Category Archives: Sermons

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Creation Care, Inclusive church, Sermons

Homily, Oct. 1

Today we celebrate the Feast of St Francis of Assisi. 

St Francis’ feast day – commemorating his death in the year 1226 – is part of WHY churches are increasingly celebrating a Season of Creation in late September and early October. 

Francis is a widely-beloved saint, and a strong voice within Christian tradition for honoring God through love of Creation. 

Many churches around the world observe the feast of Francis with a service of blessing animals – as we do. 

I have heard criticism of pet blessings as a superficial engagement, almost a trivialization of Francis’ life and message – of turning something cute that was actually radical and important.

I think pet blessings are important too – but I take the point.

So who was Francis, and what was he about? 

Francis’ life and witness have “held up” remarkably well for someone who died just under 800 years ago. There are lots of ways in which he pointed towards values and ideas that are more mainstream within Christianity or culture today. 

Francis was born into comfort, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant in the Italian city of Assisi. Even as a young man he felt conflicted between enjoying fine clothes and a carefree life, and compassion towards the poor. After a season of spiritual seeking, one day, while praying in an abandoned chapel called San Damiano, he had a vision of Jesus Christ and heard Jesus tell him, “Francis, go repair my church, which lies in ruins.”

At first Francis thought Jesus’ words referred to the decrepit chapel where he was praying, and he sold some of his father’s cloth to repair the building. This led to conflict with his father, which ended when Francis renounced his family and inheritance. 

He started dressing like the poorest peasants of his region, in a coarse brown wool tunic tied at the waist with rope. 

Intentional poverty would become a cornerstone of his movement and way of life – to prevent being compromised or distracted by worldly wealth and luxuries. 

Francis began preaching to the ordinary people he met – a message of caring for one another, making amends for one’s wrong deeds, and seeking peace among all. 

He proclaimed respect and care for every human being, saying, “Your God is of your flesh; God lives in your nearest neighbor, in every person.”

People started to follow and emulate him. A young noblewoman, Clare, was drawn to Francis and his teaching, and Francis supported her in forming a religious order for women – a counterpart to his group of male followers, who came to be called Franciscans. 

Francis lived during the time of the Crusades – a series of military conflicts between Christian and Muslim powers. Yet in 1219 he undertook a peaceful mission to meet with a Muslim leader in Egypt, securing the right for Franciscans to live and travel in the Middle East for centuries to come. 

Francis invented the Nativity scene, using real people and animals to create a sort of living diorama of the original story of the birth of Christ, in order to help common – and illiterate – people imagine and contemplate that great event more fully.

And Francis believed that nature was a mirror of God, calling all living things his brothers and sisters, preaching to birds, and making peace between a fierce wolf and the town of Gubbio. 

In this season, we’ve been opening our 10AM worship with part of a hymn or poem that Francis wrote, best known as the Canticle of the Sun, which praises God by praising parts of God’s Creation, like Brother Fire, Sister Water, and Sister Mother Earth.

In his 2015 letter Laudato Si, calling Roman Catholics to care and advocate for creation, Pope Francis wrote, “[Francis] was a mystic and a pilgrim who lived in simplicity and in wonderful harmony with God, with others, with nature and with himself. He shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace.” 

I think Pope Francis is right to point to Saint Francis as a model for the necessary integration of care for humanity, care for creation, personal self-discipline and spiritual growth, and peace and justice work. 

Today I’d like to take another step in thinking about how it informs and enlarges our theology when we take other living things seriously as our brothers, sisters, and siblings. 

We know it’s important to many of our members that St. Dunstan’s strives to be fully inclusive of LGBTQ+ people. When we ask folks why they chose this church, it comes up a lot – that we are open about our commitments and that we’re working to move beyond mere words, to becoming a community that is safe, affirming, able to learn and improve, and willing to stand up and speak up when our members and their loved ones are at risk. 

Often, in the public square, people who are opposed to or suspicious of LGBTQ+ equality will talk about Nature as part of their case. Whether that’s about sexual orientation and assumptions about how people are “supposed to” use their organs – or about gender identity and what someone’s DNA or body parts mean about how they should live in the world. 

Either way: the message is that being affirming of LGBTQ+ people is against Nature – and therefore against God’s intentions, as the Creator and Author of nature. 

The thing is: that’s a very limited view of Nature. When we approach God’s creation with loving attention and respect – as Francis did – we find that it’s often more complex, messy, and interesting than these deterministic binaries. 

During our Creation Care Camp week with our middle school youth this summer, one of our most exciting outings was to Heartland Farm Sanctuary, in Stoughton. 

We knew that our group would learn about the treatment of animals used for meat, eggs, and milk, and about humane alternatives. We didn’t know that we’d also learn more about what’s “natural” in terms of sex and gender. 

The kids’ eyes got very big when we met Daisy the dairy cow. Daisy was born intersex, with both male and female organs. 

She was sent for slaughter, since she was judged to be unlikely to produce much milk. She escaped, which led her eventually to Heartland, where she is well-loved and well-cared for.  

Our group was surprised to learn that the biology of sex assignment can be complicated and can lead to problems, even for non-human animals!

And then we met Cream Puff the goose. Cream Puff is a domestic goose who was rescued from a pond after the Canada geese they had been hanging out with flew south for the winter, leaving them alone and lonely. 

At rescue, Cream Puff was examined and determined to be a female goose, and was acting like a female goose. But as they settled into their new environment at Heartland, Cream Puff started to show some of the distinctive behaviors of a gander – a male goose. It turns out it’s not unusual for some kinds of birds to spontaneously change their gender behavior and even biology! 

Is it appropriate to apply the human concept of “transgender” to Cream Puff? Probably not.

But is it appropriate to look to Nature to justify rigid identities and categories of sex and gender? Not really! 

Looking to science – and particularly to biology – to help us understand the complexity of human gender and sexuality isn’t necessarily a helpful path. That can lead us into other tangles. 

We are, all of us, more than our genes or our body parts, just as we are more than what our culture and history tell us to be. 

But what science CAN show us is that Nature is not on the side of simple, limited, or unchanging ideas about sex and gender. 

Today, three days out from the feast of St. Francis, and ten days out from National Coming Out Day on October 11, I want to call us to join Francis in seeing Creation as a mirror of God, and taking seriously our kinship with all living things. 

Our parish Creation Care Mission Statement begins, “In response to the creative love of God made known to us in the beauty, complexity, and holiness of the created order…” then lays out our hopes and intentions – cultivating love of creation, serving as caretakers and advocates, and so on.

Our commitment to being an inclusive parish – to the growing and learning and stretching that that entails – is one of the things we do in response to the creative love of God made known to us in the beauty, complexity, and holiness of the created order. 

Being affirming IS celebrating Nature in all its diversity, ambiguity, and mystery. Thanks be to God. 

Let us pray. 

Most high, omnipotent, good Lord, grant your people grace to renounce gladly the vanities of this world; that, following the way of blessed Francis, we may, for love of you, delight in your whole creation with perfectness of joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

scripture, Sermons

Homily, July 2

In Genesis chapter 16, Abram and Sarai get tired of waiting for God to fulfill the promise to give them a son, and take matters into their own hands. Sarai tells Abram to spend some private time with her enslaved Egyptian servant, Hagar.  Hagar gets pregnant, and tensions arise between Sarai and Hagar. Sarai treats Hagar so harshly that she runs away into the wilderness. But the Angel of the Lord finds Hagar, sitting near a spring in the desert, and tells her to return to Sarai and submit to her. The Angel also promises Hagar that she will have many descendants, more than can be counted – which sounds a lot like the promise to Abraham! The angel gives Hagar’s son a name: Ishmael, meaning, God has heard you. And Hagar in turn names the being who addresses her,  “You are El-Roi” – meaning, The god who sees me. 

Wait – isn’t it an angel who addresses her, not God? Yes and no. Often in these early parts of the Old Testament, there is not a clear distinction between God and angel. Chapter 18 begins, “The LORD appeared to Abraham…” and goes on to describe the visit of three men. Those strange visitors are later described again as the (singular) Lord, and then as messengers or angels (which are the same word; “angel” or “messenger” is a translation choice). So: We think of angels as separate and lesser beings, but for this part of the Biblical text, it’s not that clear. Hagar knows she has encountered God, and she’s not wrong. 

We need that story to fully understand today’s Genesis reading, from chapter 21, which takes place when Isaac and Ishmael are children. Let me say that we’re taking things out of order – the binding of Isaac, which we heard last week, happens after this – and that the editing in this part of Genesis is a little sloppy; a few verses earlier it said that Ishmael is thirteen years old, but here it sounds like he’s a very small child again. 

Anyway: Isaac is born, a baby half-brother for Ishmael, and Abraham and Sarah dote on him. But Sarah’s jealousy smolders. One day Sarah sees Ishmael and Isaac playing together and gets angry. She tells Abraham to cast them out – “for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” 

Abraham is distressed about this! But God tells him not to worry, and that Ishmael, like Isaac, shall become the father of a nation. So Abraham gives Hagar some bread and a canteen of water, and sends her and the child out into the desert. Bye! Good luck! 

When the angel of God speaks to Hagar, as she sits weeping and waiting for death, they are meeting again – not for the first time. God repeats the promise that Ishmael’s descendants will become a great nation. And this time God does not send Hagar and Ishmael back to Sarah’s abuse, but lets them start their own lives as free people. 

I love the story of Hagar and want to make sure it’s told, every three years when we cycle through the book of Genesis in our Sunday readings. I think it’s important for me because – very early in the story of God’s people – the Biblical text is already laying out some central, holy paradoxes that will carry through. Yes, God calls Abraham and Sarah to be the parents and grandparents of a special, set-apart nation, God’s covenant people; Yes, God also claims Ishmael and makes him part of God’s larger plan.  Yes, God appears to Abraham, making him the honored faith-ancestor of three world religions; Yes, God also appears to Hagar, an enslaved woman of another ethnicity. 

Hagar names God as “The one who sees me.” God as the one who sees – and cares about – those at the margins, the pushed out, the excluded, the vulnerable and those in need, is a strong theme throughout our Scriptures, Old and New Testament alike. 

Many of the founding figures of the United States – and many people today – talk about America as a Christian nation, a country that should enshrine and embody the values and ethics of the Bible. I wonder what it would look like to build a nation on a foundational commitment to this core Biblical value: seeing, honoring, caring for and uplifting those who are poor, vulnerable, excluded, and at risk. 

