the whole of their good lives long. As our Old Testament reading, from Ecclesiasticus, points out, some of those are people whose names are known to the church, to the world – people whose witness and impact were such that they’re honored with feasts and icons and shrines. People like our patron saint Dunstan, who’s a pretty obscure saint, yet here we are, still bearing his name and telling his story, ten centuries after his death.

But then, Ecclesiasticus goes on to say, there are those too who are forgotten, or all but forgotten. They may have lived humble lives, but they lived them well. They may have touched few lives, but they touched them for good. We all have some of those names that we hold in our hearts. And a lot of our practices around this feast invite us to honor those people. We light candles for them, and speak their names with love. We bring in photos and mementos for our Remembrance Table – where you can see some of the saints we’ve commended to God from this household of faith in the past year or so: Sybil, Frances, Jerry, Bill, Art. We remember those whose ashes have become part of the soil of our grounds, here, or who have a tree or bush planted in their memory, with the new Memory Tree Plaque in our Gathering Area, and by sending the kids out after church to take flowers to those grandmothers and grandfathers of our church family. In all these ways we practice abiding: honoring the past, telling our family stories, recalling where we came from.

And it’s important to remind ourselves that this is something more mysterious and joyful than remembering the dead. Our beloved dead are alive with God, alive in God. The Communion of Saints, our church teaches us, is the whole family of God, the living and the dead, bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer, and praise. When we remember the dead we re-member, we put back together something that has been separated: we remind ourselves that we are still and always one body, one family, with those who have gone before.

So, the Feast of All Saints calls us to re-member. And it also calls us to re-commit – to our own call to sainthood. Our text from the letter to the church in Ephesus uses the word “saints” as it’s generally used in the New Testament: to mean all those who strive to follow Jesus, the whole fellowship of believers. Those who have been baptized, and those on the road towards baptism, all of us who have been promised redemption as God’s own people, and called to live as ambassadors of reconciliation.

The beloved hymn “I Sing of the Saints of God” actually captures this really well – with its charming catalog of saints and martyrs: one was a doctor, and one was a priest, and one was slain by a fierce wild beast – and its recurring refrain: And I mean to be one too! We know that our sainthood is given by God’s grace, not ours to achieve through our merit – thanks be to God! And at the same time, the gift of grace and the call of the Gospel pull on us, an invisible magnetic field that draws our hearts and lives to point towards mercy and justice.

I mean to be one too! “I mean,” as in, It’s my intention, my desire, my aspiration, to live like the saints we remember and honor: to be patient and brave and true, to love my God so dear, so dear, and let God’s love make me strong. We renew our baptismal vows on All Saints Day – and, some years, we baptize new believers – to hold before ourselves the call of faithful living: praying and worshipping, resisting and repenting, proclaiming, seeking, serving, loving, striving.

On the Feast of All Saints, then, we remember the saints who have gone before us, acknowledge our kinship with them, and affirm our intention to be one too. That is a lot to pack into one Sunday. And yet I don’t feel like any of it can be left out, or even that we could alternate which note we play, each year. Because it runs together – recalling the saints who’ve gone before, and claiming our sainthood. When we get real about what sainthood is, what it’s looked like in the lives of the uncounted millions who’ve walked that road before us, it comforts and encourages, challenges and inspires us.

It’s too easy to think of the saints, the capital-S famous ones or even our family saints, as if they were stained-glass figures, one-dimensional, frozen, idealized, captured in their best, most significant moment. But the saints aren’t, weren’t, otherworldly or perfect. They didn’t live in simpler times. They were a lot like us, which is why we can aspire to be a lot like them. Tobit, an example of faithfulness from before the time of Jesus, shared meals with the poor even when his own family was on the brink of starvation, buried those murdered in the streets, at great personal risk; and his difficulties wore him down so much that on one particularly bad day, he accused his wife of stealing a goat. Saint Theresa of Avila, the famous 16th century nun and theologian, could say lovely inspiring things like, “Let nothing trouble you, let nothing frighten you; all things are passing; God never changes.” And she is also remembered, one day when her horse threw her into a river, to have said to God, “Dear Lord, if this is how You treat Your friends, it’s no wonder You have so few!” One of the saints we remember here at St. Dunstan’s is Jonathan Daniels, a martyr of the Civil Rights movement. I love reading his diaries, in which he second-guesses his own motives and struggles with whether what he’s doing really matters.

For me there is very real comfort in looking at these lives, and so many others. I read an article a couple of weeks ago about the role of family stories in building resilience. There’s this body of research that suggests that the children of homes who tell and re-tell their family stories are more emotionally resilient, better able to cope with struggle and change. And in particular, stories that recall that the family, over its generations, has come through both hard times and good times – those stories correlate with the greatest resilience for the current generation. The stories of the saints – alongside the stories of Scripture – are those family stories for the church. They assure us that God’s people have dealt with crankiness and weariness and self-doubt, while managing somehow to stay faithful in times of need and struggle, and grateful in times of plenty and peace, for thousands of years. Their witness can help us have the resilience to do the same, in our time and place.

The resilience or the balance – that’s what the songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen called it, when he wrote about what makes a saint, back in the ‘60s. He wrote, “Contact with [the energy of love] results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence… I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a [person] setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is [a saint’s] glory… Far from flying with the angels, [a saint] traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. [She] can love the shapes of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such [people], such balancing monsters of love.” – Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)

I think that kind of resilience or balance is what Jesus is talking about in the first part of today’s Gospel. I’ve read this passage many times, but this year it jumped out at me that Jesus is talking *to his disciples.* In pictures of the Sermon on the Mount, of which this is part, there’s usually a huge crowd. But right here, the text says, He looked up at his disciples. He’s talking to his followers, his friends – people whose stories and struggles he knows. Maybe he’s looking at their faces as he speaks, thinking about how his words might land in each of their hearts. To those in bad times, in poverty, in grief, he speaks assurance and hope. Know that you are in God’s hands, blessed, beloved, and that better is coming, one way or another. And to those in good times, blessed by wealth and ease, he says, Hey, remember that’s just what it is; it doesn’t mean you’re God’s favorite or better than anyone else. Keep yourself grounded in what’s true and real and lasting, because hard times come around for everyone.

To all of his friends gathered around, he says, Our circumstances don’t define us. They influence us, of course. But they don’t get the last word. With God’s help, through the energy of love, you can keep your balance. With God’s help, by the immeasurable greatness of divine power working in and for us, you are resilient enough to withstand the risks of both easy and difficult seasons.

I woke up Wednesday morning this past week feeling like my own resilience and balance were stretched thin. The news just kept being awful, and I was running low on my inner resources. I came to church and lit candles and incense on the little altar. I sat there in the candlelight and prayed through a couple dozen of our Prayer Book collects. I chanted a few psalms. Then I just sat there in the dark for a few moments. And in the dark I heard the voice of Sybil in my memory – Sybil, our beloved deacon, who passed away this spring. I heard Sybil saying, Hopeful.

And then I started thinking about all the saints of this church who have gone on before us in the past year and more, and the witness of their lives for those of us left behind. I need Sybil’s weary and courageous hopefulness. I need Frances’ instant, genuine courtesy to every person I meet. I need Jerry’s determination to find the good in any misfortune. I need Bill’s strategic eye and capacity to see the big picture. I need Art’s gentle and total conviction that turning towards the needs of others is always the best escape from our own anxious preoccupations.

And there’s the witness of the capital-S Saints too – the witness of blessed Dunstan who knew that kings may come and go, but the work of God’s Kingdom always continues. the witness of blessed Francis who believed peace was always possible, even in the depths of division. the witness of blessed Mary, the Mother of God, who disbelieved in her own smallness, youth, powerlessness; who had the audacity to say Yes and become an agent of God’s purposes on earth. These are the saints of years past, whose light still shines to light our way forward. These are the family stories that shape us for resilience. These are the balanced monsters of love who teach us to look for grace even in chaos. And I mean to be one too.

Giving Campaign, Sermons, Stewardship, Stories, Worship

Sermon, Oct. 16

Two men went up to the temple to pray. One of them was a Pharisee, a member of a movement within Judaism that was restoring the ancient practices of worship and piety described in the books of the Law. And the other was a tax collector – someone who worked for the occupying Roman government to collect punishing levels of tax from his fellow citizens. The Pharisee was standing by himself, and praying like this: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ Jesus said, “I tell you, this man, not the Pharisee, went down to his home that day justified. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Today we begin our annual Giving Campaign, the month in which members offer their pledges – statements of how much we plan to give during the coming year – to enable the church to develop its budget for 2017. At first glance, this is a TERRIBLE Gospel reading for the occasion. The Pharisee, who’s giving a tenth of his income to the Temple, comes out of this story looking like a jerk. His piety is held up as a mistake, not a model. So let’s talk about the Pharisee. Because it’s not his giving that’s the problem.

What’s wrong with the Pharisee? Well, Luke tells us that this story was directed at those who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and regarded others with contempt. That’s what’s broken about the Pharisee’s faith, in a nutshell. He trusts in himself that he is righteous. He fasts, abstaining from certain foods as the religious laws demand; he gives a tenth of his income to the Temple; you can bet he follows all the other rules of his faith too. There is nothing wrong with those practices – in fact, there’s a lot right about them! Fasting and giving and praying, and all the other daily acts of faith, are ways we turn belief into action, into habit.

