Susan Snook's Blog

Sermon for 1.15.12

2012-01-16T10:10:00.000-08:00

Scriptures for Today are Here

The New York Philharmonic Orchestra made the news this week when someone’s cell phone kept going off during a performance of Mahler’s 9^th Symphony. Apparently every time the orchestra would get to a particularly quiet and moving moment in the music, suddenly in the darkness the sound of the iPhone Marimba ringtone would sound. And finally, for the first time in the orchestra’s history, the conductor stopped the orchestra. He turned around, pointed at a man on the front row, and demanded that he turn off the cell phone.

We’ve all had times when cell phones have gone off inconveniently, including me. But my favorite time was this: at a small meeting here at the church, we opened with prayer. We all closed our eyes, bowed our heads, and I began: “God, we know that you have a special call for each of us ….” And right on cue, BRRRIINGG! We all burst into laughter, and as the person hastily left the room, cell phone in hand, we called after him, “Be sure and let us know what He says!”

Let’s face it, most of us will never hear God’s call that directly! But the question posed to us by our scriptures today is, how do we hear the call of God? There are a few people out there who will hear God’s voice like the boy Samuel does in our Old Testament lesson today – in the silence of the night, calling our name. But many of us will hear the call of God within the community of faith. And Episcopalians have long recognized that hearing God’s call requires both of these elements – time alone with God, listening for God’s voice, and time with the church community, testing our call with other people who can see us better than we see ourselves and listening to their voices. This is why people interested in ordination can’t just decide it for themselves. They have to go through a process of meeting and praying with other people who exercise the gifts given to the church community – listening and discerning God’s voice the best they can.

But discernment of God’s call doesn’t just apply to ordained people. It applies to people exercising lay ministries as well. Every one of us has a call from God, and answering that call will help God build us into the people he created us to be.

So for each of us, how do we learn to distinguish God’s voice from our own? I think that our Old Testament lesson about the boy Samuel shows us two things. Hearing God’s call requires time alone, praying and listening, and it requires community.

So let’s talk first about time alone: is this something each of us makes time for? Do we pray each day, and not just pray by talking, but by listening too? Many of us find praying difficult, partly because it’s hard to make our minds concentrate, and partly because we are intimidated by the idea of trying to find the right words. The poet Mary Oliver writes about trying to find the right words for prayer:

It doesn't have to be 

the blue iris, it could be 

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few 

small stones; just 

pay attention, then patch 

a few words together and don't try 

to make them elaborate, this isn't 

a contest but a doorway 

into thanks, and a silence in which 

another voice may speak.

A silence into which another voice may speak: praying is a matter, not just of talking to God, but of listening for God’s voice too. All of us are different, and different prayer practices work better for some of us than for others. This is why we are offering our Spiritual Practices Study in small groups – so that you can learn different ways of praying and listening for God’s voice, and decide which ones work best for you.

The second part of listening for God’s voice is what the old priest Eli did for Samuel: provided the voice of the church community, helped Samuel learn to respond. Samuel has been brought up within the temple, he is steeped in the worship, stories, and traditions of his people, and all those things help him hear the call of God as he is lying in the dark sanctuary where the lamp has not yet gone out. Yet an older person, suffering from lack of vision yet still with the experience to know how God speaks, helps him learn what to do. And Samuel becomes the next leader of Israel, a transitional leader, who eventually finds and anoints David as king of Israel.

This way of responding to God is an everyday experience in the church community, and it doesn’t have to happen through a voice in the darkness – hearing the voice of God can happen through ordinary interactions. Someone will come to us and say, I’ve seen you relate to people in touching and beautiful ways – have you thought about working with newcomers? Or, you have a healing and comforting touch – would you like to visit the sick? Or, you have a passion for helping the poor and suffering – would you like to take on a particular outreach ministry? You love children – would you like to teach? The people who come to us and ask us these things often see things in us that we never knew were there – this was the case for the first priest who called me into lay leadership in the church. But also, they have a gift for helping us articulate desires of our own hearts, the yearnings that may be expressions of God’s voice speaking to us. and this, I think, is one of the most important gifts of a church community – helping us to hear the voice of God through worship, prayer, service, calling.