Sermons

Sermon, The Rev. Lorna Grenfell, June 18

During my younger son’s junior year in high school–most of which was during the Gulf War–we had 3 teenagers from Nazareth living with us and closely watching the news footage every day to see if their homes had been hit by a scud missile.  Never one to avoid a fray, that summer my son, age 17, expressed a desire to go home with them for a while to the Holy Land.  We searched around and finally sent him off to St. George’s College, part of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem.

While there for two weeks with 85 other young people from all over the world, my son read the Bible in the actual places where the events occurred.  For example:

-he walked in sandals down the 15 miles from Jerusalem to Jericho

-he explored, with water up to his chest, Hezekiah’s Well Tunnel under the city

-and one dark night a bunch of these kids was taken out into the Sinai Desert.  The leader flung open the door of the jeep and said, “Welcome to the land of a million, million stars!”  They were told to go off and find a place where they were totally alone—could not see another soul—and stay there for an hour.

Although I only heard about this after my son Sinjin returned home, I can tell you that his experience alone in the Sinai desert under the night sky was…life changing.

Today, with ambient light from cities, towns, and villages all over the world, I wonder how many of us have actually seen such a night sky, a sky brimming over with stars, a sky in which God seems to have thrown handful after handful of silver glitter into the dark?  To give you some idea of the abundance of stars up there, there are 100 billion stars in 2 trillion galaxies in the universe—200 billion trillion stars.

We are told that, realistically, with the naked eye, we can perhaps see 4-5 thousand stars at once.

But, I guarantee…it’s enough.

It’s enough to rend one speechless.

It’s enough to bring one to stillness.

It’s enough to give us humans a visual image to begin to understand and be open to

-our immanent (not far from us) God 

-and our transcendent (who birthed all creation) God. 

It’s enough to make one feel that (in Rev. Miranda’s words a few weeks back) “divine life is swirling in and through and around all things, all the time, all the way out to the edges of creation and beyond.”

The thought of the divine swirling right here and also through 200 billion trillion stars and beyond is hopefully enough to urge us to be open to receiving moments when the swirling transcendent God becomes the swirling immanent God, and we are overcome with the ineffable magnitude of all of it and overcome with the understanding that God’s promises do not depend on us humans.  We are not in charge here.

It was certainly enough thousands of years ago for Abram to trust his total life to God.  So let us turn to Abram and Sarai.  Their long and convoluted story in Genesis revolves all around a promise from God, and the message there, then and here, today, is that the awesome promises of God do not depend on us.

-God tells Abram, ‘Go to a country I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation’.

-Abram and Sarai leave Haran with their entire household—servants, tents, goats, sheep, family members: all of it

-They trek to Canaan and then move on east of Bethel and on again to the Negeb. 

-Then a famine forces them to move down to Egypt. 

-The Pharoah takes a liking to Sarai and they must quickly hurry away.  

-Back in the Negeb, Abram and Lot argue over the land.

-and on and on, troubles mounting up as troubles do…and still no child.

Finally, Abram complains to God about the unfulfilled promise of many descendants. So, God takes Abram outside the tent and says, ‘Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.’  Then he says to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’  and Abram believed the Lord.

Years pass and still the yearned for child, much less the promised descendants that ‘number the stars in the heavens’, do not appear. No. Not even ONE child.  

And here is our Psalm of Lament: 

“How long, O God? Will you forget me forever; how long will you hide your face from me?”

Slowly, their trust in God wanes.  ‘God has forgotten’, they whisper to each other in the dark.  

And Sarai’s Egyptian handmaiden Hagar is sent to Abram’s tent.  The resulting child Ishmael is born, and more discord follows.  Mother and child are banished into the desert and must be rescued and saved by an angel of God….

As the years continue to roll on, the prospects grow dimmer and dimmer.

Sarai is now 90 years old, long past childbearing, and Abram is now 100 years old.

And then, quite suddenly, there are three strangers outside the tent—

3 angels ineffably swirling the transcendent into the immanent.

And suddenly, Abram is running around trying to make them welcome.

And suddenly, he is urging Sarai to prepare a meal, a good meal, for these men.

And where is Sarai?  We find her inside, crouching behind the tent flap, stuffing a dish cloth into her mouth to keep from laughing.  She’s 90 years ol…and going to have…a baby?

90 years old?  Is there really any reason Sarai should not be laughing?

Now.  We need to stop here a moment.

I had Miranda put up a photo of Apo Whang-Od while Gail read us the Genesis passage this morning about Sarai.  Apo is 106 years old and, this spring she was on the cover of Vogue Magazine in the Philippines.  Apo still actively pursues her career in the ancient tradition of “batok” tattoo.  In her beads and wearing her red lipstick at 106, she’s absolutely gorgeous! 

Also, if you don’t already know, you need to know that there is a fairly powerful and beautiful group of women of a certain age here at St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church who meet regularly.  Elvice, Betty, Gretchen, Diane, Kathy, Gloria, Barb and myself were at the last “Aging” zoom gathering with Miranda, our ‘honorary’ leader.  Some may call us old ladies, but we prefer “wise women” or “seasoned saints” or “baba-yagas” or even “crones” or just simply “the coven.”  There is always much sharing of stories and laughter, and when all is said and done, the conclusion is inevitably reached that it would be a big mistake to underestimate the importance of an old woman—any old women!

Back to Sarai.  Sarai, age 90, is to have a child.  God’s promise—descendants to number the stars in the heavens—is finally being fulfilled.  We left her covering her mouth, choking with laughter, the tears running down her cheeks.  She’s no doubt watching Abram rushing around doing his own very best to keep a straight face and not treat himself to shouts of knee-slapping, raucous guffaws.

And here is our Psalm of Joy: “May all lands be joyful before you, O God, serve with gladness and come before your presence with a song.”

Yes, I do picture Sarai smiling with tears.  I think many of us tear up in moments of unutterable joy or beauty or sheer delight.  There is joy for the coming child, but there is also lament—for the long waiting, for the lack of trust, for our human frailty, for all that has gone before, some of which proved at times NOT to be so very good.

What is that vulnerable, deep place within each one of us that moves our mouth to smile and our eyes to fill up?  I suggest to you this morning that these moments are when the divine, which is indeed ‘swirling all around us’, becomes actually known and actually felt, overwhelming us humans: as when Abram hears God speak to him and upends his whole life, as when Sarai learns she is to have a child and can’t stop smiling and can’t stop the tears. It’s intense and sudden, this awareness of the transcendent becoming immanent, this God of all Creation becoming known and felt right here with us.  We feel it.  We sense it.  We know it, this assuring, presence of a Promise-Keeping God.  And we are filled in our deepest core.

I feel certain that some of you are already right now remembering such moments in your life.

Here are some examples:

  1. A slip of a girl–what is she, 11 or 12 years old—is standing as straight as she can over three huddled children.  She slowly raises her thin arms high over her head and her wings of glittering, gold cloth fall gracefully in perfect pleats to the floor.  With the deepest, most authoritative voice she can muster, the girl says to the small shepherds, “Fear not!”  And because you know this girl, you know her family, you know the cookies she likes at Coffee Hour; you know she is fond of shopping at Goodwill, and you know the particular pair of Doc Marten boots she wants so badly is probably already wrapped and under the tree, because you know, you smile.  But the ‘divine is swirling all around’, and in your joy, your eyes fill because you also know that because these children are so young and because you are, well, old enough to have memories, there will occur a number of occasions as their lives unfold and they grow and come into their own, a number of occasions when each of them may quietly whisper those very words to themselves: “Fear not!”

And because there is a past and a present and a future, the transcendent becomes immanent right there in front of you, right there inside you.  The ‘divine swirls all around’–the angel, the shepherds, Joseph, Mary, the Innkeeper, the animals, and you.  The presence, compassion and love of a Promise-keeping God is made real.  Very real.   And suddenly…it’s Christmas.

  1. Or maybe you’re late and rushing to the airport.  You’re going to meet and bring home a person whose face has long been lost to you.  Maybe a sibling who’s been living abroad for a few years.  Maybe your elderly, widowed Dad whom you have finally convinced to make the short but dreaded plane trip to see his grandchildren.  Maybe it’s an estranged adult son or daughter wanting at last to let you be a part of their life.  The flight is late. The waiting crowd is milling about, but finally the light flashes on the arrivals board.  And suddenly the face, the face you have waited so long to see, appears smiling at you out of the crowd, and of course you smile—but for just a few moments, your eyes fill up because the ‘divine is swirling’ all around and through this waiting, churning airport crowd, and it has touched your innermost being with profound joy in this moment and lament for all the lost moments, and the transcendent is right there, immanent, palpable, a very real presence enfolding the two of you in its embrace.  
  1. Or maybe you carefully watched the latest showing of the video of St. Dunstan’s Tale during which you mourned all over again the passing of narrator Celia Fine, and at the very end you see young Wren playing the king with his royal cape and lopsided crown tipping over his eyes.  He was probably 3, maybe 4, and reading his part so well—only turning once or twice to an ‘aide’ behind him for help with a big word like ‘principalities’ or ‘iniquities’.  You smile because he is, indeed, absolutely adorable and just seeing him fills all the world with joy, but suddenly the tears come because you know all children grow up and understand someday that every king’s crown is always slightly lopsided and that royalty always need aides–many, many aides.  And you recognize the transcendent and immanent becoming one right there, that very moment, in front of your very eyes–in young Wren.
  1. But it’s ordinary lives we are living. Try this. It’s the middle of a cold, dreary November, and you have yet again lived through September and October, the busiest, most over-scheduled months in our American culture.  You wake up. It’s early morning and still dark, and you’re suddenly conscious that there is no sound at all—only silence as you lie there.  The late theologian Frederick Beuchner put it this way.  You jump up. “You…pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there—the sodden gray yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to put away last fall.  All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is…the fresh snow….  The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear the silence.”  And despite the shoveling and the bad roads ahead, you open the window and let all the newness of the world flow in over you.  And the stars shine down and the cold, crisp air fills the room, and the ‘divine is swirling all around’ and you smile with joy in the moment and your eyes fill up in lament for all the times you might have missed just such a moment as this.