The practices aren’t the problem. The mindset is the problem. If you think you can get right with God by simply checking a set of boxes, then you don’t actually need God. Being a good person becomes a lot like acing a test, and God becomes irrelevant. The apostle Paul talks about this mindset a lot, because before he became a Christian, he was right there with this Pharisee – righteous under the Law, meeting all its requirements. And then he met Jesus, and realized how inadequate and empty it all was.

So, the Pharisee trusts in himself that he is righteous; and he regards others with contempt. His sense of his own righteousness is based to a significant degree on being better than other people. This is one of my favorite parables because it gives us a glimpse of Jesus’ keen sense of humor. Did you notice the trap he sets here, with this simple little story? You hear the Pharisee saying, Thank God I am not like that tax collector! And the immediate, natural thing to think is, Thank God I am not like that Pharisee!

Let’s call that the Pharisee Trap: the tendency to find our righteousness in being better than others. The Pharisee Trap can be a real risk for Episcopalians. I’ve heard too many church leaders who should know better say that what’s great about the Episcopal Church is that we’re not judgmental like the fundamentalists, or manipulative like the evangelicals, or rigid like the Roman Catholics. I’m sure I slip into the Pharisee Trap now and then myself. We love our church, and we find grace in its particular balance of Scripture, tradition, and reason. It’s great when we talk about that, when we proclaim it.

But we need to be intentional in talking about why we love our church and our way of faith in terms of our strengths, more than in terms of other churches’ weaknesses. I have the privilege of having pretty regular conversations with people who are coming to the Episcopal Church from other ways of faith. And I always try to ask, What was hard about what you’re leaving, what didn’t fit? And, what was good about it? what will you miss? And I try to say, Here are things I love about the Anglican and Episcopal way of faith. Here’s what’s earned my loyalty and my joy. And here are the things we’re not so great at. Because we’re not perfect, not the pinnacle of Christianity.

So that’s what’s wrong with the Pharisee: self-satisfaction grounded in the conviction that he’s got this God thing all figured out, unlike SOME. And if you think that smug spiritual arrogance doesn’t sound very Episcopalian – well, then you haven’t been to all the same meetings I have… Okay. Let’s turn to the Tax Collector. He comes out of this parable smelling like roses. He humbles himself, lowers himself, before God, and God exalts him, lifts him up, sets him right.

What’s right with the Tax Collector? Jesus describes this character in the parable in a way that invites us to notice his grief and guilt: the man is standing far off, off to the side, alone; he would not even look up to heaven; and he is beating his breast, a gesture of self-abasement. And then there are the words of his prayer: God, be merciful to me, a sinner.

Jesus paints a vivid picture with a few simple details. He wants his hearers to understand the intensity of the tax collector’s guilt and longing for mercy. However – I want to be clear that I don’t think Jesus wants us all to approach God this way. A lot of his preaching and teaching is focused on encouraging people to approach God with more boldness, trust, and love. To take one key example, when Jesus’s friends ask him how to pray, he teaches them to call God, Father. Or even, Daddy or Papa – the word Abba that Jesus uses, in the Lord’s Prayer, is one that a child would use at home. Jesus calls his followers to greater intimacy with God, and away from a distant and fearful piety. He doesn’t want us to stand off to the side, to be afraid to look up at God, even in our deepest sins and darkest moments. So those details he tells us about the Tax Collector, I think, are meant not to give us an example we ought to follow, but instead to tell us something about the depth and quality of this man’s spirituality.

So what are we to notice about the tax collector? He’s open to God. Both in telling the truth about himself, his brokenness and his need; and in expecting God to respond. Look back at our friend the Pharisee: his words are technically a prayer, because he starts with “God.” But it he’s basically talking to himself about what a great guy he is. The tax collector’s prayer is far simpler – and far more honest. He doesn’t have a list of what he’s done wrong, or right. He simply names himself as a sinner, as having fallen short of God’s intentions for him. And he asks for God’s mercy. For God to receive him with love and save him from his own weaknesses and failures. While the Pharisee thinks he’s fine already, and has no need to be open to God, the tax collector’s burdened conscience drives him to seek God, in pain, in truth, in hope.

And that leads me to the second thing I think Jesus wants us to notice about the tax collector: He leaves different than he came. Jesus says, He went home that day justified. Set right with God – forgiven – exonerated – his burden lifted. Imagine him walking out of the Temple feeling … lighter. Feeling hope, once more, that there is good in the world and that he has a chance to be part of it. The tax collector leaves the Temple changed by what happened there – by his own prayer, and by God’s grace.

And that, friends, is why maybe this is a pretty good parable for the beginning of a Giving Campaign, after all. Because let’s face it: the real question of a Giving Campaign is, why have a church? You could get together for meals without church. You could give money to charity without church. You could study Scripture without church. Why commit your resources and time and skills and care to helping this place be and become and endure?

A couple of months ago, Scott Gunn, Episcopal priest and writer, wrote a blog post that caught my eye, responding to a statement he’d heard several times: The church should be out in the world. The implication being that we might be indulging ourselves by making sure we have a safe, warm, and lovely place to gather for worship and fellowship. Here’s what Scott says about that idea:

“Sometimes you hear people saying something along the lines that the church shouldn’t be focused on worship when there are so many needs in the world. And I fully agree that any church which turns its back on the needs of the world is no church…. [But] there is not a zero sum… here. A focus on worship does not reduce our focus on the world. Rather, a focus on worship is the church’s work, and … worship rightly done sends us out into the world. I think we confuse the work of the church and the work of disciples… When the church is doing its work, it will be forming disciples of Jesus Christ who find the needs of the world irresistible and who find themselves called to respond. Worship is not a distraction from the world, but rather it is the thin place that opens our eyes to the glory of God and thus to the possibility of glory in our world.”

Scott is saying, in essence, that the purpose of church is to be a place apart. The word Holy, in all the languages of the Bible, basically means: Dedicated. Set apart. And set apart for a purpose. At church we gather from our daily lives, into this holy place, this holy time; and then we go forth as disciples into the world. And like the tax collector, we go forth different.

When we held focus groups last year to talk about why you all make church part of your lives, a lot of you said something like that: that church was a place of solace, of restoration, of re-orientation. A place to bring your thirsty soul and receive the water of life. A place to sit and breathe, and remember the big picture, the long arc, the great story. A place to get re-grounded to face the challenges of daily living. A place to leave different.

Now, in all honesty and humility, I’m sure there are many weeks for you when it’s just church. I know there are for me. Maybe it’s a bit much to expect transformation every week. But at the same time, I’ve learned – mostly from all y’all – that there are a lot of ways in which gathering here, spending this intentional time with God and fellow Christians, does change us. Does send us forth different than we came. Even in small ways.

Because in the face of today’s perplexities, Scripture reminds us of the long history of God’s people struggling and shouting and grieving and journeying and surviving and rebuilding. Because in a divided world, here we share faith and friendship with people of different backgrounds and different views – yes, however homogenous we may look, believe me, we contain multitudes! – and those conversations bless and challenge us by making us remember our shared humanity. Because in an everything-is-fine world, sometimes, here, we are able to name what’s really on our minds and hearts, in prayer and conversation.

Because we can do small, real things together here about the world’s woes, coordinating our efforts and getting diapers or notebooks or a jar of applesauce or the price of a new muffler to those who need them. Because griefs or concerns that feel big and new and strange to us are wrapped up in the capacious and experienced arms of the church’s prayer, to which no human pains are unfamiliar. Because there’s room here to offer the things we’re good at and the things we love to do; and when a community recognizes and receives and acknowledges our gifts, we feel seen, and blessed.

Because despite weariness or despair that can weigh us down, here the bright energy of children and the soaring notes of our hymns and the color of the leaves in the sunlight can lift our hearts and restore some sense of hope and meaning. Because our liturgy invites us to lay down our burdens, offer up our prayers, and be fed by God’s unconditional, unshakable, unending love.

Now, I’m in danger, here, of sounding like the Pharisee. Of saying, God, thank you that our church is such a great place! We welcome everybody, we have beautiful worship and vital ministries, and we’re WAY nicer than Some Other Churches We Could Name. It’s a fine line to walk… I want to celebrate what we do well. I am proud of St. Dunstan’s and I take delight in many aspects of our life together. But I can’t, I don’t ask you, to commit financial support and time and ideas and skills to the life of this body because we’re perfect. We’re not.

I ask for your presence and participation and support because we’re building a good thing here, and I very much want to continue that work together. To follow through on where God is leading us. I ask you to stand with me before God, as we look towards another year in our shared life of faith, with the heart of the tax collector: open to God, in honesty, humility, and hope, and ready to be made new and sent forth.

Scott Gunn’s blog post may be read in full here: http://www.sevenwholedays.org/2016/08/17/where-does-the-church-belong/

Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, October 16

This was a week when I wished we had that sign board out front for sermon titles, like some churches do, because I actually had a title before I had anything else: How We Know the Good. How We Know the Good – how we recognize good things, good thoughts, good choices, good paths. It’s a fundamental issue in religion and ethics – we can have the best intentions in the world to act rightly, but if we can’t somehow identify or discern what is right and good, we can’t follow through on our intentions.