I think it is vital for us to understand why the church community exists, because I would say most people in our world don’t – They Like Jesus, But Not the Church (as the title of a recent book puts it). There’s a YouTube video that went viral this week, with millions of hits and many, many young people sharing it with their friends – called Jesus > Religion. Watch it here. In this video, a young, hip-looking poet named Jefferson Bethke gives a long rap-like rant about religion, starting with the line: “What if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion: – and continuing with claims like:

“I mean if religion is so great, why has it started so many wars / Why does it build huge churches, but fails to feed the poor …." and

“Now back to the point, one thing is vital to mention / How Jesus and religion are on opposite spectrums / See one’s the work of God, but one’s a man made invention / See one is the cure, but the other’s the infection”

There are so many points made in this video, both good and bad, that it would take hours to unpack them all properly. But even if none of us here agree with what he’s saying about religion, we need to understand that there are lots of people who do agree. And if we’re going to minister to our community, to reach out to our world with the love of Christ we believe in and live by, if we’re going to invite others to come and see what we have found here, we need to understand why God calls us into church communities, and what church is all about.

So we can easily dispose of some tired old claims atheists like to trot out. Have people started wars over religion? Yes, and people have also started wars over communism, democracy, territory, power, money, slavery, land grabs, power grabs, money grabs, and on and on. Human beings are sinful – that is one of the foundational beliefs of our religion – and it takes God to set us free from our own tendency to sin.

Has religion built great churches? Yes. Has it failed to feed the poor? No. Christians have done huge amounts of charity work for two millennia. As the largest religious group in the world, Christianity may be the most potent force for loving others the world has ever seen, and all because people have heard the call of God in their church communities. Christians have done great work also to establish justice in the world – such Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate this weekend – who helped to finish the job of setting people free in this country – working through what he called “The Beloved Community.”

So when Jefferson Bethke says: “Religion might preach grace, but another thing they practice / … See the problem with religion, is it never gets to the core / It’s just behavior modification, like a long list of chores” - I have to say, don’t criticize religion for not helping the poor, then also criticize it for saying that religion involves behavior modification. We do believe that Jesus changes our lives, and that includes living differently, behaving differently, loving differently, than we otherwise would. Christianity IS something you do, not just something you believe.

Bethke continues: “Now I ain’t judgin, I’m just saying quit putting on a fake look / Cause there’s a problem If people only know you’re a Christian by your Facebook / I mean in every other aspect of life, you know that logic’s unworthy / It’s like saying you play for the Lakers just because you bought a jersey.”  Well, no one would agree more than Jesus – we need to live as Christians – people need to be able to see it in way we live and the way we care for each other. Christianity is not something you do in secret – it is a way of life.

It is abundantly clear from the gospels that Jesus did not come to abolish religion. He says he came not to abolish, but to fulfill, the Law and the Prophets. And Jesus took very intentional steps to create a community of faith – which we can see bits of in today’s gospel. All 4 gospels tell us that the first thing Jesus did when he decided to launch his ministry was not to go out to the mountain and start preaching, but to call a group of disciples who would be future leaders of his community. And I think Jesus did this very intentionally because he knew that we can hear the voice of God in community much better than we can individually. These leaders would learn by following Jesus and listening to him, but they would also learn from each other, like Philip and Nathanael. And after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the community they formed with each other helped them keep their faith strong and to make disciples of others. They formed a community of faith that has passed down the news of Jesus through 2,000 years. If Jefferson Bethke knows anything about Jesus, it is because other people in the worldwide community of faith have showed him and told him about Jesus.

So let me ask you, why are we part of a community of faith? What makes religion an important part of our lives? Why is this worth doing, why not follow Jesus alone? Sure, you can admire God’s creation on the golf course; you might even pray there. But what can you do in the community of faith that you can’t do there? You can worship in community, you can share in the sacraments, you can learn from the wisdom of other followers of Jesus. You have a community that prays for you when you’ve lost the ability to pray. You have a group of people that can help you hear the voice of God.

Most of us are not going to hear Jesus’ voice like a cell phone ring; most of us will hear God’s call from other people who say: that voice you’re hearing, that desire to do something more, that wish to know God more completely, that pull to do something new with your life – that is the voice of God.

Because the most powerful thing about being called into a community of faith is the idea of being part of something bigger than you are – being one member of a Body of Christ that can change the world – being a follower of Jesus, who knows us each better than we know ourselves, and has a call for each of us.