To me, a symbol of all this ‘swirling of divinity’, this incomprehensible transcendent becoming immanent, is the night sky of a “million, million” stars.  Thousands of years ago, Abram stood under it and looked up as the transcendent became immanent and God spoke and made his promise.  And those few moments were enough to carry Abram and Sarai through a life journey of much travail and missteps and wavering of trust—much like our own lives.  My friends, the awesome promises of God do not depend on human beings.  Sarai at age 90 finally has a baby whom they name Isaac, meaning laughter, and her own name is changed to Sara.  And Abram becomes Abraham, the father of three world religions.  The awesome promises of God do not depend on us humans.

Four years after my son’s trip to the Sinai desert, he returned there as a writer for a travel guide. He backpacked alone for six weeks through Israel, Jordan and Egypt, and every chance he got, he climbed Mount Sinai to spend the night in his sleeping bag lying under those same stars.  As I said, such an experience can be life-changing, and we humans want more of it—this transcendent God ineffably becoming immanent right here with us.  We need always, therefore, always to be on the lookout for the ways God chooses to be with us and make God’s own multifaceted self known and felt in our lives.

You may know of the International Dark Skies movement which strives to find and preserve places all over the world where there is little or no ambient light, places where the real heavens can be seen with the naked eye. Such a place is Wisconsin’s own Newport State Park on the tip of land in Door County that juts up into Lake Michigan.  This is where the Hassett family is this week.  May the dark, starlit sky inspire them to see and feel the ‘divine swirling around them’.   Amen.

Faith, Sermons, Spirituality, Stories

Sermon, June 11

In the letter known as Romans, the apostle Paul was writing to the Christian community in Rome, which he didn’t know yet; his other letters are largely to churches and people whom he knew well. 

He’s trying to present himself and his understanding of the Gospel, in a way that will make the church in Rome take him seriously. 

One of the early topics Paul takes up is the question of the place of Gentiles, non-Jewish Christians, in the church, in a time in which Christianity was still largely a movement with in Judaism. 

Paul himself has been a faithful and observant Jew. When he mentions “the Law” here, that is shorthand for the whole way of life to which the Jewish people are called through their covenant relationship with God – prayer and worship practices, kosher food rules, rules about money, wealth, and land, and much, much more. 

And, of course, circumcision – the core mark of the covenant.  

Paul is arguing with the idea that only people who already follow Jewish law can become part of this new thing God is doing in Jesus Christ. And he does so by talking about Abraham, the person with whom God formed the first covenant that became the basis for the Jewish faith. 

Paul says that God called and blessed Abraham not because Abraham was a righteous Jew – there was no such thing yet! – but because Abraham was faithful. He responded readily to God’s call, and went where God sent him. 

And therefore – Paul says – God can likewise call faithful Gentiles today. Obedience to the Law is not the only way to enter into relationship with the God of Israel, made known in Jesus Christ. 

That’s what Paul is up to, here. 

But Paul is also simplifying Abraham’s story a good bit! 

Let’s take a look. 

Paul says, “No distrust made [Abraham] waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. …”

Well… Yes. But also: no.

Our Genesis text today is the beginning of Abraham’s story. At this point his name is Abram – and his wife is Sarai. We are still early in first book of the Bible; the LORD who speaks to Abraham is not yet really known to humanity.  The last human God spoke to was Noah, and that was many generations earlier. 

So Abram’s ready response to God, when God addresses him out of the blue, is striking. God tells a wealthy, 75-year-old man to up and leave home – and Abram says, Okay. 

I wonder if Abram’s responsiveness has to do with the fact that despite his wealth, Abram wants something very much indeed. He wants a child. He and Sarai have never been able to conceive. And even though God doesn’t specifically promise, yet, to give them a child, God does promise to make Abram a great nation. That his lineage won’t die out, as he fears. 

That catches Abram’s attention… and perhaps drives his willingness to follow this call. Maybe what we have here is a meeting of deep needs: God wants to call and form a nation, and Abram wants to be a dad. 

So, here, at the very beginning, yes, we see Abram’s trust in God. This is a heck of a leap of faith. 

But there are lots of other moments in Abram’s story that are less clear. 

Abram and his household travel into the land of Canaan, and he builds an altar and worships God. But then there’s a famine and Abram and Sarai go to Egypt. 

Abram tells Sarai, “You are a beautiful woman; and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife’; then they will kill me. So, say you are my sister, so that my life may be spared on your account.”  …!! 

Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, takes note of Sarai’s beauty and takes her into his house as a wife, and gives Abram a lot of gifts as thanks!  

But then God afflicts Pharaoh with various plagues, and Pharaoh figures out that Sarai is Abram’s wife and angrily gives her back. 

And Abram sets off again – with Sarai, and all the gifts from Pharaoh.

It’s an unsettling episode, and suggests a deep fearfulness in Abram – such that he won’t even protect his own wife. 

God speaks to Abram again in a vision, and Abram complains that God has still given him no children; his heir is a favored servant. God says, “Your very own child shall be your heir… look towards heaven and count the stars: so shall your descendants be!”  

Then we get the line Paul is quoting, here in Romans: “[Abram] believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” In other words: Abram’s trust in God’s promise counted as righteousness, before the Law existed as the measure of human righteous behavior. 

Yet in the very next verses Abram questions God! God promises Abram that his descendants will have a homeland, and Abram asks, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” 

It’s one of a number of places in Scripture where somebody asks God for a sign to confirm that a prophetic message actually has authority behind it! 

God gives Abram his sign, and and a more detailed promise of a future homeland. Now is Abram able to trust in God’s very specific and detailed promises? Well. Sort of.

Abram – now 86 years old – and Sarai decide to take matters into their own hands with respect to this promised child. It seems that Sarai cannot have children, so she tells Abram to spend some private time with her enslaved Egyptian servant, Hagar. If Hagar and Abram have a child, that child could also be “counted” as Sarai’s child, because Hagar is enslaved. 

This arrangement was not so strange, in that time and place – something to bear in mind when people talk about Biblical marriage! But Genesis lets us know that it was still not a great idea, here. Hagar does get pregnant, and tensions arise between Sarai and Hagar. 

When Sarai complains, Abram tells Sarai, She’s your slave; do whatever you want to her. 

So Sarai drives Hagar away into the desert. 

I want to talk about Hagar another time, so let me just say here that this sure seems like another significant failure of trust. 

Both in taking this ill-advised path towards providing Abram with a son; and then not having the courage to stick with that plan and protect the woman carrying his much-wanted child. 

FOURTEEN YEARS PASS. Then God shows up again. God gives Abram a new name, Abraham; God once again promises Abraham many offspring and a homeland; and introduces the covenant sign of circumcision. 

Then God gives Sarai a new name too – Sarah – and says that Abraham and Sarah will have their own child. 

Remember when Paul said, “[Abraham] did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb”? 

Well: Genesis chapter 17, verse 17, says: “Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, ‘Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?’” ROTFL! 

Finding this promised child improbable, Abraham asks God to instead bless Ishmael, the son he had with Hagar. 

God says, I will bless Ishmael; but you and Sarah will have a son. 

And Abraham believes all this enough to circumcise himself and all the men and boys of his household – so that’s saying something!… 

In Genesis 19, three angels visit Abraham and Sarah and repeat the promise that they will have a son. We’ll hear that story next Sunday. 

But then – while we’re waiting on Isaac’s promised conception – Abraham and Sarah travel again, and once again Abraham tells the locals that Sarah is his sister, and once again the local king – King Abimelech of Gerar – takes Sarah as a wife! God tells the king in a dream, “You are about to die because of the woman whom you have taken; for she is a married woman.” Abimelech, like Pharaoh before him, is pretty mad at Abraham about the situation. 

Abraham explains that Sarah is actually his half-sister, so it’s not a lie really; and he says, “I did it because I thought, There is no fear of God at all in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.” 

Abimelech gives Sarah back to Abraham, and 1000 pieces of silver besides. 

So, even after all these concrete, specific promises that he and Sarah will have a child, Abraham is still doing this weird, fearful thing, putting his wife at risk! 

After that, finally, Sarah conceives and baby Isaac is born. Sarah gets jealous of Hagar again, and Hagar is driven out, again. Then we come to the story of the binding of Isaac – which it’s possible to read as the ultimate proof of Abraham’s trust in God, or as the most fundamental failure of trust possible. Father John will speak about that story in a couple of weeks, so I’ll leave it there for now. 

I want to be clear: These are ancient, ancient stories, which probably tell us more about how the Israelites were trying to make sense of their own history and what it meant to be God’s people, than they do about specific things that happened in the literal historical sense. 

But: the minds and hearts and voices that passed down these stories, and eventually crafted them into texts that endure, were thoughtful and wise. 

They expected readers or hearers to come to know Abram’s story as a whole.

They expected readers or hearers to see Abram struggling with faith, with trust, in all these little separate episodes and in the overall story arc. 

Abraham’s story is a lot more complicated than Paul makes it. It is not just one simple, whole-hearted Yes that settles things for good. 

Abram lived a long life, with many twists and turns. There were times when he felt very clear in his path and his relationship with God, and times when he really second-guessed whether God was with him or had a purpose or plan for him. When he questioned whether God would lead him through  whatever he was facing. 

And I think that’s important.  Not just as a matter of arguing with Paul’s exegesis, his interpretation of Abraham’s life, but for us as people of faith. 

While I can’t relate to most of the specifics of Abraham’s story, the pattern – the ebb and flow, the push and pull – of his life of faith seem very familiar to me. 

I do have a base level of trust in God’s goodness; I believe that God loves and holds me.

But that by no means makes it easy to navigate or bear everything that life brings. I struggle, and second-guess, and question, too. 

Having and holding a basic, core Yes to God doesn’t mean we don’t wobble or waver.  And I think there’s hope in that, actually. 

Not so much in Paul’s reading of Abraham’s story – Paul’s description of Abraham as someone who was SO faithful, who believed SO strongly, never questioning, that God blessed him and worked through him to accomplish God’s purposes. 

But there’s hope when we read Abraham, the great-grandfather of three world religions, the way that Genesis actually presents him: as someone who wants to believe; who struggles and yearns and messes up, yet fumbles his way through a faithful life.  Confused, impatient, often afraid. But still: a life of faith. A life in conversation with God.  A holy dance with God’s purposes for self and others. 

May we indeed have a faith like Abram. 

Amen. 

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Kid-friendly, Saints, Sermons

Homily, May 21

Saint Dunstan was a Benedictine monk, and a big part of his life’s work was establishing Benedictine monastic communities. Let me explain what all that means! 

A monk or a nun  is a person who has chosen to devote their life to God by living in a special place called a monastery or convent, with a group of other monks or nuns, and following a very set pattern of prayer and work in daily life. 