Today’s lectionary texts point us at two ways that we can know the good. The first is the human conscience. Conscience is the word we give to our God-given capacity to know the good. Like a compass pointing to north, our conscience points to the right path, to what is true, and just, and good. It guides us in uncertainty, goads us when we are wrongly comfortable, and reminds us when something in our lives is amiss, in need of amendment, change, or healing. In our text from the book of the prophet Jeremiah, God speaks through the prophet to tell the people: No longer will the law of holiness, your way of living as God’s people, exist outside of you, a Law that must be written and taught. Instead I will put my law inside of you; I will engrave it on your hearts; and I will be your God, and you shall be my people. No longer shall the people have to teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD.

Jeremiah’s image of God’s law of goodness written on the hearts of God’s people, so that we simply know God’s ways without being taught – that idea becomes a central concept in Anglican theological anthropology. Theological anthropology just means, how we think about humans in light of how we think about God. And Christian traditions vary widely in their theological anthropology. For instance, it’s one of our areas of difference from our Lutheran brothers and sisters, with whom we otherwise share a great deal. Among Christian traditions, Anglicans and Episcopalians have a relatively positive view of humanity. For Anglicans, knowing good from evil is a fundamental part of human nature, one of the ways in which we were created in God’s likeness, revealed and redeemed in Jesus Christ’s incarnation as a human being. While other Reformation theologians stressed human sinfulness, the Anglican reformers saw humans as possessing reason and conscience, God-given capacities for moral knowing, which make it possible to see and choose the good. True, we see wrongly and choose badly, often; but in spite of our failings, humans are capable of acting rightly. The 16th-century Anglican theologian Richard Hooker wrote, “Reason… may rightly discerne the thing which is good.” And the 20th-century Anglican theologian Kenneth Kirk wrote, ‘”The Soul, however tainted or corrupted by sin, retains an innate power both of perceiving what is good and right, and of aspiring to it.”

Listen, talking Anglican moral theology may seem scholarly and abstruse. But I think that sense of a human capacity to know the good is in the DNA of our faith in a way that you’ll recognize once you start to look for it. Our shared conviction that the human heart is not a traitor leading us to damnation, but can actually be a faithful compass pointing us towards God’s desires, that conviction is what’s made it possible for us to re-examine and revise the the church’s historic teachings on ordaining women and gay people, for example.

So, we Episcopalians, Christians in the Anglican tradition, believe that conscience is inborn, a birthright. But conscience is also formed and nurtured by community. You might think of it like our capacity for language – we are hard-wired for it, it’s fundamental to our nature, but we still need a linguistic community to activate it. Our conscience is shaped and developed in the context of our moral communities – family, church, and society. Of course, as people of faith, we see the church as a primary site of moral formation; and of course as liturgical Christians, we see regular participation in our rites of word and sacrament as the key to our ongoing growth as moral agents.

The liturgy we’re using right now, for example, teaches us to notice and celebrate the small blessings of life – those loud-boiling test tubes! – and give thanks for them. To look to God as the Source of all things. To pray and strive for the welfare of others, near and far, and to work and pray for the good of the city where we dwell. To be mindful of our failures of love, and to seek healing and amendment of life. To be people of peace. To be people of generosity, who offer back a portion of what we are given. To hold before ourselves Jesus’ example of courageous self-giving love, and his passion for the redemption of the world. To be people of forgiveness. To trust God for what we truly need. To recognize and treasure our unity, even in our differences. And to serve God in the world with strength, courage, gladness, and singleness of heart. And that’s just the words of the liturgy, apart from the Scriptures and the sermon of the day, which occasionally makes a worthwhile point.

There is indeed some rich moral teaching in our liturgies, to be absorbed week by week, year by year, decade by decade. But it’s all rather broad-brush, isn’t it? Not a lot of specifics about how to apply these principles. Those of you who have come to the Episcopal Church from other branches of the noble tree of Christianity may have noticed that we are not real heavy on teaching particular moral rules. That’s not just 21st century Episcopal wishy-washiness. It’s actually part and parcel of that basic Anglican theological anthropology. Instead of teaching moral rules, what you ought to do in such and such a situation, we focus on forming a moral community, in which individuals develop their capacity to recognize the good and do what is right. We proclaim a few bedrock commitments, but when it comes to how we live them out in given cases, we tend to trust reason informed by conscience. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury once wrote, “Only I can answer the question, ‘What ought I to do?'” (Rowan Williams, p. 296).

Listening to your conscience takes effort. Otherwise we’d never do anything wrong. It takes mindfulness and self-knowledge. It’s easier when we’re not stressed or angry or exhausted – though sometimes clarity can strike like a lighting bolt in those moments, too. We’re apt to ignore that still small voice inside us because we’re comfortable, or busy, or anxious, or prideful, or because we feel too responsible … But if we look inside ourselves, the compass is there, needle faithfully pointing the way even as we cast about for a path.

But. But.

Let’s look at this Gospel parable. Jesus says, In a certain city there was a judge, who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'” Luke, our Gospel writer, sees this as a story about our call to be persistent. He introduces it as “a parable about the need to pray always and not to lose heart.” And he adds a coda to the story itself – a couple of sayings of Jesus: God will grant justice to God’s chosen ones who cry to God day and night; yet when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?

This whole section of Luke, these parables and sayings, is unique to Luke’s Gospel. Bible scholars think that he had access to a collection of Jesus’ sayings and teachings that the other Gospel writers didn’t have. He had to figure out how drop them into his account of Jesus’ life, which he does, in part, by just stringing a bunch of them together here in chapters 17 and 18. It’s possible – and in some cases seems likely – that he was trying to match up parables and sayings, so that it all made sense to him and to his audience. I visualize him with a bunch of index cards on his desk…

So. Maybe this is a parable about being faithful in prayer, even when it seems like you’re not getting results. Sure. That call to holy persistence would be in keeping with the message of this portion of the second letter to Timothy: Proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. Read from that angle, the story invites us to identify with the widow. Keep making noise. Be the squeaky wheel. Don’t give up. You will be heard, and answered.

But. Part of how the parables work is that they can be read from multiple angles. I fully believe that was Jesus’ intention, and that a lot of the time, in the Gospels, when a parable comes with a little explanation about what it means, that explanation comes from the Gospel writer. I suspect Jesus mostly just told the stories and left people to puzzle over them.

So in that light, think on this story again, and ask yourself, what if I’m the judge? …

Jesus points us towards the question of conscience in the way he describes the judge: he neither feared God nor had respect for people. So in contrast with the developed conscience of a practicing Jew or Christian, this guy doesn’t care what God thinks about his actions, and he doesn’t care about what happens to other people. And he’s a person in authority; his decisions influence the lives of others on a daily basis. And he has walled up his inner moral compass. He just doesn’t care.

But the widow makes him care. Because she won’t shut up. She keeps pressing her case, insisting that there’s an injustice that needs attention, until she wears him down. He finally hears her, and responds to her call, because she is so persistent – or to put it another way, because she is so annoying.

What if I’m the judge? What if I’m the one whose ears and mind and heart are closed, until someone’s persistence wears me down so that I finally, finally listen?

We are formed and nurtured by moral communities – our families, schools, churches. They train and calibrate our consciences for compassion, understanding, empathy.

But the human world is bigger than our moral communities. There are people whose lives we don’t easily understand. The constraints that bind them, the struggles that bear down on them, the griefs and needs that exhaust and frustrate them. Sometimes we look at others’ lives and find it hard to their motives and choices. Sometimes we look at others’ lives and know we should feel pity, but instead, feel judgment. We think, in our inmost hearts, I wouldn’t have let that happen to me. Why didn’t they make better choices? He brought it on himself. She should have known better.

Those thoughts are a sign that our conscience is overwhelmed, swamped by a situation that’s outside our moral universe. The communities and experiences that formed us didn’t prepare us to understand and respond to the full scope of human lives, needs, wrongs and injustices.

This is the second way we can know the good: by listening, when a person or community is persistently telling us that something is deeply wrong. What’s banging on the door of your conscience? Coming around every day to remind you that some situation you haven’t yet begun to care about still hasn’t gone away?

Here’s something that’s been nagging at my conscience. On September 21st, five days after police in Tulsa shot Terence Crutcher, one day after police in Charlotte shot Keith Scott, a new hashtag showed up on Twitter. A hashtag is a way to link people’s comments and posts, to have a broad conversation about the same issue or event. This hashtag was, WhiteChurchQuiet. The conversation it defined was a conversation among African-American Christians about feeling unheard and uncared-about. And it felt like a punch in the gut to me, and to many other white Christians.