As Mary Oliver says: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Sermon for 1.18.12

2012-01-08T19:52:00.000-08:00

Scriptures for this Sunday are Here

There’s nothing like being a parent for the first time – because nothing prepares you. Before our oldest daughter Sarah was born, Tom and I prepared exhaustively. We read books, we took classes, we got advice from other parents. We knew about every possible childbirth issue and we were sure we knew what to expect – and sure enough, everything went fine with the birth.

But the surprise came the next morning, when the doctor came in to release me and the baby from the hospital. He grinned at us cheerfully and said: “Well, the easy part is over. The hard part is the next 21 years.” And Tom and I just stared at each other blankly – because how could anything top the drama of a child being born?

That afternoon, we dressed Sarah in footie pajamas and a little knit hat, wrapped her up carefully in 7 or 8 blankets, nestled her into her state-of-the-art child safety seat, and took her home – and I remember walking into the house, all prepared with cribs and cute baby equipment and plug covers and child safety locks; sitting down with Sarah on the couch, looking at her, looking up at Tom. And together, in unison, we looked at each other and said, “Now what?”

Because it suddenly occurred to us that we thought we had prepared everything we could possibly prepare, but we had no idea how to be parents.

And for the last 20 years, we’ve done what every parent has ever done – figured it out as we went along, taught her what we were taught, hoped she learned some things we couldn’t teach her, helped her grow up as best we could, and most of all, just loved her. Because that’s the whole point of being born, isn’t it? It’s not about all the preparation that led up to the birth, the work on creating a family that can nurture a child, the nutrition, the gathering of supplies. Those are all important – but the whole point of the birth is, now what? What is going to happen during the course of this precious new life? How is the child going to live into the promise of perfection, the day she was born?

As we read the story of Jesus’ baptism in our gospel today, the question that baptism points toward is – Now What? This baptism is the very first event in Mark’s gospel – Mark’s version of the Christmas story in a sense – the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, the moment when his identity comes clear, the opening of the trajectory of his life. And from this moment of baptism, we can look backwards to see all the preparation that has brought Jesus to this moment, but more importantly, we can look forward to understand what his baptism is pointing toward – what it will mean for Jesus, and what it will mean for us.

Looking backwards, this scene from Mark’s gospel evokes some deep truths, some vital events in Israel’s history that every listener would have understood. First, at the most basic level, the ritual of baptism points to cleansing and purifying rituals that would have been familiar to every Israelite. John takes this simple and repeatable act within Judaism and re-purposes it as a one-time ritual symbolizing repentance and forgiveness of sins – which is a direct challenge to the power and authority of the Temple in Jerusalem – because the Temple has a monopoly on ritual acts taken to ask for forgiveness. John circumvents all this and says that the Temple apparatus is not necessary. For forgiveness of sins, what is necessary is repentance and baptism, and the past will be wiped clean, life can begin again, anew – with a second birth.

Taking the meaning a step deeper, the fact that this baptism takes place in Jordan River brings to mind for Israelites the triumphal entry of the Israelites into the Promised Land. Moses had led them out of slavery and had died, and had turned over leadership to a new leader, Joshua, who parted the waters of the Jordan as Moses had parted the waters of the Red Sea and led them to their new home. Jewish people hearing this story of Jesus’ baptism for the first time would have understood intuitively that Mark is telling them that a new Joshua has arisen, who is leading them to a new place of Promise – emphasized by the fact that Jesus’ name, in Hebrew, IS Joshua – a name for heroes, meaning “God Saves.”

But here, instead of the waters being parted, it is the heavens that are torn apart as the Holy Spirit comes to rest on Jesus. The people are not coming to live in a new place, in a new way. It is God himself who is coming out of the heavens to rest on Jesus, the Son of God who is making his home among us, and who will make the everyday reality of our life right here the new Land of Promise.

Behind that story lies one more, still deeper and further back. Many peoples and cultures have creation stories that involve water. The Hopi people, for instance, tell of worlds before our world, that were destroyed by fire and flood; and of a Creator Woman rescuing the Hopi people from flood and making them boats in which they floated to safety, until they finally emerged into new creation from a certain spring at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Other cultures have similar stories of our world emerging from creation water.