Usually, monks and nuns don’t have families of their own, and they live at least somewhat apart from the community around them. They usually have a special way of dressing – like the brown robe that Benedictines wear.

Each monastery has a specific schedule of daily prayer times, meals, and work times. The work depends on the season, on what each monk is good at, and on what they do at that particular monastery. At monasteries and convents, people would usually grow their own food, care for livestock and bees, weave cloth, make candles, beer, or wine, make Bibles and books of prayer and spiritual readings, and much more. 

About 500 years after the time of Jesus, a man named Benedict started a monastery in Italy. The way of life that developed there became a movement that spread all over Europe and, eventually, all over the world. 

To become a Benedictine monk or nun, you had to make three vows. A vow is like a great big promise that you plan to keep for your whole life!

The vows were: Poverty – you had to give away everything you owned, and have nothing of your own. 

Chastity – which meant that you wouldn’t seek out romantic relationships or get married and start a family. 

And obedience – you had to vow that you would obey the leaders of the church and of your monastery. 

But those vows were just the beginning. Once you joined the Benedictine order, you had to live under the Benedictine Rule.  

That’s Rule with a capital R and it’s actually lots of rules all bundled together, to describe how these Benedictine monks were supposed to try to live. 

A monastic Rule of Life is a set of guidelines that cover everything from prayer to meals to sleep to work to prayer again. It lays out how to live in community and how to focus your life on God. The Benedictine Rule is only one Rule of Life; there are other monastic traditions with their own Rules that have developed through history, and still follow their patterns of prayer and work together. 

The Benedictine Rule is long – more than seventy chapters! It covers a lot of things. 

Some parts of the Rule have to do with helping people keep their focus on God. 

For example: There could be as many as SEVEN daily prayer times, depending on the community. Some of them were named after the hour, using the Latin names for numbers – like Terce, recited at 9 a.m. or “the third hour”; sext, read at noon or “the sixth hour”, and None (nohn), read at 3PM or the ninth hour. The Benedictine Rule says that those times of shared prayer are to reverent, pure of heart, full of honest feeling, and SHORT. Otherwise how would all the work get done? 

There’s a rule about not talking after Compline, the prayers late in the evening before bedtime, so that after Compline everybody can just wind down for rest. 

There’s a whole chapter on the practice of humility – how to focus on God, not your own will or desires, and not setting yourself above others. 

And monks weren’t supposed to have their own possessions, to help them not get too attached to objects instead of God. Each monk should have their own robe and shoes, that are comfortable and fit them well, and a mat, blanket and pillow for sleeping. But that’s about it! 

Some other parts of the Rule have to do with the strains of living in community with other people! 

There are rules about “restraint of speech” – not talking a lot in daily life – talking gets us into trouble sometimes, doesn’t it?

Instead of conversation at mealtimes, somebody reads out loud and everybody is silent and listens. 

Monks are discouraged from drinking more than half a bottle of wine per day.

Monks are supposed to be obedient to the abbot, the head monk, but the abbot is also supposed to lead with patience and understanding, not by bossing everyone around. 

Everyone’s needs should be provided for within the community, respecting that some have different needs and capacities. 

If a rich family sends their child to become a monk or nun, they have to understand that they can’t secretly send their kid extra clothes or other luxuries. He has to live like all the other monks.

What do you think of all that? 

Would you be interested in living like that?… 

There are some things about it that I like and some things that I think would be really hard! 

Dunstan lived in a difficult time. Most people were very poor and there was a lot of illness around that nobody knew how to treat. There were bandits who would raid and steal, and there wasn’t really a stable government to look out for people and make things better. Ordinary people’s lives were pretty hard and uncertain. 

Dunstan wanted to help make things better. He did that partly by being an advisor for a lot of different kings, encouraging them to do things that would improve life for the people.

But he also believed that founding more Benedictine monastic houses could be a tool for making things better. 

Even though monasteries and convents keep some separation from the community around them, they can have a big influence. People who were sick or starving, or in trouble in other ways, could come to the monks or nuns for help. Monastic houses were like hospitals, in Dunstan’s time. Most people couldn’t read, so they might come to the monastery to learn and study, or for help with a legal document. 

Hospitality is an important value for Benedictines and other monastic traditions too. All guests are to be received with prayer and generosity, and with special care for the poor and for pilgrims making a holy journey. 

The monasteries also trained monks who went out to be priests in local churches. Before that, a lot of the priests were just somebody who was picked out for the job by the local rich family. The monk-priests were better trained and more committed to God, and they could do more to teach, help, and guide the people of their congregation. 

The changes Dunstan worked for did help things get better for ordinary people. That’s why people started honoring Dunstan as a saint, not long after his death. 

Now, a church like our church is really different from a monastic community. We don’t live together all the time. We don’t have a Rule of Life that tells us how to spend each hour of our days. 

But I think even in the few hours we spend together, week by week, we are training ourselves and each other to be people who can make a difference in our communities too. Sharing worship and learning, and the ways we practice generosity and kindness and caring for one another here –  and the ways we play together and create and celebrate and share our gifts too – I hope, I believe, that all of that helps shape us into people who can do good for our neighbors and in the world around us. 

And I’m sure that it makes Saint Dunstan proud! 

Amen. 

 

A website with some info about medieval monasticism for interested kids: 

https://medievaleurope.mrdonn.org/monks.html

A nice abbreviated overview of the Rule of Benedict: 

http://snowmassmonks.com/abbreviated-rule.html

Sermons, Uncategorized

Sermon, May 7

“Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house….”

I love this image from 1 Peter… envisioning members of the church as stones in the walls of a spiritual dwelling place. 

It’s in one of my favorite texts from the Epistles too – from the second chapter of Ephesians: “So then you are no longer strangers and outsiders, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. 

In Christ the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together into a dwelling-place for God.”

That image of believers as living stones shows up in other early Christian writings outside the Bible, too – most notably in a text written by a lay Christian named Hermas, who lived in Rome in the early 100s. I wrote a term paper on it in seminary because it delighted me so much! 

Hermas describes a very detailed vision of the Church as a tower being built by angels, from all sorts of stones, representing all sorts of believers. 

For example, the damaged stones lying around the tower are “those who have known the truth but did not abide in it.” 

The cracked stones are “the ones who have something against one another in their hearts and are not at peace among themselves.” 

Some round, white stones are beautiful, but don’t fit easily into the building. These are “the ones who have faith, but also have the riches of this world,” and struggle with faithfulness.

Some stones are too short to fit well, in the course of the building. 

These stones stand for “those who have believed and live for the most part in righteousness, but they have a certain amount of lawlessness.” And there are many more…!

It’s a wonderfully detailed metaphor for all sorts of believers, semi-believers, ex-believers, and non-believers.  And in Hermas’s vision, nearly all the types of stones are eventually included in God’s great building. 

“Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house….”

What is this building these writers envision? This spiritual house, with the apostles and prophets for its foundation, and Christ its cornerstone? 

When we think of buildings plus God, we naturally think of a church building. But the first Christians didn’t meet in churches. They met in houses. 

1 Peter was most likely written – in the name of Peter, not by Peter – in the late first century. But even then, fifty years into the Christian Era, buildings specifically for Christian worship weren’t a thing yet.

The earliest church archaeologists have found is a house in what’s now Syria that was adapted into a place of worship in the early 200s. 

The earliest buildings built to be places of Christian worship came along later in that century. 150 years or more after this letter was written!

So what building does this author have in mind? 

1 Peter gives us a clue when the text links the “spiritual house” with the image of Christian believers as a holy priesthood offering spiritual sacrifices – evoking the ritual practices of the Great Temple in Jerusalem.  Judaism had long been a faith centered on one central Temple, the place to come closest to God. 

Forty years after the first Easter, around the time Mark wrote down the first Gospel, that temple was destroyed by the Romans, as a Judean revolt against Roman rule was brutally crushed.  Both Judaism and Christianity had to rethink what God’s house looked like. 

And one of the ways early Christians did that was by developing this idea of a spiritual temple – impossible to destroy, and always accessible to everybody, because we are the very stones of its walls. 

“Let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.” 

We are the stones, beloved siblings, living stones, each as unique as a stone on a lakeshore, but each with our place in the spiritual temple, God’s great house with its many dwelling-places. 

The stones aren’t asked to be passive, but to find the place where they fit and to give their strength to something bigger… even though they can’t see the plan, and will not see the building’s completion. 

Living stones.

Did you notice the other stones in our lessons today?  The stones used to kill Stephen, the church’s first martyr. 

Stephen’s story is in Acts chapter 6 and 7; the lectionary only gives us the very end of it.  At the beginning of Acts chapter 6, we are told that there was conflict within the Christian community over fairness in food distribution to the needy. And the Twelve Apostles, the leaders of the early church, did what leaders do.  

They said, Our work is too important for us to spend time resolving this; let’s appoint some people to deal with the problem. 

They picked six men (…) and commissioned them to oversee food distribution, so they – the Apostles – could focus on prayer and the word of God. Stephen is one of those appointed deacons. 

But Stephen doesn’t spend much time handing out bread and canned ham.  Instead he turns out to be a gifted preacher, evangelist – and debater. He has public arguments about Jesus with people of other beliefs. 

Before long he upsets enough people that he is arrested and brought before the Jewish Council. 

Now, if you’re one of the religious leaders associated with the Temple, and people keep cropping up talking about that Jesus fellow you thought you had dealt with, you’re going to deal with them, too. 

The charges against Stephen sound not unlike the charges against Jesus:  “We have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy [the Temple] and change the customs that Moses handed down us.”

The high priest asks Stephen, “Are these things so?”  And Stephen, according to Luke, gives a speech that is simultaneously an eloquent retelling of the sacred history of the Jewish people – and a harsh condemnation of current Jewish faith and leadership. He calls the Council betrayers and murderers who oppose God. The lectionary doesn’t give us that part of the story!

Unsurprisingly, this does not go over well, and the Council has Stephen stoned to death for blasphemy – speaking falsely about God. 

Crucifixion was a Roman practice. Stoning – throwing stones at someone until they die – was the means of execution in the Hebrew Bible. Israel is a rocky land. There were always stones on hand. 

So: stones become instruments of death for Stephen. 

What is the difference between these stones? The stones of death, and the living stones built into a spiritual temple?

There are many answers to that question – but one big difference is whose hands they’re in. Whose hands they’re in… God’s, or humans’. 

