Category Archives: Sermons

Big Questions, Church Seasons & Holy Days, Sermons

Sermon, March 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Questions, Sermons, Stories

Sermon, March 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermons, Spirituality

Sermon, Feb. 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

you should go on a little hunt later…!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks be to God.

 

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

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

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Sermons, Worship

Sermon, Feb. 14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermons

Sermon, Feb. 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Giving Campaign, Sermons, Stewardship

Sermon, Jan. 24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermons, Youth

Sermon, January 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermons

Sermon, Christmas Eve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sermons, Worship

Sermon, Dec. 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, Dec. 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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