Here are a few of the tweets, “Do you all really want social justice, or do you just want to talk about diversity so the good Lord knows you mean well? #WhiteChurchQuiet” “We ask, How long, O Lord? Maybe God is asking us the same question. #WhiteChurchQuiet” A quotation from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. #WhiteChurchQuiet” A quotation from the Epistles, from 1 John: “If you don’t love the person you can see, how can you love the God you can’t see? #WhiteChurchQuiet”

The #WhiteChurchQuiet hashtag is a persistent widow for me. I’m not like the Unjust Judge; I might be worse. I do fear God and respect other people, but I’m still ignoring my brothers and sisters who are shouting for change, shouting for justice. I believe that, among the forces that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, systemic racism is among the most vicious and powerful. My brothers and sisters, for whom Christ died, live in a very different Madison and a very different America than I do as a white person. My kids’ Black friends are growing up in the shadow of statistics about massive disparities in educational outcomes, future employment, and involvement with the criminal justice system. It’s not just and it’s not right. But talking about systemic racism has become so polarized that it’s scary to talk about it in church. I’m worried right now about who I’m upsetting. And so I become a poster child for WhiteChurchQuiet. Because I’m fearful, and because I don’t know what to say. I don’t have this figured out yet. Far from it. But I hear #WhiteChurchQuiet as the holy botheration of the indignant widow, for me. There’s something here that’s calling my conscience to re-calibrate, so that it can guide me in right response to the divisions and disparaties of our common life.

But there are plenty of persistent widows to go around. This past week a lot of American men have had a rude awakening to the commonplace realities of life as a girl and woman. Our political conversation has gone some places nobody expected or wanted it to go. And that’s uncorked the bottle of women’s stories of having their space invaded and their bodily autonomy violated. Author Kelly Oxford tweeted about her own experience of sexual assault, and invited other women to share theirs. She got millions of responses. At the peak she was receiving fifty per minute. I think women knew that these experiences are commonplace, though maybe we didn’t know just how commonplace, or how egregious they could be, or how young we are when it begins.

But a lot of men didn’t know. Most men don’t do stuff like that. And they had no idea that most women experience stuff like that. And it’s been genuinely heartening to see America’s men responding to this particular persistent widow – taking on board realities that were invisible to them before, and saying, That’s not okay. We all need to do better. We need to teach our daughters to yell, and our sons to ask, and we need to convince, rebuke, and encourage one another to treat every child of God with respect and care.

We know what’s good, what’s true, what’s just, first because God gives us the gift – and burden – of a conscience, born inside us, nestled against our beating hearts, nurtured by the people and communities around us. And when we run up against the limits of our moral knowing, of what our conscience has encountered, we can come to know the good by a second path: through the persistence of another’s voice, from outside the walls of our zone of comfort and familiarity, that breaks through the limits of our capacity for concern and compassion, and bother us into a broader view of the goodness God wants for all God’s children.

Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, Oct. 9

How shall we seek the good of the city where we dwell?

We use this phrase in our Prayers of the People – Work and pray for the good of the city where we dwell, for in its peace we shall find our peace. Today the lectionary brings us those words in context, late in the book of the prophet Jeremiah. Jerusalem and the whole land are conquered by Babylon, as Jeremiah had predicted, and many of the people are taken into exile in Babylon. This passage is part of a letter that Jeremiah sent to those exiles. He was writing to counter the words of false prophets, who were telling the Jewish exiles that Babylon would soon be destroyed and they would be able to go home. Instead, Jeremiah says, You’re going to be there for a while. Build houses. Plant gardens. Have families. And seek the welfare of the city where God has sent you, for in its welfare, in its peace, you will find your own.

I’m glad to have the chance to explain the text and its context. I want to make sure we understand that the city mentioned there isn’t necessarily Madison. Maybe it’s Middleton. Verona. Mount Horeb. Maybe it’s Dane County. Or Wisconsin. Or the United States. It’s … wherever we find ourselves. Where we live and work, rest and play. Where we abide. Where we know the struggles, and have the chance to be part of the solutions.

How shall we seek the good of the city where we dwell? I added these words to our weekly Prayers maybe 18 months ago. Before that we had prayers for the world and the nation, but I noticed how much our prayers and actions were focused on local issues, local needs, and I thought, We need a particular place for those prayers and intentions. These words from Jeremiah came to mind, and fit so well. I treasure this text because it holds up the paradox of belonging and not belonging that’s central to life as a person of faith. Our loyalties are first and foremost to God’s kingdom and God’s ethics, which are often in tension with the ethics and norms of the world. Yet we’re called to engagement, not disengagement; to love, not condemnation.

Jeremiah wrote these words in a very particular moment; but I think I can defend using this random snippet of Old Testament prophecy as part of our weekly intercessions in Christian worship. Because what Jeremiah says here about how the exiles should live in Babylon is a lot like the way Jesus and the Apostles direct the first Christians to think and live: Be not conformed to the world, know yourselves as a people set apart, a people whose homeland is elsewhere, not even of this world; but live in this world as Jesus did: loving, grieving, celebrating, helping, healing, feeding, showing up, speaking out.

It was pretty easy for the earliest Christians to remember this because they felt like exiles; their way of faith put them at odds with other religious groups and with the cultural and political order around them. The Old Testament tells us that the people Israel, the faith-ancestors of both today’s Christians and Jews, had times of peace and prosperity when they were tempted to forget that they were first and foremost God’s people, not as a self-made and self-sufficient nation. Times when God had to remind them that they didn’t belong where they were in any deep or lasting way. The books of the Torah remind the Jews again and again that they were aliens and slaves in the land of Egypt. And the great festivals of the Jewish calendar, Passover, Sukkoth, Purim, remind them too of their times of being outsiders, wanderers and exiles.

Jews living today carry the collective memories of millennia of living – and dying – as an oppressed minority. They are not likely to forget that their loyalties are never simply to any earthly kingdom. But we Christians, well, our faith became the religion of empire 1600 years ago. That chapter of unquestioned dominance for our way of faith is waning now, and we’re struggling, in many respects, to remember – to reconstruct from the wisdom of our faith ancestors – how not to belong. How to be outsiders, exiles, whose identities and loyalties come from somewhere else than the place in which we find ourselves, but who work and pray faithfully for the good of the city where we dwell.

I think that’s why Jesus in his wisdom gave his followers so many stories and examples of strangers and outsiders being the ones who truly recognize God’s power and mercy. Like the Samaritan in today’s Gospel. Please note, the other nine guys are all doing what Jesus told them to do – going to show themselves to the Jewish religious authorities, to be certified as healed and clean from their disease, and free to resume normal life. Familiar rites, institutions and theologies take over. We have no reason to believe that they thought much about Jesus, after that day. The Samaritan is outside of that religious system. So where does he take his gratitude? He takes it back to the man who seems to him to have brought about his healing: Jesus. It’s his very outsiderness that makes him able to see clearly how God is at work.

The theme is familiar because Jesus tells it, and shows it, again and again. Listen to those on the outside, and remember, hold onto, your own outsider-ness; you often get the broadest view from the cheapest seats.

How shall we seek the good of the city where we dwell?

It’s pretty hard sometimes, and exhausting. We’re in one of those seasons right now. There’s so much going on in the life of our nation, let alone the larger world, that makes people feel angry, fearful, confused. Overwhelmed. Outraged. Despairing. We can be tempted to disengage. To think, like the exiles in Babylon: I don’t really belong here, and this place and its problems are just not my problem.

I read a short essay on this topic a few months ago that I really, really loved. And I’m going to share a little of it with you now. It’s written by a bear, who blogs and tweets regularly. Well, okay. It’s probably actually a person, but it sure sounds like a bear. She wrote this essay in response to the Pulse nightclub shooting back in June. And she’s basically reflecting on the struggle to keep striving for the good of the forest where she dwells. Listen.

“I wish doing things to make everything better for everyone in the forest was as easy as thinking about doing things to make everything better for everyone in the forest. It is not, though. In fact, it is actually very difficult for me to do things in the forest that feel like they affect anyone or anything beyond [me] or my immediate forest surroundings…I have tried, certainly, but the things I want changed seem to stay the same, no matter how much effort and dedication I put toward the changes I want to see. That is one of the more frustrating aspects of this: the one thing I do have control of [myself and my surroundings] are the only things I can effectively change. However, changing [myself] does not make the terribleness of the bad things that can happen in the forest change, go away, or get better. What I can change does not matter for the things I want to change. Sometimes I wonder if I should mind [my own bearness] and nothing else. I wonder if it is possible that all creatures of the forest are meant to simply mind their own personal creatureness… I am a bear, and I can only control my bearness, and I just have to accept that and move on with my bearness. But… I do not like that.  Some [creatures] fight just to make others feel like their otherness is wrong, bad, and worthless… And some [creatures] actually hurt and destroy [others], which is not fair or nice or necessary… I have to be a part of all of those relationships of the forest. I cannot just tend to my own bearness while [others] are hurt or hindered or hushed… If another creature cannot be the creature it is or wants to be because it is being unfairly stopped or even hurt, how could I not intervene? … [pause] I know that not everyone can tend their everyoneness, and sometimes they need help with tending their everyoneness.”

It’s a funny phrase: Tending our everyone-ness. But it’s the phrase I’ve kept thinking about, over the months since I first read the bear’s musings. Tending our everyone-ness. Our capacity to recognize the other, the stranger, the outsider, as also a child of the forest and a child of God. In our Discipleship Practices, we call this Reconciling: living as people who know that we are all one in God’s eyes. That there is no such thing as other people.