Our Old Testament lesson points the way to this truth also: the Bible tells us that in some deep and mysterious way, all of creation comes out of water. We read this morning, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” ‘Wind’ is same word as ‘Spirit’ in Hebrew – so we understand that into this brooding, wet, windy, Spirit-filled silence, the voice of God speaks the words of creation – and life bursts forth.

Perhaps underneath those stories of creation lie some deep truths. Not only the scientific facts of our earth, that tell us that life emerged from water. But the fact that each of us were held in our mothers’ wombs, suspended in water, before we were born, emerging from a world of water into a world of earth and air.

As Jesus stands in the Jordan River, as he emerges, dripping, from the water, as the Spirit of God descends upon him, we see that what is happening to him is no less than a moment of new creation, new birth, new life.

Which is where we come back to our original question – Now What? Because the point of new birth is not the preparation, but the life to be led after the birth. For Jesus, the key to Jesus’ baptism is this voice that declares he is God’s Beloved Child. Jesus’ own Belovedness becomes the key to understanding everything he does. Because, for any child, the experience of being loved by a parent, or some other mentor, becomes the foundation of our ability to love others in turn. Because Jesus is loved, he is able to give love away freely on the cross, and love becomes the whole meaning of his life.

Jesus’ baptism points the way to our baptism, a new birth for us too. Someone recently asked me, what are the minimum beliefs required to be a member of our church? And here’s the answer: there are no minimum beliefs. We only ask people to be baptized, which is full initiation into the church. There are some other procedural things to become a member of Church of the Nativity, but there’s no quiz on beliefs. And sure, the church has basic beliefs, all spelled out in the Nicene Creed. It’s not that the beliefs aren’t important – they are, and I believe them. But we don’t ask people to be 100% certain of those doctrines to be members – as Queen Elizabeth I said in helping to settle the conflicts of the Protestant Reformation, “I will not make windows into men’s souls.”

We’re all on a journey where we are traveling toward more knowledge of God. There’s a story of Billy and Ruth Graham driving along a highway somewhere, when they came to a long stretch, maybe 20 miles, that was under construction. So of course they had to slow down and creep along. When they finally came to the end of the construction, there was a sign, and Ruth Graham pointed to the sign and said, “That’s what I want on my tombstone when I die.” Billy Graham looked at the sign and it said, “Construction Complete. Thank you for your patience.”

Baptism is the beginning of a lifelong journey of growing into the new birth God has given us in baptism. I tell parents who are baptizing their babies – when they are born, physically, you don’t expect them to understand everything about how to live. What you do is accept them into your family and promise to feed them, love them, cherish them, teach them what they need to know to become wise and strong and caring adults, who are ready to take their place in the world.

It takes a lifetime to grow into the promise of our birth. And the same is true for our rebirth, our baptism – it takes a lifetime to grow into. A lifetime of accepting our belovedness, a lifetime of learning to love others.

So – for us who have been baptized in his name – Now What? Jesus asks us all to listen carefully, on this Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, this day on which we all remember our own baptisms. Listen carefully to what God is saying to each of us in our baptism: You are my Child, the Beloved: in you I am well pleased. You are loved by God: the love of God that was poured into Jesus at his baptism, is the same love that has been poured into us by the power of the Holy Spirit. We are forgiven, we are healed, we are reborn into new life. And by the power of the Holy Spirit, we are given the ability to pour that love into the world, loving others as we have been loved.

So it’s a simple question, really, but it’s a question that I invite each of you to think about this week. It’s the question of all of our lives as Christians – what happens now? How should we live into our baptism, the new birth we have been given? How are we called to love world as God loves us?

Now that we have been baptized, now that we have been reborn into new life, now that we have been given new birth as children of God – Now What?

Sermon for New Year's Day 2012

2012-01-08T19:48:00.000-08:00

Over the Christmas holiday, we had family in town, so we took them to visit the Musical Instrument Museum. There are big rooms for each continent on earth, and they give you a set of headphones, so as you walk up to the display for each country, you see someone playing music on a video screen, and your headphones pick up the sound as you walk up to it. So, we learned about music from all over the world, and I noticed different concepts of time in music.

Some musical cultures, like our Western tradition, have fairly defined notions of time in music – time signatures that give predictable rhythm and tempo. Others, noticeably Asian cultures, don’t have a time signature that’s recognizable to Western ears – the music seems to meander and at its own pace. It’s very interesting to listen to music that obeys a completely different set of rules than you’re used to hearing.