Who’s holding the stones – who’s deciding what to do with them, how to use them. 

I’ve preached on these lessons several times over the years.

The first time was in 2008, when I was preparing to be ordained as a deacon, as part of my path to priesthood. These lessons made me reflect on my place in what God is building, as I took on a new role and new work in God’s holy house, the Church. 

I reminded myself, in that sermon, that being a deacon or priest didn’t make me the architect, the builder. That my role remains a stone among other holy stones, placing myself in God’s hands to lend my strength to what God is doing. 

I preached these texts again in 2014, six years into my ordained ministry, three years into being rector of St. Dunstan’s. We were over the initial hump of getting to know one another and beginning to think about possibilities together. 

I wondered aloud, in that sermon, what kind of structure God was building us into, and invited us into some shared discernment about hopes and goals for the parish. 

Now I’ve been here another nine years. (How is that possible?) And in that time I think some of the contours of the structure God is building here have become clear. 

We are becoming a church that strives to welcome kids and youth in the fulness of who they are, and to nurture them in faith. 

We are becoming a church that strives to be fully and gladly inclusive of LGBTQ+ people. A church that strives to weave creation care into our common life in an ongoing way. A church that tries to attend to the needs of our neighbors, and to name and reckon with injustice, past and present. A church that strives to take seriously the work of extending care and companionship to one another. 

Some of those … architectural elements … are pretty solidly in place, though they may need some finishing work.

With others, we’re still building the support structures, or even laying foundation – but we’ve gotten a glimpse of the Architect’s sketches; we know what needs to be there. 

Has anybody ever been out to Pope Farm Park?  There’s a stone wall there that I really like. 

Well: let’s be honest, it’s really more of a linear pile than a wall. 

Drystone wall building is a skill that requires a lot of training and experience – knowing how to fit different sizes and shapes of stone together to build something strong and stable that will last decades or centuries, even without mortar holding it together. 

Whoever built the wall at Pope Farm Park did not have that skill. They piled cobbles and small boulders together, to a height of maybe three feet. It wouldn’t contain a horse or a goat or a human; it probably wouldn’t even stop a motivated cow. 

It’s the kind of wall you build because you need a place to put the stones from your field so they don’t keep damaging the blade of your plow. 

And it’s beautiful.

It’s beautiful because we live in a place that was once covered by glaciers, by thousands of feet of ice. 

As the Big Ice pushed into southern Wisconsin – and then as it shrunk back towards the north, eventually – it brought, and left, rocks and stones from all over. Our native geology here in Wisconsin – the ancient fossil-filled layers of the Niagara Escarpment to the east, the golden karst bedrock to the west – is hidden and complicated by stone from thousands of miles elsewhere. 

That wall at Pope Farm Park – its stones are white and gray and yellow and orange and pink and brown and black and green. Large and small. Smooth and rough. Solid and composite. Veined and fossil-marked and decked with tiny hidden crystal caverns. 

Hermas would love that wall. 

As I said: I don’t know if whoever built that wall had anything in mind beyond marking a boundary and getting some rocks out of the fields. 

But if not particularly skilled human hands can take that wild variety of stones and make this beautiful, chaotic wall, then what can God do with all of us? 

I hope the stony lessons of the fifth Sunday in Easter in Year A of our lectionary cycle always remind us to place our trust in God the Builder. 

Me, and you, and you, and you and&you&you&you&you – all of us – we and everything we bring to this community of faith, we’re just the raw materials. And that’s good. 

That’s a relief. That’s holy and joyful. 

Even if we’re sometimes a little reluctant to lay down our blueprints, our plans – I know I can be! – it’s good to know we’re not in charge. 

Because history shows us again and again that when people pick up the stones, we’re about equally likely to build them into something beautiful or useful and to throw them at somebody with whom we disagree… 

Like living stones,  let us offer ourselves to be built into a spiritual house. 

Look at yourselves, beloved friends, and look at one another,

and see someone who is useful to God, 

who has a place in the mysterious architecture of the Kingdom. 

May we have the grace and courage and patience 

to put ourselves in God’s hands, 

and give our strength to what God is building.

Amen. 

Creation Care, Sermons

Sermon, April 23

This tender Gospel story is a favorite of mine, and of many. 

We meet these two disciples, Mary and Cleopas, on the way home a couple of days after Jesus’ death. They figure everything is over and they might as well get back to everyday life. 

But they’re still talking about it all, and grieving.

By the way: Luke only names Cleopas here, but John’s Gospel names “Mary the wife of Clopas” as one of the women who stood near the cross as Jesus was dying. Clopas and Cleopas are almost certainly variants of the same name. 

So, we have a couple, followers of Jesus, part of the group that came with him to Jerusalem, returning, now, to their home in Emmaus, about eight miles from Jerusalem. 

And on the way… a stranger walks with them. 

When Father John and I talked about this story last week, he pointed out something I hadn’t noticed before: that this Gospel story echoes what the church does when we gather. 

We meet one another. 

We check in, sometimes – how are you? How are things? You look sad… 

We read and reflect on Scripture – how does it speak to us? Is there something here to hep us find meaning or make sense of our world and what we’re experiencing?  

At Eucharistic services we share a meal – with one another and with Jesus. 

Then we get up and set out, shaped by our time together, perhaps – sometimes – with hope or good news to share with others. 

I love this Gospel story, but I’m not going to talk about it much today.

Instead I want us to notice how it’s one example of the physicality of the risen Jesus. 

He walks on a dusty road.

He sits down to share a meal. 

He breaks bread. 

He seems to be a person with a body – even though he also vanishes unexpectedly from the dinner table. 

Other resurrection encounters point in the same direction. 

Jesus eats fish. He breathes on people.

Thomas pokes at his wounds.

He cooks breakfast.

He returns to visit, console, and commission his friends, in his real, physical body. Scars and all. 

That’s important not just because a ghost would be an easier story for the early church to tell… expected, almost. 

But it’s also important because of what it says about the material world, this world we live in. 

The idea of transcending material reality and returning as a spiritual being was just as present and perhaps just as tempting two thousand years ago as it is now.

Some of the core ideas of New Age spirituality have been around for a long, long time. 

Like the idea that this world is a flawed crappy knockoff of a superior spiritual plane, and that the goal of existence is to achieve enlightenment and escape from this physical world. 

The cave allegory of the Greek philosopher Plato – the idea that the things we perceive in this world are just shadows of a more true reality elsewhere – had been around for hundreds of years by the time Jesus was born. 

We can see the pull of these kinds of ideas now and then in the New Testament – of a strong dualism between the material and the spiritual, with the material being deemed bad, flawed, lesser.

John’s Gospel, for example, walks right up to that line now and then, in passages that feed the development of Gnostic Christianity a few decades later, in the late first and early second century. 

For Gnostic Christians, this world was the creation of some lesser, malevolent god, not the supreme and good God. Jesus was a divine being who came into our world to show us that we can transcend material reality and become divine ourselves. 

Gnostic Christianity thrived for a while, but ultimately was declared a heresy – not consistent with the emerging theology of the Church – largely because it did not honor the incarnation and resurrection, the physicality and this-wordliness of Jesus’ life and teaching. 

So: First Judaism, and then Christianity, were well aware of various versions of the idea that this world – nature, our bodies, human wellbeing – don’t really matter, because spiritual reality is primary. 

And first Judaism, and then Christianity, reject and resist that idea. 

This world matters. 

How we act in this world matters. 

Our human wellbeing matters. 

Our use of resources, our stewardship of creation, matters. 

Which brings me to Earth Day. 

Early Christianity was perhaps not hugely interested in creation and the health of ecosystems. 

But significant parts of Old Testament Judaism were. 

Parts of the Hebrew Bible take God’s care for – and human responsibility for – Creation and the land very seriously indeed. 

And over the millennia, many Christians have, as well. 

We have seen that the world that God called good, the world that God came into and redeemed in Jesus Christ, merits our care, curiosity, and commitment. 

We’ve looked on the diversity, complexity, beauty and strangeness of Creation in wonder, seeing it as a window into the heart of the Creator. 

I think something like that was probably at work for Father Childs, the founding rector of St. Dunstan’s, who had an inordinate fondness for conifers. 

He oversaw the planting of a wide range of conifer trees on our church grounds. 

Many of those trees – imported from different climates – have not survived the decades, but we still have enough diversity on the grounds that UW professors regularly bring students out here for identification practice. 

Appreciation of, and care for, creation as a value goes back to the earliest years of this parish. 

We’ve given it fresh attention in the past decade – including the work of a Task Force in 2016 to develop our parish Creation Care Mission Statement. [You can read it in your bulletin.]

There’s a lot I love about that work. 

I continue to find these to be helpful guideposts. 

And: I think it lacks a note of urgency that might be present if we did that work today – just seven years later. 

As the signs of climate crisis become more evident month by month, year by year, I think that for many of us creation care feels less like a sort of ethical hobby, and more like a core concern that weighs on all our plans and decisions. 

We don’t know how to make sense of it or handle it, but it looms on the horizon like a dark cloud of uncertainty, fear and grief. 

Unprecedented floods, storms, fires, droughts, species and ecosystem losses pile up in the news, week by week. 

And it doesn’t feel like anyone with the power to change the trajectory has the will to do so. 

 

In our Epiphany Climate Circle discussions – based on materials developed by the All We Can Save Project – one of the the session themes was Reframe. It invited us to think about the role of language, story, and culture. 

One of the discussion prompts really caught my attention, in my role as a church leader: “Consider your organization’s role in shaping the ‘climate story.’ Does your [organization] leverage its storytelling and culture-shaping power for climate?” 

I wonder what that could look like. 

A church is most certainly a storytelling organization. 

And as liturgical Christians, we hope that our weekly worship forms us, over time, towards the kinds of people God needs in the world. That’s a kind of culture-shaping power.

We pray, weekly, for the earth and the whole created order. 

Is that enough? Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. 

We used to use a longer version of our Prayers of the People that included these words: Spirit of Wisdom, move us from fear and despair towards courage and compassion.

Guide us to actions that protect and renew.

Maybe we need something like that, that lets us name out loud the feelings and challenges of this season, and ask for God’s help and guidance. 

Or maybe there’s some other way our shared worship could help form us for the days and years ahead. 

I don’t know the answer. But I wonder. 

I’d be interested in your ideas. 