There is a paradox here, for the exiles in Babylon and for us: it’s our otherness, our commitments as people of faith, that drive us to tend our everyone-ness, to respond to our neighbors in love. It’s the paradox of Jeremiah’s call to the exiles: Remember who you are, but don’t keep yourselves apart. Strive for the welfare of the city where you live as exiles. Be an active part of the common good, wherever you find yourselves. Tend your everyone-ness.

How shall we seek the good of the city where we dwell?

Of course, the biggest thing straining our capacity to tend our everyone-ness right now is the election season. Some of us are angry, hopeful, fearful, determined, defensive. All of us are weary. How does Jeremiah’s call speak to us right now?

Some of you probably feel tempted to say, A pox on both their houses!… You’re so fed up that you’re ready to disengage entirely. I believe that faithful stewardship of what God has given us as citizens of a democracy, however flawed, involves informing ourselves and voting. If the candidates and the process make you queasy, try thinking past the election; look at the candidates’ policy priorities, think about the vision for the country they’re promoting, and weigh that against your values and convictions as a Christian. Make your choice on that basis. People of good conscience may arrive at different conclusions. But striving for the good of the city where we dwell demands that we take the impact of our votes seriously.

Some of you are deeply engaged, and fiercely passionate, for your candidate and/or against the other candidate. Tending your everyone-ness is even harder for you, friends, than for those who are just exhausted and ready to tune out. Because for you, it means trying to keep loving those on the other side. Setting aside judgment in favor of curiosity and compassion. What brought them to stand where they stand? How is their path like and unlike the path that brought me to stand where I stand? It is hard to look at someone who holds views you find hateful and tell yourself, This is a human being whom God loves. It’s hard. But it’s not optional.

On November 9th we will be the United States. We will still have to live with each other. We are going to need a lot of active, intentional, loving tending of our everyone-ness, after this divisive and exhausting season. In times of struggle, threat, anger, fear, uncertainty, it’s tempting to pull back into ourselves. To hunker down in the places where we feel safe, with the people who’ll affirm our opinions. To mind our own bearness.

But the hopeful, the faithful response, is to keep pushing outwards. To keep reconciling. To tend our everyone-ness. To work and pray, faithfully, for the good of the city where we dwell. For in its peace, friends, someday, somehow, we shall find our peace.

The bear’s wise words may be read in full here:

https://helloiamabear.com/2016/06/13/i-do-not-want-to-feel-helpless/

Creation Care, Sermons

Sermon, Oct. 2

God made us to love the world, and God made the world to be loved. So God rejoices when we are fulfilling God’s purposes by loving the world.

So says the 17th-century priest and writer Thomas Traherne. Traherne died on September 27, 1674, so this past week was the 342nd anniversary of his death. His writings demonstrate an expansive and joyous understanding of God’s love and grace immanent in the beauty of the natural world.

It’s a deeply Anglican perspective. Richard Schmidt argues that the Anglican theological heritage, which we share as Episcopalians, is profoundly incarnational. God becomes human and enters our world in Jesus Christ, and that moment of incarnation teaches us always to look for God present in the world, to honor God through with art and music, with human skill and reason, in the disciplines and duties of daily life, and in our love for the natural world.

There are Christians who see the world in other ways – as a resource entirely at our disposal, with no responsibility of care; or as inherently bad or flawed, over against a spiritual realm which is the true and good reality. But we Anglicans, we incarnational Christians, expect to meet God here, in this world, in these bodies; we expect to honor God’s grace and treasure God’s gifts; we expect to serve God in our daily living.

In seeking to know, honor, and serve God in the material world, and especially in the natural world, we stand in the current of a long and deep stream of Judeo-Christian thought. Saint Francis of Assisi, the 13th-century saint whom we’ll honor this afternoon at our Blessing of the Animals service, is remembered for seeing animals and plants, sun and moon, as brothers and sisters within the created order. When I’m blessing the water up at the altar, I use a simplified version of a prayer of Francis: ‘I thank you, God, for Sister Water, who is so beautiful, humble, mobile, and pure.’

In the early 16th century, between Francis and Traherne, Martin Luther, the founder of our sister tradition, the Lutheran way of faith, wrote, “God is entirely and personally present in the wilderness, in the garden, in the field….even in the smallest flowers! … God is wholly present in all creation, in every corner, behind you and before you. Do you think that God is [just] sleeping on a pillow in heaven?”

There are so many witnesses to the possibilities of encountering, praising, and serving God in Creation spread across two thousand years of Christianity – and before that, in the Hebrew Bible, as well. The Creation story in Genesis, the book of Job, portions of the Psalms and the Prophets – there are many passages throughout the Hebrew Bible that describe God’s glory and generosity as vividly present and available in the natural world and its creatures.

Ellen Davis, my Old Testament professor, argues convincingly that the first covenant, the Abrahamic Covenant, was triangular – connecting three parties in mutual responsibility: humanity, God, and the land. God’s people are called both to be faithful to God’s ways and to care for the land with respect and love. Davis says that in her reading of the Bible, that part of the Covenant is still in force.

God made us to love the world, and the world to be loved. But we are alienated from the natural world, which has diminished our love; and the love we do feel is shot through with grief.

I think the Anthropology Police would break down the door and take away my degree if I tried to romanticize pre-modern peoples and say that everything was better when we lived closer to the land. Before urbanization and mass production and a dozen other vast historical trends moved most of humanity away from small-scale farming and into lives in which the change of seasons is primarily a matter of wardrobe, and a bag of groceries is more likely to contain food from Chile and China than from Wisconsin. Modernity has a lot going for it – medicine, technology, mass education. I would not choose to go back to Traherne’s time, or Francis’s. I probably wouldn’t have survived the birth of my first child.

But: when I read Traherne’s euphoric praise for the gifts of the ocean, the hills, the skies, when I read Frances binding us in poetry and prayer to flower, cloud, bird and star, I feel a tug of sadness. I know those beauties less well than my ancestors in faith did; and I know them as endangered. Compromised, diminished, at risk.

Humans have always used and abused Creation; but the pace and the impact have increased sharply since the 19th century, and we see, and bear, the costs of those changes. Already by the 1870s, with the Industrial Revolution casting a pall of coal smoke over the world, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins voiced the grief we feel: “… All is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil, and wears man’s sweat and shares man’s smell.”

Today the lectionary brings us two songs of exile. Lamentations gives voice to the loneliness of the land, the city, with its people taken from it, and Psalm 137, one of the most poignant of the Psalms, gives us the voice of the people, grieving the loss of their homeland, the landscape of their hearts: “By the rivers of Babylon, we lay down and wept when we remembered Zion… we hang our harps on the willow trees, for how can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” We had a place, says the song, a land that was ours; we loved it, it was beautiful; and we lost it. It’s gone.

That’s us. We live there, in that terrain of memory and grief. In the book Healing Through the Dark Emotions, Miriam Greenspan proposes that we are all living with chronic anxiety and sadness about what’s happening, what’s already happened, to the natural world. When I first read that, during seminary, I recognized it instantly as true for me. Does it ring true to you? … When I talk with you all about spirituality and where we feel close to God, a lot of you say, In Nature. And when we talk about Nature, there’s this shadow that comes across people’s faces. The simple joy and intimacy with Creation that we hear in the words of Frances and Traherne – sometimes we feel that for a moment. And then we remember how much we have lost; how much we still have to lose.

I don’t know how you live with it. For me, it involves a lot of denial, a lot of things I just don’t think about much. Because I don’t have time to fall apart like that.

God made us to love the world, and the world to be loved. But we are alienated from the natural world; our love of Creation is diminished and shadowed by grief. We know and feel that we are called to care for the world, but we lack the will.

In today’s Gospel, some of Jesus’ friends come to him and say, Increase our faith! He’s been talking with them about discipleship – caring for each other, forgiving each other, serving the poor, and so on. And reasonably enough, they think, All that sounds pretty hard. And maybe if we had more faith, it would be easier. So: Jesus, give us more faith. And Jesus says, Look. If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could tell this mulberry tree, Go jump in a lake! and then listen for the splash. When your slave who works for you does a full day’s work in the field and then comes home and serves you dinner, do you thank him? No, you don’t; because that’s his job. That’s what he’s supposed to do. So how about you just do the things you’re supposed to do?

It’s a Gospel lesson that can give us pause. Not because what Jesus is saying here is perplexing or hard to interpret; he’s just being a little blunt. Less warm and fuzzy and affirming than we like him. He’s a little fed up that the disciples think they still need something else. That in their laziness, they hope that maybe Jesus can just wave his hand and make discipleship into a cakewalk. So his reply is kind of a kick in the pants. He says, You don’t need more faith. You have faith, and you know what it means to live faith. You just need to make up your mind to do it. You don’t lack faith. You lack will.

Oh, boy, do I recognize that truth about myself. I have faith. I believe. And I know what belief demands of me, in my obligations to God, my neighbors, the common good, the created order. The things I don’t do, the places I fall short, are because it’s hard, and I’m weak and lazy. Fortunately God is gracious; I keep getting second chances. But when Jesus says, Faith is not your problem; just act on the faith you already have! – he’s talking to me.