Even for us westerners, good musicians learn how to transcend time. Jeanne Person, professor of spirituality at General Seminary, tells this story about a metronome, a very irritating object that music students use to help them keep time: “I remembered my own metronome, a small, mechanical one in a rectangular red case that helped me, when I was a young musician, to learn tempos as I played Czerny piano exercises and Bach organ fugues. Usually, the metronome would reveal my weakness, as I failed to keep tempo, to live up to its demands, to be perfect. One day, a new piano teacher … stopped me as I pounded through a Bach piece, striving for faultlessness. He took my hands in his, tenderly. “You must love the piano,” he said. “Love the music.”

Which is as good a way as any to think about the two kinds of time the ancient Greeks recognized: they had two different words for time. One was chromos: the kind of predictable, measurable time a metronome keeps track of, or a clock, or a calendar. Chronos is the kind of time that says, this is New Year’s Day, and every New Year’s Eve makes me wonder why we should celebrate the fact that the clock changed from 11:59 to midnight – as it does every single night. Chronos time is not something to celebrate, in my view – it’s simply a mechanical measure.

But it’s the other kind of time that we remember in our lives – the kind of time that you are living when you “love the music” – and it’s what the Greeks called kairos time. Kairos time takes place within chronos time, but it feels different: you say, it’s time for me to make a change in career, it’s time for me to apologize to my mother, it’s time for us to build a new church. Watches and calendars can’t tell you about that kind of time – that kind of time, kairos time, lives in your heart.

Kairos time, in a sense, is God’s time. If New Year’s celebrates mere chronos time, then the Christmas season (which we are still in) celebrates kairos time. When God takes action to enter our world, God’s Kairos time has entered into our dull chronos time, and the world is eternally altered as a result.

In fact, my favorite Christmas poem recognizes that fact: BC:AD, by the British poet U.A. Fanthorpe:

This was the moment when Before 

Turned into After, and the future's

Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.  

This was the moment when nothing 

Happened. Only dull peace 

Sprawled boringly over the earth.  

This was the moment when even energetic Romans 

Could find nothing better to do

Than counting heads in remote provinces.  

And this was the moment 

When a few farm workers and three 

Members of an obscure Persian sect 

Walked haphazard by starlight straight

Into the kingdom of heaven.

In Jesus, God's Kairos time entered our chronology so decisively that our whole way of measuring time had to change. We point to Jesus' birth as the fulcrum of all human time - everything before was BC, everything after was AD, and all of time in the western world revolves around that moment. At that moment, the moment of Jesus' birth, the clock ticked on and the world looked no different - but at this moment, God took decisive action to enter our world - and eternity came crashing into chronology.

Reading today’s gospel story, you might think that Kairos time is moving fast indeed. Just a week ago we had Jesus as a newborn, and today he’s a 12-year-old boy. In between, we know next to nothing about his life: Luke tells us that at 8 days, Jesus was dedicated in the Temple – the custom for newborn boys. And Matthew tells us that to get away from King Herod, who wanted to kill the newborn King of the Jews, the family fled to Egypt, then returned after Herod had died (which was about 4 BC).

But gospel writers don’t tell us so little about Jesus’ early life because they’re keeping some kind of secret – it’s because they’re telling us kairos, not chronos – they’re not interested in filling in a timeline – they’re interested in God’s moments. God’s time says there is something significant in this event in Jerusalem, when Jesus amazes the priests and scribes with his learning and wisdom. Luke probably wants us to understand that Jesus was gifted with wisdom beyond his years, wisdom that can’t be explained by his country origins. But he also wants us to understand the choices Jesus’ parents made with kairos time.

I think we can discern some very interesting facts about Jesus’ life here. In the 19^th and early 20^th century, it became fashionable for scholars to see Jesus as an illiterate peasant – but this is not true, as you can plainly see by reading today’s story. Jesus was not a peasant – he was the son of a tradesman living in a small town. Joseph was a carpenter – not a furniture maker, but a builder, day laborer. Joseph would probably have walked each day to the nearby Roman city of Sepphoris to work on building the great Roman city there – Herod Antipas’ capital, full of Roman baths, theaters, all the delights of Roman civilization.