How is your organization using its storytelling power for climate?  That question is why I decided to preach Earth Day today, instead of staying closer to our Scriptures. 

It made me want to think out loud, to wonder with all of you, how we’re called – as people of the resurrection, as Easter people – to Christian living as if this world really matters.

Even when that means taking on the grief and frustration and fear of rapid climate change and all that it might mean, for humanity and for the creatures and systems and places we love. 

One of the biggest deterrents to looking head-on at climate change is that it can make us feel really helpless. 

The material we used for our first round of Climate Circles – I hope we’ll do more! – wrestles with that helplessness and points at some important things that we can do. 

The first being: Sit with our feelings. Sit with the grief and frustration, anger and fear, the overwhelming uncertainty. 

Feel them. Process them. Share them. Find ways to release them together, and let them drive us to action, instead of overwhelming and paralyzing us. 

One important point in the readings for the Climate Circle group is that our feelings have been weaponized against us. 

For seventy years or so, Americans have been deliberately convinced that it’s our individual responsibility to protect the environment or save the planet. 

Whether by cleaning up litter, or recycling, or switching to LED bulbs, or using fabric bags at the grocery store. 

Those actions are all good! But they will not solve the problem. Huge, systemic changes in industrial, energy, and transit systems  are needed. 

But we have been intentionally taught to feel like it’s up to us – in order to deflect pressure from industry and government. 

That’s not a conspiracy theory; it’s historical fact. 

Feelings of guilt or shame over not consistently recycling, or not being able to afford an electric vehicle, or just generally not doing enough: those feelings just need to be named and released. 

To make room for more honest and fruitful emotions, like anger, grief, compassion, and determination. 

That said: It does matter for us to do the things we can, even small things, and to spread the word. 

I’ve gone to a couple of webinars on the Inflation Reduction Act – the IRA, and the incentives it offers for households to do various kinds of upgrades. 

And my biggest lightbulb moment was: Oh. 

This works if lots of people do it.

So, for example, the best thing a church can do is make sure its members know that the federal government would really like to pay you to put in a heat pump, or replace your gas stove with an electric stove, or buy an electric vehicle, right now. 

The more people use these incentives to help them take these kinds of steps, the more we shift, nationwide, towards electricity; and electricity can be, and will be, increasingly generated by sun and wind and water. 

I think the IRA is really important and I hope everybody will take a look at what it could offer them. There’s great info out there. 

But you may not be in a position to make home or vehicle upgrades! We all have different capacities and priorities. 

A couple of households have been able to make major gifts to help St. Dunstan’s install our solar panels. I’m so, so grateful.

And: Not everybody can do that. 

But we can all do something; and we can all spread the word. 

Our individual actions will not save the planet. 

But when our actions add up, they do have an impact. 

We can shift consumption patterns. 

We can shift habits and norms. 

We can shift public officials’ priorities. 

Another thing we can do is build local networks of mutual care and resilience. 

Get to know our neighbors. Share tools and ideas and resources. 

In an increasingly uncertain future – where larger systems may be more vulnerable to all kinds of risks – we’re going to need to look out for each other, and figure out ways to do what needs doing for ourselves and one another. 

Look: it’s not nothing that a committed group of five or six people made quite a lot of sugar, in March and April, right here on our grounds. 

Another thing we can do is cultivate imagination and hope. 

That’s perhaps a particularly important piece of the work for a church community. In our storytelling and culture-shaping role. 

A lot of the visions of the future that come at us are pretty grim – and the message can feel like, “You will have to give up everything you like to avoid this.” 

I’ve learned a little from a friend about solarpunk, a genre of art and fiction committed to developing visions of a green future that are actually attractive and motivating. 

Here’s a little from the Solarpunk Manifesto: 

“Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”…  As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings. Solarpunk wants to counter the scenarios of a dying earth, an insuperable gap between rich and poor, and a society controlled by corporations. Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and also for the generations that follow us.”

https://www.re-des.org/a-solarpunk-manifesto/

I’m not proposing that we start developing Solarpunk Church – though, maybe? – but there is a lot to ponder here about how to bring creativity and hope to the challenges of this time. 

We can’t naively assume that human ingenuity will avert global catastrophe.

But we can lean into the places where human ingenuity is pointing towards better futures for all living things.

And let’s not count out God or God’s creation as partners in this season of challenge, adaptation, and possibility. 

This week I read a fascinating article in the Atlantic about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a massive collection of floating plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean. 

Everything I’d ever read about it before just posed it as a problem that we have to solve. A cleanup project.

This article said that scientists are discovering that various kinds of sea life are colonizing the plastic and making it their homes.

And in fact that it’s becoming a new kind of ecosystem, where organisms that usually live in coastal areas, and organisms that usually live in the open ocean, are cohabitating and interacting and thriving. 

Let me be clear: It’s not OK that there’s a huge amount of plastic floating in our oceans. Let’s stop putting plastic in the ocean, OK?

But it is a reminder of the vitality of the natural world and its systems. 

It makes me think of a favorite poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins – The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God. Writing in the mid-19th century, Hopkins expressed grief over the ways human activity and industry were marring and scarring the natural landscape – then writes: 

“And for all this, Nature is never spent;  

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

Let me close with one more short poem, by Adrienne Rich – words of sorrow and determination. 

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: 

so much has been destroyed 

I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, 

with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. 

May it be so. 

Amen. 

Sermons

Sermon, March 5

Welcome to the Gospel of John. 

Sometimes I wonder if I talk too much about which text is what and when and why. 

But the jump from Matthew’s Gospel to John’s is a significant shift – they’re very different texts. 

And I feel like if our lectionary, our calendar of Sunday readings, is going to suddenly set us down in totally different territory, it’s at least my responsibility to give you a compass and a map. 

We often hear a lot from John’s Gospel in Lent; this year we’ll have lessons from John for the rest of March. Lessons that will show us a couple of the hallmarks of John’s Gospel. 

One such hallmark is a complex mix of mystery, puns and misunderstandings; we’ll see that in today’s story. 

Another hallmark of John’s Gospel is the presence of many extended scenes involving Jesus and another person – or several people – in conversation. We’ll hear four of those, this month! 

These are texts that invite dwelling with who Jesus was and what he meant to those he met… how he changed hearts and lives. And we start with Nicodemus. 

Nicodemus was there at the beginning. 

Jesus had just broken on the scene, begun to make headlines in the Jerusalem Times. In the Gospel according to Matthew and Mark and Luke, Jesus goes to Jerusalem exactly once, and dies there. But in John’s Gospel he goes to the Great City again and again, and riles up the crowds more and more each time. 

John’s story of the Word that became flesh, the Light that shines in the darkness, begins with Jesus named by the Baptizer,  calling his first disciples, going to a wedding and changing water into wine. 

And then he visits Jerusalem for the festival of Passover – and causes a ruckus by driving the vendors and money-changers out of the Temple court. And that night, he has a visitor. 

Nicodemus is a Pharisee. That means he was a member of a movement within Judaism at that time,  that encouraged renewed faithfulness to the religious practices of the Torah, and resisted assimilation to the ways of the modern cosmopolitan world. 

Politically, the Pharisees tended to side with the people, rather than with the Jewish elites or the Roman conquerors. 

Jesus had a lot in common with the Pharisees. That’s why they argued with each other so much. 

Nicodemus is also a leader of the Jews – a member of the Sanhedrin, the Council of religious leaders who made all final decisions on matters of religious law. 

In the time of Jesus, their power was at its peak, as they legislated all aspects of Jewish religious and political life, apart from those held by the puppet king Herod and his Roman rulers. 

Nicodemus was a man of paradoxes. 

Wealthy and elite, but concerned with the welfare of his people. 

A guardian of Jewish law, but a seeker too, open to the possibility that God is doing a new thing. 

The stories of this Jesus catch his attention, and he goes to see him. But making contact with this rabble-rouser could damage his reputation, so he goes by night, under cover of darkness.

Nicodemus is in the dark, both literally and metaphorically. Perplexed, confused, and profoundly curious.He calls Jesus Rabbi, Teacher, granting him authority from his first words.

He tells him, “We know that you are a teacher who comes from God.” 

Who’s the “we” here? Who else does Nicodemus speak for? Perhaps he has Pharisee friends who share his interest in this prophet from Galilee – who were sympathetic to Jesus’ stunt at the Temple that day. 

So Nicodemus begins with affirmation, with flattery, even. What does he think will happen next? Talk of a strategic alliance? A friendly theological discussion over a cup of wine? 

He gets a theological discussion, all right, but it leaves his head spinning.

Jesus says, “No one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above.” That Greek word, Anothen, can mean “from above” or “again.” 

Two thousand years of Christianity have accustomed us to the language of rebirth, but it’s brand new to poor Nicodemus. He asks, “What’s that supposed to mean? Am I supposed to crawl back into my mother’s belly?” 

Jesus corrects him gently enough: “I’m talking about another kind of birth, birth by water and the Spirit into the kingdom of God. Don’t be so astonished. The wind blows where it will, and you hear the sound of it, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going. That’s how it is, for those who have been born of the Spirit.” 

In this, their first and, as far as we know, only conversation, Nicodemus begins with the confident words, “We know,”  and Jesus immediately challenges Nicodemus to make the journey from knowledge to uncertainty. 

Hear Nicodemus’ questions, perplexed and frustrated: What do you mean? How can this be? Asking for explanations he’ll never get. Because even those who have been born of water and the Spirit, those who say Yes to the mystery and undertake the work of the Kingdom – even they, even us, the most we can hope for is to feel the wind of the Spirit blow. We’ll never know where She comes from, or where She’s going.

I imagine Nicodemus thinking, “Thanks; I’ll stick to the certainties of the religion I already have. And all this business about the Son of Man, and the Son of God – are those supposed to be the same person, and does this strange Galilean think it’s HIM? Does he think he’s the Messiah? Does he think he’s GOD? His teaching is strange and fascinating – but he’s asking me to believe a lot, and I don’t understand at all.”

John’s Gospel doesn’t tell us how the conversation ends. Nicodemus probably slipped away as he came, quiet through the dark streets, full of confusion, wonder. What else? Anger? Hope? … 

Nicodemus was there at the middle. 

Jesus’s reputation has grown to the point of danger. 

He comes to Jerusalem again, for the Festival of Booths. 

He comes in secret, walking the streets among the festive crowds, hearing himself debated: “He is a good man!” “No, he’s deceiving us!” 