This past spring we called and gathered a task force here at St. Dunstan’s, the Creation Care Task Force. Loving care of creation has been part of mission of this parish since its earliest years, when the first rector, Father Childs, worked to plant conifers from around the world on the church grounds. Over the decades, the trees, plants, birds and animals of this place have been part of our identity here, and have called us into awareness of God’s beautiful creation. In the parish mission statement developed in 2010, “Care for the environment” is named as one of the ways we strive to respond to God’s grace. But we have not had a consistent or clear witness on creation care. It’s in danger of being just another value that a church claims, but isn’t really sure how to live out.

So we called the Creation Care Task Force, inviting members of the parish with knowledge and passion around issues of environmental stewardship to gather to reflect on what it means for a church to be committed to creation care. We’ve been meeting regularly since the spring, and they’ve been such fruitful, insightful conversations; it’s truly been holy work.

We’re still at it – for a couple more months, I expect – but we’ve achieved one important goal that we’re sharing with the congregation today: a Creation Care Mission Statement. It names our hopes and intentions for living as people who still honor the First Covenant! – who see loving stewardship of Creation as an integral part of holy living. So far that Mission Statement belongs to the Task Force; but I very much hope that it will come to belong to the whole parish, that we’ll claim it and own it and live into it together, in the months and years ahead.

The Creation Care Task Force and its work are an example of doing what we know we need to do. We didn’t need more faith – we already believed that Creation matters, that the natural world is beloved of God. We didn’t need more concern for the earth, or more guilt or anxiety – we had plenty of that. We didn’t lack faith; we lacked will. We just needed to start somewhere. And so we started.

It’s just a start. This mission statement invites us into demanding ongoing work, as individuals and as a community of faith. It will be hard, and I, for one, am still weak and lazy. But – we’ve started. And – this is the part that gives me the most joy – we’ve come to some clarity about where to start.

God made us to love the world, and the world to be loved. But we are alienated from the natural world; our love of Creation is diminished and shadowed by grief. We know deeply that we are called to care for the world, but we lack the will. The path towards awakening our longing to protect and renew begins with cultivating love.

The path towards awakening our longing to protect and renew Creation begins with cultivating our love of Creation.

Ever since it first became clear that human activity was changing and harming the environment and the world’s creatures, we’ve been living with guilt, shame, and fear. Those feelings have shadowed us for decades – and a lot of us still feel paralyzed. There’s been some interesting research on environmental education with young children that concluded that it’s not a good idea to start too early with teaching about endangered species and threatened landscapes. The sense of impending loss can just make kids disengage. Why learn and fall in love if these creatures and places seem doomed? They can’t process the grief when they haven’t yet even had a chance to discover the joy. Instead, effective environmental education for young children focuses on developing curiosity, engagement, wonder, connectedness… love. I think that, while that’s particularly true for young children, it’s true for all of us. We need to renew and nourish our love for Creation.

Listen, when the Creation Care Task Force first gathered, I was hoping for outcomes like guidelines for what kind of dish soap to buy. And we may yet get there; this mission statement should inform those choices. But gathered around the table, walking around the grounds, in conversation and in prayer, we have discerned something much more foundational and hopeful. I’d like to use a word we don’t all know: charism. It’s a Greek word, a New Testament word; it means gift – but we use in the church to mean particularly a gift from God given with a purpose. A gift given to be used.

The Creation Care Task Force believes that this parish, St. Dunstan’s Church, has a charism for the restoration of the relationship between humans and nature.

This parish has a charism for the restoration of the relationship between humans and nature.  Our grounds and the plants and creatures that inhabit them – our spaces for worship and fellowship that look out on nature- our heritage of planting and tending here – the joy our members and guests take in exploring, playing, foraging, wandering, praying here – the people God has sent us who themselves carry charisms, gifts, for teaching and advocacy and care for the natural world – these are all clues that fed our discernment that God wants this church to help people love the world.

And our grounds are our central gift and tool for that work. A core and distinctive part of St. Dunstan’s identity and mission is inviting people into loving engagement with creation, by practicing sustained compassionate attention right here on our little patch of fertile ground.

That local focus – using this place to learn to know and love nature together – that’s not navel-gazing or parochialism or escapism. It’s more like learning a skill in a classroom or workshop that you’ll take out and use in daily life. Our life here together, in this place, can be that classroom or lab where we cultivate a disposition of heart and mind that we’ll carry with us out into the world. Just as we practice love of neighbor here, to shape our daily interactions with others, we can practice love of creation here, to shape our daily living, buying, eating, voting.

What does that look like? Well, this is a brand-new thought; my prayer is that we’ll develop it together. I think there are ways in which we’re already doing it, have always done it. I think there are other ways we can take it on with intention, in our shared life of worship, learning, fellowship, and work. I heartily invite all of you to share your ideas, questions, hopes.

Today the Creation Care Task Force is offering the congregation three simple exercises to try out, in the spirit of cultivating our love of the natural world. These are exercises in abiding, practices of curiosity and compassionate attention. Please take a look at the Tiny Hike, Small Ecology, and I Notice, I Wonder, and give one of these practices ten or twenty minutes today, or this week, or anytime. Share with me, with each other, how they feel, where they take you.

God made us to love the world, and the world to be loved. Our love of Creation is diminished and shadowed by grief. But the path towards awakening our longing to protect and renew begins with cultivating love. I believe that we, as the parish and people of St. Dunstan’s, are called to that work of cultivation. May the God who has given us this desire and intention, continue to stir it up within and among us, equip and inspire us to live out our hopes, and prosper the work of our hands. Amen.

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Kid-friendly, Sermons, Social Media

Sermon, Sept. 25

Our readings this morning tell us that God calls us to HOPE and God calls us to HELP.  Today I am mostly going to talk about Helping… but I think the Hope is really important too. If we don’t have hope, then we can get too sad or tired or overwhelmed to feel able to help. That’s one of the things we do together as a church:  we help each other have hope, for our own lives and for the world.

But now I want to talk about helping. Let’s talk about that story about the rich man and Lazarus.What could the rich man have done differently, before he died?…

  • He could have shared food.
  • He could have gotten Lazarus a doctor, or even a place to live.
  • He could have tried to find out why Lazarus was there to begin with. He could have looked at Lazarus and thought, Why are there so many poor people, without food and without homes, lying on the streets of Jerusalem? Something is wrong. Why is it like this? What can I do to change it?

A friend told me a story recently about taking her granddaughters to Chicago. The girls live in a small town in Wisconsin and had never been to the big city before. They enjoyed all the sights of the big city, the fancy stores and museums and parks. But they were also sad to see all the homeless people there, even families with little kids, settling down to sleep in doorways as the evening approached. Finally one of the girls turned to her grandma and said,  “Nana, DO something!”

Grownups just laugh sadly at that story because we know what a big, messy, hard problem that is. It will take a lot of money to fix that situation, to help change all those people’s lives so they have homes and work and food to feed their children. But even more than all the money, what it will really take is this: A whole lot of people who want it to change. Who are determined that things have got to be better.

Maybe an ordinary family like mine, if we didn’t have too many extra bills that month, maybe we could take one of those families sleeping in a doorway, one of those Lazarus families in Chicago or Madison today, and we could buy them a good dinner, and pay for them to sleep in a hotel for a night. But we couldn’t change things for them. Tomorrow they would be right back sleeping in a doorway.

But if a whole lot of ordinary families get together, and tell our leaders in our city and our state and our nation that we don’t want anybody to be homeless or hungry anymore, if enough of us got together and really stayed focused on that, we might, eventually, make a difference.

God wants us to help. And there are lots and lots and lots of ways to help. But there are two big simple ways: Give, and Speak. Give means, buy somebody a meal. Pass on your old coat to MOM, so another child can wear it this winter. Help assemble Backpack Snack Packs for hungry kids. Cook a dish for the folks at the men’s shelter. Give to MOM or MUM or Briarpatch or Second Harvest or my discretionary fund and let us give to others in need. We do a lot of giving, at St. Dunstan’s. We can always do more – but we do this pretty well.

But giving isn’t the only way to help. We can also Speak. That can mean lots of things – talking with friends or family about the things we worry about and hope for;  talking with our leaders and officials; using our votes when there’s an election of any kind; showing up for meetings or when people are gathering to show support or concern about something.

Speaking and Giving are different, but they’re both important and you can do both. You can feed a hungry person,while also asking our leaders why they let so many people be hungry, and how we could work together to change things.

Today is Bread for the World Sunday. Bread for the World is an organization that asks Christians to speak to our leaders, and ask them to be faithful to one of God’s highest priorities: feeding the hungry. It could be a detailed two-page letter that outlines exactly what legislation we hope they’ll support. It could be just a postcard or a Tweet that says, Remember the hungry. Each year Bread for the World chooses a particular issue as a focus, so that we can press our leaders to take real steps. This year the issue is asking our government to give more to programs in poor countries around the world that help mamas and babies have enough to eat. We’ll hear more about Bread in a few minutes.

Kids can’t vote yet – not till you’re 18! But you can still speak to your elected leaders. There are some tables up here at the front, and we’re going to write note to four people – President Obama; our Senators, Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin; and our Representative, Mark Pocan. You can write a note that says Remember the hungry! or if you feel like you can write more, you can use this text, and maybe add some of your own words about why you think this is important. You can draw a picture too if you want, of a happy mama and baby who have enough to eat! I hope each of you will do four letters. We’ll put them all together and mail them later.