As Jesus reached the age of 8 or 10, old enough to hold tools responsibly, he would have been expected to be about father’s business, help support his family. Yet this gospel story tells us that he claims a different Father’s business. He claimed God as his Father, and the Temple discussions of God’s laws as his business.

This was possible because Jesus’ parents made sure he had time for something else than working for a living – he had an education. Jesus learned how to read, how to study scripture, how to discuss God’s words at a very high level. Granted, he was Son of God – naturally gifted for this work – but his parents must have paid a rabbi in Nazareth to give him reading and scripture lessons, sacrificing not only the cost of education, but also foregoing some income that he could have brought into the family.

So the Jesus we picture as a country bumpkin would really have been literate and very well educated for a Jewish boy – all gospels are clear about his intellectual gifts and his ability to hold his own against the most distinguished scholars. And this is true for him because the adults around him made his religious education a priority – and because they did this, he changed the world.

The Son of God is not a 12-year-old child today: but our world is full of young people whose lives are brimming with God’s possibilities. These are children and youth whose whole lives are before them, who are in the prime years of learning their place in the world, developing their God-given talents.

Yet fewer and fewer of these young people have any exposure to faith. The fastest-growing religious demographic in the US is the “nones” - those who claim no religious affiliation at all – 12% of the US population. And 25% of young people are “nones.” Even Evangelical Christians are failing to keep their young people in church – a majority of them drift away when they grow up, which researchers David Campbell and Robert Putnam attribute to the politicization of religion.

These “nones” are not atheists – 93% of the nones believe in God or a higher power. They are simply people who don’t know what to believe – they dabble in different things – Buddhism, Catholicism, Sufism, New Age. But with no faith tradition, they are left with no solid foundation, no religious community, no spiritual discipline or tradition to fall back on when life gets hard. And studies in Britain show that 94% of children raised without faith will never have it – it’s much harder to help adults develop a relationship with God.

Growing in faith is a lifelong process that for most humans, as for the Son of God, needs to begin in childhood, needs to develop in young people the habits of faith and the conviction of God’s love, and the willingness to reach out and love others as we love ourselves – if they will ever have these gifts.

If you want to know why we’re building a church – this is why. It’s partly for us who are here in this room – we love our church community, we want it to grow. But it’s mostly for the generations who are now children, and for the generations to come after them. Their lives will be changed because of the priority we are giving them.

And if you want to know why we put time and budget money and effort into our children’s and youth programs, this is why. Growing in faith begins when we are young, when our minds are open, when our hearts are ready for God.Because God’s time is now; kairos time is here; and we are the ones whom God calls to bring the news of God’s love to a new generation. God’s love comes bursting in on us, in God’s time, in the form of a child who was loved and made a priority by his parents, and would grow up to become our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Sermon for Christmas Eve 2011

2011-12-25T16:23:00.000-08:00

Scriptures for tonight are Here

What is your earliest Christmas memory? Memory is a very strange thing, you don’t remember whole events, you remember pictures – moments infused with sights, smells, feelings, thoughts. Memories stay with us like photographs – frozen moments in time that we can call up and look at, and remember the stories that lie behind the memories.

My earliest Christmas memory is this: picture, like a photograph, four-year-old me, standing hiding a little bit behind my mom, peering out at a tall, thin, balding man sitting on a couch next to a Christmas tree all lit up with lights and tinsel. It doesn’t sound like much of a photograph, but you have to know the story behind it.

This little moment of memory was from the year I was four years old. My father, an army officer, was away in Vietnam. My mother, my baby sister and I lived in an apartment complex full of families like ours – wives and children whose husbands/fathers were at war. My mother made sure I remembered my father – there was a big glossy picture of him on the wall above my bed, taped onto a posterboard that said “Daddy” in big red letters. My mother and I wrote letters to him every day, with my 4-year-old scrawl in red crayon on the outside of the envelope, saying “To Daddy.” And we’re told that the Army mail clerk in Vietnam found that extremely amusing. He would come to my father’s tent with the mail and say, “Let’s see if we have any mail for ‘Daddy’ today – why yes, we do!”

For Christmas in my little world, a world with no dads, the moms did the best they could – putting up lights and trees, getting our families of women and children together to celebrate, putting mysterious presents under the tree. That was the year Santa brought me a tricycle, shiny and green with tassels hanging from the handlebars. I loved that tricycle. But of course what we really wanted was to have our fathers home for Christmas.