Then he starts showing up at the Great Temple to preach. He speaks of being sent by God; he accuses the people and their leaders of superficial piety,  and calls them to a deeper, truer righteousness. 

He says, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me!” 

Rumors are flying around the city:  “Isn’t that Jesus of Nazareth? Why aren’t the authorities arresting him? Maybe he really IS the Messiah after all!” 

The Temple police stand around, abashed, uncertain. They’ve been given orders to seize Jesus, but they don’t. 

When the chief priests of the Temple demand an explanation, they say, sheepishly, “We’ve never heard anyone preach like that before.” 

The Temple leaders sneer – only the ignorant would take this strange country preacher seriously! – But Nicodemus gathers his courage and speaks up. 

He says, (Ahem.) “Aren’t we being hasty in our judgment? The Law of our faith says that we shouldn’t judge anyone without first giving them a hearing, to find out what they are doing…” 

But the other leaders turn on him:  “What, are you from Galilee too? Search the Scriptures, Nicodemus – there is no prophecy of a holy leader from Galilee.” 

Nicodemus does not have the courage to say more. To admit that he’s met Jesus – that he is drawn to him, almost in spite of himself.  He is silenced – a silence that lasts for twelve chapters. 

Is he there when the chief priests decide that Jesus must die?

Is he there when Annas and Caiaphas question and abuse Jesus, late one Thursday night? 

Is he there when Pilate says, Isn’t this man your king? and the chief priests answer, We have no king but Caesar!…

Is he looking on at a distance as the man he wanted to believe in, the man he wanted to save, dies on the cross under the noonday sun? 

We don’t know.

This we know, from John’s Gospel:  when Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy man and a secret follower of Jesus, gets permission to give Jesus an honorable burial, rather than leaving his body for the vultures, Nicodemus is there. He brings aloe balm and myrrh, a fragrant resin, for embalming Jesus’ body – a hundred pounds, an absurdly large amount. Nicodemus and Joseph tend to Jesus’ body, anointing it and wrapping it, giving the prophet from Galilee the devotion they never dared show while he was alive. And they lay his body in a nearby tomb, until the Sabbath has passed and they can find him a permanent place of rest. 

Nicodemus was there at the beginning, at the middle, at the end.

Hanging around the edges of the crowd, the edges of the story. 

Artists have always imagined Nicodemus as an old man, bearded and gray, forehead furrowed with age and perplexity. 

Today’s lectionary brings us another story of an old man called to something new, Abram, who will be named Abraham.  Abram was 75 years old, and quite wealthy, when God invites him to pull up stakes and do something entirely new. 

Most people, at that age and stage of life, would say, No, thanks, I’m good. Abram is different. He says Yes. 

Nicodemus? Nicodemus… says, Maybe.  Maybe. 

Today’s lectionary brings us, too, the words of another man firmly rooted in Judaism: the apostle Paul. In this portion of the letter to the Romans, he recalls Abram’s journey into the unknown as he argues that the foundation of human relationship with God is not any fixed doctrine or practice, but rather faith – trust – in a God who surprises us by calling into existence the things that do not yet exist.

Nicodemus is no Abraham. He’s unwilling to give up his security and his station to journey into the unknown, trusting God alone.

Nicodemus is no Paul.  He’s unwilling to give up his certainties,  the familiarity of the faith he practices and protects, for the tangled path of unknowing. 

Nicodemus is no hero. His loyalty, his love for Jesus is always tentative, limited. And yet… here he is, part of the story.

John’s Gospel treats him with compassion. 

Christian tradition has named him as a saint.

A person whose walk with God can teach us something about our own. 

Commentators have called Nicodemus the patron saint of seekers. The patron saint of the curious, the confused, the conflicted.  The patron saint of those who wrestle with faith for years – for a lifetime. 

We don’t know how Nicodemus’s story ends – though the fact that his name and voice are preserved in John’s Gospel suggest that he did, eventually, join the Jesus movement and share his story, his testimony, with the fellowship of believers. 

Nicodemus had so many reasons to steer clear,  but uncertain, unwilling, fearful as he was, the wind of the Spirit had caught in his sails just enough to change his course.

There are many icons and holy images of Nicodemus. At St. Dunstan’s, among our icons, we keep this copy of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting of the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus.

I love the play of light and dark, the colors, the way the painter gestures to both the beauty and the obscurity of this moment. 

That image is usually up above the baptismal font, among our other icons, but it’s down on our prayer table this week. 

I invite you – sometime today – to pause and take a look.  And, if you feel so moved, to light a candle for Nicodemus, the reluctant disciple, patron saint of the perplexed. 

Kid-friendly, Sermons

All-Ages Worship Homily, February 26

Let’s talk about a character in this story – the Tempter. Jesus calls this figure Satan. The Hebrew word is the “shatan”, meaning adversary or accuser. Somebody who tests or tempts someone else. 

The word Devil comes from the Greek word used to translate satan. So it’s another name for the same figure or being. 

The Devil is a supernatural being, less powerful than God, whose job is to test people’s faith. That’s the role the Satan plays in both the Old and New Testaments. They are NOT the ruler of Hell – again, those are later ideas. The Satan or the Tempter doesn’t really have much to do with Hell or an underworld or afterlife. In fact, in a couple of places in the New Testament, Satan is referred to as the ruler of THIS world. 

Is the Satan, or the Devil, real? … 

I realized that this is probably our kids’ first question, and I found that it’s not that simple for me to answer. 

I can tell you that I don’t believe that there’s a supernatural being sneaking around trying to trick or trap me.

And I also don’t believe humans need much help to do evil or bad or cruel or hurtful things. Unfortunately we don’t seem to need much help with that. Nobody should be using Satan as an excuse for bad choices. “The Devil made me do it!” 

But I’m also not a person who only believes in what we can see and touch and measure and prove. 

I believe in mysteries, and things beyond what we can understand. I know that Goodness and Holiness sometimes work in mysterious ways.  Sometimes Evil does too. 

Let’s talk about evil for just a minute. Evil means much more than just ordinary bad. And everything that is hard or sad isn’t necessarily evil.

Doing without something you really wish you had can be hard, but isn’t necessarily evil. It depends!

Dealing wiht a big change or a loss … the end of a friendship, or having to move and start over … can be really hard and really sad. But those things aren’t necessarily evil.

The death of a pet or a person you love can be VERY hard and VERY sad. But again, it’s not necessarily evil. 

Evil hurts on purpose. 

Evil delights in breaking and ruining. 

Evil wants all the things, and doesn’t care what it costs. 

Evil wants to control and dominate and take, take, take. 

Evil hates healing and reconciling, redemption and mending. 

There’s a big, old debate about Good and Evil: 

Is there an active force of Evil? A power of evil, trying to make more evil in the world? Or is Evil just where there isn’t Good yet? Just the hole where there isn’t any Good right now? I don’t feel qualified to answer that question!

So I don’t know if the Devil exists. But I don’t worry about them. 

Because the Christian witness is very strong, going all the way back, that Jesus and God are stronger than the Devil. 

I belong to Jesus, and that means I can tell the Devil to go away, any time I want. 

Anytime I feel like there might be some evil lurking around, I can remember that I belong to Jesus, and I can say: 

Go away! You have no power over me!

That’s fun to say. Want to try it? …. 

Let’s look at the story of the Temptations of Jesus again. 

Temptation means when you want something, but you know it’s not right for you, so you say No. Or you try really hard to say No! 

So Jesus goes into the wilderness for some time away to really focus and pray and be in the big emptiness of nature and prepare for how hard his work and his ministry are going to be.

And after he’s been doing that for a while, the Tempter comes to him and says, Hey, Jesus, you’ve been alone in the wilderness for a long time. You seem pretty hungry. 

Why should you be hungry, Jesus? Aren’t you really God? 

I know you want to share life with human beings, and have the experiences they have, but you’re not just an ordinary person. Hunger and deprivation and discomfort are for chumps.

You’re special. You shouldn’t have to be hungry. 

Look at all these rocks. You could just turn them into bread – nice, warm, fragrant, freshly-baked bread! What do you say?…

Let’s say it together again: 

GO AWAY! YOU HAVE NO POWER OVER ME!

Then the Satan brings Jesus to the highest point of the biggest building in Jerusalem and says to him, 

Listen, I know you’ve got some big plans ahead. 

But if you dot he things you plan to do, it’s going to get harder and harder and worse and worse for you. Eventually you’ll be betrayed by your friends, arrested, condemned to death, nailed to a cross – and then you’ll DIE. It’s going to be awful. 

You don’t want that, do you? Suffering is for ordinary people and you are special. So to prove that you’r especial and don’t have to suffer, throw yourself off this building! God will send some angels to catch you and protected you. Probably. 

What does Jesus say? ….

GO AWAY! YOU HAVE NO POWER OVER ME!

THEN the Satan, the Devil shows Jesus all the nations of the world, all the peoples… all the finery, all the land, all the wealth, all the great armies with their power and their weapons… 

And the Devil says, Right now everyone thinks you’re a poor, powerless guy from a poor, powerless part of the world. 

Look, if you were in command of all this, you could do so much good! You could use all that wealth and power to make things better for everybody. Who would be a better Emperor of the World than you?

You can have it all – if you’ll just promise to worship me and do what I say, instead of God. 

What does Jesus say? … .

GO AWAY! YOU HAVE NO POWER OVER ME!

And the Devil left… and angels came and tended Jesus. I hope they gave him a snack! 

Thank you, actors! Thank you, everyone, for wondering about the story together! …. 

Saints, Sermons, Uncategorized

Sermon, Feb. 19

The Transfiguration of Jesus is our Gospel for the last Sunday in Epiphany every year. 

It gives us – looking on with his disciples – a glimpse of Jesus’ divinity, his God-self, as his journey turns towards the cross; and as we turn towards the journey of Lent. 

Let’s note that we’ve jumped twelve chapters in Matthew’s Gospel; the lectionary will circle us back to some of what we missed, in the summer and fall.

But for now we are suddenly fairly late in the story. 

Jesus is headed towards Jerusalem, and anticipating the part of his mission where he gets arrested, condemned, and killed. 

Just a few verses later he tells his disciples “The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and on the third day he will be raised.”

The disciples are greatly distressed by this… as you would be.

But Jesus is very clear that doing and saying the things he is doing and saying is going to make the powers that be seize him and crush him. 

I wonder what they were talking about, Jesus and Moses and Elijah – or whoever these mysterious beings are, whom the disciples think are the great prophets Moses and Elijah. 