OKAY, Grownups… time for YOUR Children’s Sermon. There will be visual aids and response activities and everything! Today is Social Media Sunday.  (And no, I didn’t invent this; observed widely for several years; this is our first time observing it.)

How many of you use some form of social media? That includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Raise your hand… How many are on social media at least once a week? Once a day? More than once a day?

So we hear a lot about the bad of social media – and that’s real; people can be addicted, people can get into unproductive fights with strangers, people can use these platforms to be creepy or abusive. But there’s a lot of potential for good, too.

Raise your hand if you’ve used social media to share information about an issue of concern… If you’ve ever learned something new or gotten a new perspective from something you read or saw on social media… If you think you’ve ever given somebody else a new perspective, by way of social media…  If you’ve used social media to be in touch with your public officials… Who’s used social media to get support, prayers, even help in a hard time?  Who has ever posted about their church or their faith on social media?…   All right, we’ll come back to that.

Now, a very quick tutorial. This is the At-sign, and it’s used at the beginning of someone’s handle (or username) on Twitter or Instagram. Individuals and organizations can have them. Mine is @revmirandah; the church’s is @StDunstansMSN.

This is the Hashtag – again, mostly used on Twitter and Instagram. Hashtags work two ways. One is, it’s a way you can search to find people talking about the same thing, even if you don’t know them and they don’t know each other. Another is, to be funny or comment on what else you just said. So you’ll see a lot of hashtags that aren’t really functional hashtags – usually the long ones.  People use them on Facebook some as well, even though Facebook doesn’t really work that way.

So if you were to Tweet or post to Instagram about Social Media Sunday, you might include the church’s handle -@StDunstansMSN – and you might include the hashtag #SMS16.

Now let’s talk briefly about some of the platforms out there.

Facebook – who uses Facebook? … I think Facebook is the most familiar and maybe the most intuitive. On Facebook, you’re connected with a set list of people – your Facebook “friends.” Some have 1000s, some have 50. You have to build that network, by asking people to be your friend, or by saying yes when they ask you. So you have a thought, or a funny thing happens, or you take a picture, or you read an article; and you post or share it on Facebook, and then all those friends can see it. The interesting thing – and sometimes the challenging thing – about Facebook is that ALL those friends see what you posted. Sometimes some of those friends from different corners of your life see things differently from you, or from each other.

Twitter – who uses Twitter? … Twitter is very different from Facebook. I’ve been using it fairly regularly for a little over a year. I mostly re-tweet things – sharing a tweet I read that I think is important or funny. I don’t create a lot of content on Twitter. Twitter has the famous 140-character limit (though they’re stretching that now…), so people express themselves very concisely on Twitter!

Instead of a friend network, on Twitter, you “follow” people to see their tweets, and people can “follow” you to see your tweets. Twitter is interesting because it’s totally public – unlike Facebook, anything you Tweet is visible to ANYONE – but it can also seem very private because if you don’t have a lot of followers, you can Tweet something and NOBODY will Like it. Or maybe just your mom.

What I like about Twitter: its immediacy – you can hear about what’s happening RIGHT NOW; its flatness – if you’ve got a favorite author or minor celebrity who’s on Twitter, you may have a chance to interact with them; and I’ve really used it to diversify my media, by, for example, following people who are commenting on current events from the standpoint of racial equity. So, I read on Twitter much more than I post.

Instagram – who uses it? … I don’t use Instagram much myself but I’m going to try to start.  It’s mostly for sharing photos. Like Twitter, you “follow” people to see what they share, and vice versa. And you can Like people’s photos, and use hashtags to index photos, or link your photos to a place or a project or event.  Some folks say that Instagram can actually be a good beginner platform – because it’s pretty easy and it’s mostly pretty nice.

Snapchat – who uses it?…  Snapchat & Instagram are maybe most popular with teens & twenty-somethings these days, though as soon as us old people move in, they’ll move on.  Snapchat is a way of sharing photos socially –  they come to your phone like a text or instant message. You can add funny captions and doodle on them. The photos disappear quickly, so there’s an element of, you have to be tuned in, if you miss it, you miss it. (But people can get themselves in trouble because the picture only disappears quickly if the person receiving the photo doesn’t screencap it and keep it!…)

There are other platforms too, but that’s a good start!

Okay, Miranda, but WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA IN CHURCH? Listen, a friend told me a few years ago that he’d read somewhere that the average Episcopalian invites someone to church once every 46 years.  I think that’s probably not quite fair… but it is funny.

The reason some folks came up with Social Media Sunday a few years ago is to help encourage church folks to share about their faith life on social media,  just like you share about other parts of your life. If you are a social media user, it can be a really easy, effective way to let people know about your faith and your church.

When you post to Facebook or Twitter or Instagram about a cool event at your church, or a bit of a sermon or song or Scripture that speaks to you, or about how God is present to you in daily life, YOU ARE EVANGELIZING. You are proclaiming. You’re letting people who know you, who aren’t church folks but might be curious or interested – you’re letting them know that you are a person of faith, and that you belong to a community of faith that you value. And you NEVER HAD TO HAVE AN AWKWARD CONVERSATION ABOUT IT. You just Shared about something you do anyway.

In your bulletin you got a sheet about “15 Ways to Share your Faith on Social Media” – some of these are great, some are a little corny. On the back, we’ve added a few of our own. Please take special note of #21, #SelfiewithaSaint a special challenge for today and this week!

If you are NOT a social media user, and don’t plan to become one, here’s your take-away from Social Media Sunday: When you see somebody with their smartphone out in church, don’t judge. DON’T ASSUME they’re tuning out. They might have heard something they really like, and be Tweeting it or posting on Facebook. Which is awesome! They might be donating to the church online, at donate.stdunstans.com . They might have heard about an upcoming event, and be putting it on their calendar. They might be texting a friend to say, Hey, I’m at church and wanted to let you know I’m praying for you and my community is too. They might be snapping a photo or taking a video of what we’re doing, because they think it’s worth recording!

Maybe they got curious about one of the Scripture readings and they’re looking it up in an online Bible. Maybe they’re Tweeting their elected officials to ask them to remember the needs of the hungry – Bread for the World uses Twitter a lot, and invites us to use it too. They even have a Social Media Kit – you can pick up a copy or look at it online. They say, “Digital-minded Christians should see social media platforms as an opportunity to “give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and destitute” (Psalm 82:3). Engaging in digital conversations is engaging in democracy, which is part of good Christian stewardship.”

So, social media can be a powerful tool – for speaking, for evangelizing, for helping, and for sharing hope.

Big Questions, Outreach, Sermons

Sermon, Sept. 11

This week, as I spent time with these two parables of Jesus, the familiar stories of the lost sheep and the lost coin, I found that there were two different sermons tugging at me. So I decided to preach them both.

In the first sermon, these parables are about you. About us. About our lostness, and God’s determined love. We all have moments when we are the sheep, lost and tangled in the brambles, somewhere in the wilderness; when we are the coin, under the bed, between the floorboards, menaced by dust-bunnies. When we feel alone, and afraid, and useless, and forgotten, and… lost.

Scholar David Lose, writing about this passage, gestures to some of the many ways we might feel lost, even while seeming fine on the outside: “Might the career-minded person who has made moving up the professional ladder their only priority, be lost? Might the folks who work jobs they hate just to give their family things they never had, be lost? Might the senior who has a great pension plan but little sense of meaning since retirement, be lost? Might the teen who works so hard to be perfect and who is willing to do anything to fit in, be lost? We have lots of people in our congregations who seem to have it all together and yet, deep down, are just plain lost.”

These parables of Jesus speak comfort for those situations, those people. They offer an image of God as a patient and determined seeker, who loves each and every one of us enough to strike out into the wilderness, light the lamp and grab the broom, and seek until we are found. These parables tell us that in God’s love, we are never truly alone, never useless, never forgotten. It’s a message that is consistent with other parts of the Gospel – Jesus meets all kinds of people, in all walks of life, and sees their inward hurts and needs. And Jesus wants wholeness and joy and purpose for each and all.

But while we might be like the coin and the sheep in our lostness, we are different from them in an important way: we have the capacity to turn back towards God. After each of these short parables, Jesus says, Just so, I tell you, there is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents. The sheep and the coin don’t, can’t repent – they get found solely through the seeker’s efforts. But we humans, given intelligence, spirit, and free will, we can turn back towards God. The word “repent” here is the Greek word “metanoia,” a wonderful word for which I wish we had a better translation… As I understand it, it means something less like being sorry for one’s sins and something more like coming to a new understanding, changing one’s direction or path, turning, turning till you come round right.

These parables, the coin and the sheep, lead into the Prodigal Son parable – it’s not in the lectionary this season, but you can glance at it in the Luke booklets if you want – and that parable does have a metanoia moment: when the lost son, at his lowest point, degraded, alone, starving to death, “comes to himself” and thinks, I could go home. Repentance really isn’t a good word for what happens there. He remembers who he is, and whose he is, and that he is loved, in spite of everything, and he walks away from the mess he has made for himself, and back towards the Father who longs for him. Just so, I tell you, there is joy in heaven….!

I want to preach this sermon because some of you are in seasons of lostness. Some of you feel alone, and far from God. I want you to hear this message of God’s stubborn love, God’s ceaseless seeking for each and every lost sheep. I hope you’ll find here the comfort and courage to turn towards that loving Presence and take the first halting steps towards a sense of purpose, worthiness, and hope.

And then there’s the second sermon. In this sermon, these parables are NOT about us. This sermon begins with the context for these parables: Jesus’ pious frenemies the scribes and Pharisees are complaining that he hangs around with sinners. Now, they don’t mean casual sinners, who gossip or speak sharply to their children or don’t give away as much money as they could. They mean the obvious, bigtime sinners, the ones you can pick out in a crowd. “Tax collectors and sinners” – that phrase points to a wonderful mix of both high-ranking and low-ranking undesirables. Corrupt or scandal-ridden government officials, wealthy folks who made their millions by fraud and coercion, shoulder to shoulder with prostitutes, drug dealers, and thieves.

Jesus offers these parables in response to criticism that he is hanging out with the wrong element. The unclean, immoral and undesirable. The worst and the lowest. And friends, whatever inner hurts or struggles we bear, that just isn’t us. We’re all well-off and well and healthy enough to make it to church on Sunday. We are the 99 sheep left in the wilderness, the nine coins safely tucked away in a pocket. We’re the ones who are more or less OK.

In these two simple parables the 99 and the 9 don’t have a voice, but in the Prodigal Son parable, we hear the brother’s voice – the brother who stayed home being a good son, and is angry that his father makes such a fuss over the return of his irresponsible, reckless sibling. And what the brother says is what the 99 sheep and the 9 coins might well say: “What about ME? I didn’t get lost. I haven’t made a mess of my life. Where’s MY party?”

Over the years I’ve found that a lot of Episcopalians tend to identify with the stay-at-home brother, and thus by extension with the 99 and the 9, sheep and coins. And we tend to struggle with these parables. Just as in our civic life, we sometimes feel resentful that so many resources and so much attention go to the poorest kids in our schools, or to the neediest neighborhoods in our cities, or to the demographic groups with the lowest rates of health, opportunity, and wellbeing. It can feel unfair and disproportionate to us. Why should the lowest and the worst get so much attention, care and concern? What about us more-or-less OK folks? Where’s our party?

I get it. I was raised to believe in the middle-class white American values of fairness and rationality. But God isn’t fair or rational. It isn’t fair or rational to leave 99 sheep alone in the wilderness while you go looking for one. It isn’t fair or rational to search for a lost quarter by burning a dollar’s worth of oil in your lamp.

But if we seek to have the heart of God, if we want to be disciples of Jesus, we have to understand that a reckless love for the truly lost is fundamental to God’s character. God is disproportionately – unfairly! – concerned with the last, least, lowest and lost. And God asks us to share that concern. We learn this from the Gospels and indeed, from the witness of the Scriptures as whole. One of the Bible’s clearest themes is God’s care for those on the edges and on the very, very bottom of the economic and social structure.

In the Book of Jeremiah, our current Old Testament text, a couple of chapters on from today’s reading, Jeremiah says, “If you truly amend your ways and your doings,… if you do not oppress the immigrant, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods…, then I will dwell with you in this place.” (7:5-7) That’s just one of many, many places in the Bible in which a society’s treatment of its neediest and most vulnerable members serves as a barometer of collective righteousness. How those folks are doing tells God everything God needs to know about whether the people as a whole are living as God has called them to live.

In the parable of the sheep and the goats, in Matthew’s Gospel, the one yardstick used to measure people’s lives is, Did you care for the lost? Did you feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, visit the sick and the prisoner? Did you join in God’s disproportionate and unfair concern for those in greatest need, the lowest and the worst? It’s a question of urgency for both the world, and for our souls.

I want to preach this second sermon because this is a really important place where the rubber of our lives meets the road of discipleship. Where the orientation of heart and mind that Jesus asks of us is in tension with the way our hearts and minds have been formed by our culture and experiences. Jesus says: There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who turns back towards God, than over ninety-nine righteous people who never turned away to begin with. That is unfair. It probably really rubs some of us the wrong way. And it is a glimpse into the heart of God. God asks the 99 and the 9 to be OK with being taken for granted. And to join in the rejoicing when one of the lost is found.

Okay. Two sermons. And they’re in tension with each other. Either it’s all about us, or it really isn’t. If we focus on the hurt and lost places in our own souls and lives, we may be blind to – or even resentful of – the struggles of others. If we focus on the urgent needs of the profoundly lost, we may neglect our own legitimate needs, and spend ourselves until we are empty.

Instead of choosing whose needs matter most, might we find a way to live in the tension between the two readings of these parables? To say to ourselves, There are some ways in which I’m hurt, broken, or lost; and I can also have compassion for people in the world who are much more hurt, broken, and lost than I am?

At my seminary, the Episcopal Divinity School, we began our learning by reflecting together on how our backgrounds and biases shape how we see God and understand faith. And one of the tools we used was the concept of target and non-target identities. Bear with me; this is a new language for most of you but it’s not hard to understand. Non-target identities are what our society identifies as normal and good. It’s easy to inhabit these identities because our world is built for you, to a large extent. Some examples: White. Male. Able-bodied. Slender. Young. Straight. Cisgender. Middle-class.

Target identities are what our society identifies as other, or second-best, or even flat-out weird or bad. This is “target” in the sense of something that gets rocks thrown at it, not something that’s a goal people are aiming for! When you walk around these identities – or when you find yourself in a situation in which your target identity is in play – you may face biases and barriers. Some examples: African-American, Latino, Asian. Female. Disabled. Elderly. Fat. Gay or bi. Transgender. Working class or poor. Mentally ill. Obviously most people have a mix of target and non-target identities that intersect to make us who we are.

Here’s what my seminary does with that. The point is emphatically not to award a gold star to the most non-target member of the class, or to the person who can check the most “target” boxes and is thus gets the crown for Most Oppressed. The point is to use this simple approach as a tool for reflection and for empathy. To notice the moments when we inhabit those target identities, think about what that feels like, and use that as a window into what it might be like for those who are target in more ways, and in more profound ways.

While I was in seminary, I was also parenting a toddler. Phil was telecommuting, working full-time to help pay the bills, so I couldn’t just leave our son with him. I wanted to attend chapel worship every morning, to be part of the ongoing liturgical life of my seminary community. But it was hard with an 18-month-old, a 2-year-old. Hard to get out of the house, hard to have him with me in worship in a way that wasn’t a total distraction to myself and others. Our seminary chapel opened onto a lovely little green space, and in the spring when the weather turned nice, people liked to worship with the chapel doors wide open, breezes blowing in and trees and grass just outside.

Now, imagine trying to contain a bored two-year-old in a room with two wide open doors onto grass and trees and freedom. After trying it a couple of times, it got so that if I approached the chapel and the doors were propped open, we just wouldn’t go. There was nothing that felt like worship to me in spending forty minutes trying to keep my toddler from escaping.

Now, that was an experience of being target, as a parent encumbered by a young child. I was one of only a couple of people meeting that description, at my seminary at that time. The people planning chapel worship were unencumbered, and my and my son’s needs just didn’t cross their minds.

I am not for a moment claiming that this was a serious problem, or was hurtful in a lasting way. I do have some sense of proportion. But it did make me think about what it’s like for other parents. For single parents, or parents whose partners aren’t available or willing to share childcare, especially those who don’t have the resources to put their kids somewhere safe while they work or study. Having to drag your kid with you is inconvenient at best, and can really close doors and get you in trouble, at worst.

More broadly, those chapel experiences were a window into a common experience of folks who wear those target identities: being in a social and physical space that just wasn’t designed for you. That just doesn’t fit. My options were: complain, and be the person who complained, and made them stop doing something that everyone else enjoyed. Or – I could stop coming. Remove myself from the space, even though I wanted to be there. That was the choice I made. And it’s the kind of choice people face all the time, target folks living in a world designed for the non-target default.

As trivial as this experience was for me – so I couldn’t go to chapel all the time; so what? – as trivial as it was, it did hurt; and that hurt became for me a window into other lives, a bridge of empathy to the experiences of those who are excluded much more routinely, and with greater consequences.

I’m not recommending that, for example, you approach someone at a funeral and say, “I know what it’s like to lose your spouse, because my gerbil died once.” But, in a sheltered and lucky life, the experience of loss and sadness at a gerbil’s death might truly be a useful tool for trying to understand somebody else’s greater grief.

Earlier I said, Either it’s all about us, or it really isn’t. But maybe – it could start with us, and move towards the other. Maybe the ways in which I feel hurt, broken, or lost, instead of making me resentful of others’ needs, could help me care. We could focus on our own lostness, the moments and places in which we are in need of being found and tended and restored by God’s healing love. We could focus on the lostness of others, those who struggle daily at the margins of our status quo. Or: we could give real, prayerful, serious attention to our own moments of feeling alone, afraid, useless, forgotten – lost – and use those moments to deepen our understanding of those who bear greater burdens, our concern for their wellbeing, and our rejoicing when the lost become found.

The David Lose post referenced above is here: http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=2737