In his Gospel, Luke says that they were speaking about Jesus’ departure that he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Meaning: his death. 

Which makes sense – that this is a time for Jesus to take counsel, and perhaps comfort, before facing the hardest part yet of his earthly mission. A conversation about what’s ahead, and about how to stay the course. 

I’ve had conversations a little like that – not with people who anticipate being arrested and killed, but with people getting ready to do a hard thing, and trying to prepare themselves, and work out how to do what has to be done as well as possible. 

Maybe that’s what’s happening here. 

It’s the understanding and teaching of our church that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine; and I can’t imagine that any amount of divinity makes it easy for a human to willingly face mortal danger. 

Jesus following his path towards death paved the way for a lot of other people to follow Jesus towards death. 

The apostle Stephen was the first Christian martyr, stoned to death in the seventh chapter of Acts for preaching the Gospel.

But many followed. 

There were waves of persecution that led to many Christians being imprisoned, and some killed, because they refused to participate in the Roman state religion. 

(Saint Valentine, for example!) 

The early church came to hold the martyrs in very high regard, as having made the ultimate sacrifice for Christ. 

Martyr is a funny word. M – A – R – T – Y – R. 

You may be familiar with it in secular language, meaning of someone who appears to enjoy suffering for the sake of others. 

But that’s a distortion of its earliest and simplest meaning. 

It’s a Greek legal term, meaning a witness, as in a court of law. 

It took on its religious meaning as early Christians bore witness to their faith – gave testimony to their convictions and hopes – under threat of torture and even death. 

Those early generations of our faith-ancestors understood martyrdom as a way to respond to – and even emulate – Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross. 

(Source: https://cmsw.mit.edu/reconstructions/definitions/martyr.html) 

It became less common for Christians to die for their faith, after the year 300 or so, but it was by no means uncommon. 

Yet in the mainline churches like the Episcopal Church, we don’t tend to talk a lot about the Christian martyrs – ancient or modern. 

I’m not sure why not. 

Maybe it seems a little dramatic. A little indecorous. Excessive. 

There’s a tiny little section in our hymnal for feasts of martyrs – Hymns #236 through 241 – but I didn’t grow up singing them. 

Sometimes we talk about the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement – Jonathan Daniels, Dr. King. 

Sometimes we talk about the martyrs of World War II – Dietrich Bonhoeffer is probably the best known. 

But today I want to talk about Sophie. 

Sophie Magdalena Scholl was born in 1921, in Ulm, Germany, the fourth of six children. She was part of a lively, loving family, and was a smart, curious, loving child. 

The Scholls were not particularly religious, but were people who thought deeply about ethics and values; her father was a pacifist and had been a conscientious objector in the first world war. 

When Sophie was 11 or 12, something started to happen in her country – a new movement, with a new leader. His name was Adolf Hitler. 

At first it was exciting! Everybody was talking about a new chapter for Germany, with unity and prosperity for everyone. There were clubs for kids to join to celebrate being German. Sophie joined one, and became a leader. They marched and sang and went on outings; it was fun! Everyone felt caught up in the hope and energy of the moment. 

But this new movement in Germany wasn’t for everybody. The leaders said that only some kinds of people count as real Germans. Others don’t belong – especially the Jews. 

There had been Jews in Germany for a long, long time, and some of the best music and poetry and writing in Germany came from German Jewish musicians and poets and writers.  

But the Nazi movement said:  All of that is no good. Sophie’s brother Hans found out he wasn’t allowed to sing his favorite songs. Sophie learned that her favorite poet, Heinrich Heine, was off limits. And the young Scholls started to look more critically at this new movement. 

Deep down inside, Sophie’s heart began to turn. She couldn’t just go along with things anymore. 

Sophie finished school; by then World War II had started and Germany was deep in wartime. Hans and all her male friends had to become soldiers. Young women had to work for the German cause too, before they could start university or take another path. During those difficult years, Sophie kept in touch with a group of friends who shared thoughts and feelings about the war and the Nazi regime.  

An elderly Roman Catholic priest and scholar befriended the group and influenced their thinking, bringing Christ and faith into their reflections on how to live in such times. 

In 1942, Sophie’s brother Hans and his friends started a secret resistance network at the university where he was studying. It was called the White Rose Society. They wrote essays urging ordinary Germans to resist Nazi ideas. They printed thousands of copies of their essays, and secretly sent them all over their city and country.  

When Sophie found out, at first she was shocked – but then she asked to join them. She knew that because she was a girl, and looked young and innocent, it would be easier for her to get away with buying supplies and distributing leaflets.

It was dangerous work, but Sophie knew that. She knew that terrible things were happening – and even more terrible: ordinary people were standing by and letting them happen. Sophie and Hans knew that they were doing and saying things that might make the powers that be seize them and crush them. And they went ahead anyway. 

On February 18, 1943 – eighty years ago, yesterday – Sophie and Hans were on a university campus in Munich, leaving leaflets for students to find. Sophie had a few papers left, so she threw them over a balcony into an open area.  But a janitor saw her, and reported her to the Nazi secret police. 

Sophie and her brother Hans were arrested by the Gestapo. They were tried the following Monday, sentenced to death, and executed later the same day. Sophie was 21 years old. 

On the last day of her life, February 22nd, 1943 – eighty years ago, this Wednesday – Sophie said,  “The sun is still shining.” 

When we reflect on the lives of the blessed martyrs, we might feel like they must have been a different kind of person – a different kind of Christian – than our ordinary selves. Surely their faith was stronger, their inner vision clearer, to lead them towards the cross in such a way. 

But I’ve spent some time in the past week reading excerpts from Sophie’s letters and diary, and there’s so much that is, as we say, relatable. 

She struggled with having to live through difficult times, writing in a letter to her sister, “Sometimes, and especially of late, I’ve felt that it’s grossly unfair to have to live in an age so filled with momentous events.” (145)

She found consolation in music, as so many of us do. She writes at one point about hearing something on the radio that stirred her and helped, in her words, “distance me a little from the turmoil around me, with its resemblance to glutinous, hostile mush.” (189) She continues, “Music represents neither more nor less than the air that enables a flame to burn more brightly.” (190, winter 1942) 

She found solace and escape in nature – again, as I know many of us do. She wrote in 1942, “I’ve always felt, and I still do now, that I can hear the most consummate harmony resounding from field and forest…” (204) 

And the night before her arrest, she wrote a letter to her sister about looking forward to spring, saying, “You can’t help rejoicing and laughing, however moved or sad at heart you feel, when you see the springtime clouds in the sky and the budding branches sway, stirred by the wind.” (280)

Sophie questioned her own motives and felt like she should be doing more. As perhaps many of us do. 

In June of 1940, she wrote to her boyfriend, a soldier, about the need for clarity of conscience in complicated times – but went on to say, “Very few of my actions correspond to what I consider right… Weariness keeps me silent when I ought to speak out… I know what I’m like, and I’m too tired, lazy, and bad to change.” (75, 77, 1940, to Fritz)

In January of 1943, just a month before her arrest, she wondered whether she’d ever done anything out of truly good motives, or just to look good or keep up with others she admired. She wrote, “It’s beyond me that some people have moments of temptation only. I have moments of greater lucidity, and I’m grateful for them, but the rest of the time I’m paddling around in the dark.” (268)

Sophie struggled with prayer – as perhaps many of us do at times. Late in 1941 she wrote, “When I try to pray and reflect on whom I’m praying to, I almost go crazy, I feel so infinitely small… I get really scared, so the only emotion that can surface is fear… I can’t pray for anything except the ability to pray.” (176-77) 

In June of 1942 she wrote of praying desperately against becoming numb: “Teach me to pray… better to pray for pain, pain, and more pain, than to feel empty, and to feel so without truly feeling at all. That I mean to resist.” (207-08) 

Later that summer she wrote, “I too often forget the sufferings that ought to overwhelm me, the sufferings of mankind. I place my powerless love in your hands, that it may become powerful.” (209)

In October of 1942, four months before her arrest and death, she wrote, “Whenever I pray, the words drain out of me. The only ones I can remember are, “Help me!” I can’t offer up any other prayer….. So I pray to learn how to pray.” (249) 

She writes about feeling like she didn’t know how to approach or name God. Like she was too bad, too small, too distracted. She describes wanting to fall to her knees at an Easter service – and feeling too self-conscious and inhibited. (194) 

And yet: There is no question, reading her diary, that it was her faith and her conscience that drove her to join her brother in resisting the Nazi evil, and thus to her death. 

There is no question that Sophie Scholl is a Christian martyr. 

In my sermon last week I said: Choosing good is hard, for lots of reasons. We are often conflicted, confused, self-deluded, weak and weary. 

It can help to have a community, people in it with us.

It can help to have a season like Lent to invite us deeper into it. 

Maybe it helps, too, to have people we admire and honor to show us what it looks like to choose the good when it’s hard.

In weakness, weariness, confusion. 

Perhaps part of the work of this season – of Lent, of this season of the world – needs to be reckoning with what matters to us deeply enough to stand up for it, to work for it, even when it’s costly. 

We aren’t in the depths of World War II. But we live in profoundly uncertain times. Threats to democracy, civic strife, the deepening climate crisis… We probably feel some recognition of Sophie’s “glutinous, hostile mush.” 

I can’t help thinking about Sophie from the perspective of a parent and friend of young people. When her father, Robert Scholl, tried to get into the courtroom for Hans and Sophie’s trial, the guard told him, “You should have raised them better.”

Sophie and Hans are both a worst-case and best-case outcome for a parent: young people of courage, resourcefulness and conscience, who stood up to evil and paid the price. 

Part of me wants to urge the youth of our parish to dwell deeply with the stories of people like Sophie, to help form their hearts and souls for struggles ahead. 

Part of me wants to say, Look away. Never mind. Stay home. Stay safe. 

But it’s not up to me. 

From one perspective, the White Rose was a failure. Ordinary Germans did not rise up against the regime, as they hoped. 

Sophie believed their deaths would spur a student revolt, but it didn’t happen. People were either too comfortable or too scared.

But their lives and witness remind us that there are things we do because we have to. Because they are necessary and right, regardless of whether they work. 

That there’s always an alternative to standing by, or looking away. 

That sometimes all we can do is place our powerless love in God’s hands, and trust that somehow it will become powerful.

 

 

Diary and letter excerpts are from the book At the heart of the White Rose, edited by Inge Jens.