That year, my best friend's father actually got leave and came home, all the way from Vietnam, for a week at Christmas. And my Christmas memory, that picture, is this: going over to our friends’ apartment, standing shyly hidden behind my mother, looking at the Christmas tree, all shiny with tinsel and lights, and next to it, on the couch, a tall man. And I remember looking at him and thinking, so that’s what a father looks like.

If this were a Disney movie, the door would have opened on Christmas Eve, and my father would have walked in – but that’s not what happened. My own father didn’t get to come home that Christmas, but he came home one month later. And when we met him at the airport, I was the first one to catch sight of him as he stepped off the plane, and I shouted “Daddy!” and ran and jumped into his arms – a story often told, another memory photo my family treasures.

And I learned, at age 4, that the greatest Christmas present doesn’t have anything to do with tinsel and lights, it doesn’t have anything to do with anything you might find under the tree – not even the fanciest green tricycle. The greatest Christmas present is to be with the people you love.

Maybe you have albums full of Christmas photos like that one too – in your house or maybe just treasured in your memory. Maybe your photo is of running and jumping on your parents’ bed at 5 a.m. on Christmas morning, seeing them grumbling but smiling to see you awake. Maybe you see yourself as a child, scrambling down the stairs to see whether Santa came, turning the corner in your bare feet and pajamas, stopping to see a shiny new bicycle, with a bow on the handlebars and your name on a tag. Maybe your picture is of your extended family, all gathered and ready for Christmas dinner, the house smelling of turkey and your grandmother’s apple pie, and everyone smiling for the camera just before you sit down to eat.

And when you look at those photos, in your photo albums or in your mind, perhaps a little worn and faded with age, perhaps in soft focus so you don’t quite see or remember the hard edges around those old Christmas memories, what warms your heart is not the photos themselves, what you remember is the stories you know behind the photos –and most of all, memory of love.

Probably when we think of Christmas, we all have another photo in mind too. Somewhere in our memory, we have a picture of the first Christmas. We see a cold, clear night with starlight brightening the night sky. We see a field outside of town with shepherds gazing in fear and amazement at a sky full of angels, singing the most beautiful music any ear has ever heard. We see one star that is brighter than the rest, shining on small, humble stable. We look inside that stable, and see hay on the floor, and a donkey and an ox warming the cold air with their warm breath.

We see a steady, responsible, worried husband gazing down at his wife and wondering how on earth he is going to do the task God has given him to do. We see a young wife who has just given birth to a baby, looking at the child in wonder and pondering deep thoughts and questions in her heart. And we see a tiny, warm, newborn baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, no crib for his bed. The baby has a short, dangerous life ahead of him – before he knows it, his family will be fleeing to Egypt to escape the first of many world rulers who will seek to kill him, one of whom will eventually succeed. But for this one night, he is safe, and warm, and loved, and his young mother and her worried husband, and a band of ragged shepherds, and a sky full of angels, stand watch over him this cold, clear night.

And why is this a precious memory for us, this picture of that night in Bethlehem? It’s not that the picture in our mind is so beautiful. That first Christmas had none of what we’re used to – no beautiful trees and twinkling lights, no Santa Claus, no bicycles waiting in the morning. It had no extended family gatherings, no grandmas, no turkey; the young mother gave birth alone, without her own mother to help her. The young family in our mind’s picture is far away from home for Christmas, and won’t be going home to Nazareth anytime soon. The shepherds are dirty and poor, the stable smells of the animals who live there. And yet this picture in our mind is infinitely precious to us, a picture of love.

That memory of a night in Bethlehem is precious to us is not because that picture itself is unusual: children are born to worried, poor, lonely parents every day. It’s precious because we can look at it and remember the rest of the story. It’s a story about the God of the universe who took on human flesh and lived an ordinary human life, as vulnerable to hunger, sorrow, cold, pain as you and I. A story about God, not a god who sits on a throne and watches us from a distance, but a God who decides to be born as a vulnerable and poverty-stricken child, who cries and eats and sleeps and grows just like any child; who will be so vulnerable that he will die under the power of those same Roman soldiers counting heads in Bethlehem at his birth; but who will triumph over the powers that put him to death by rising to life again.

This is the God whom we will remember in everyday substances like bread and wine, the God whose real presence lies not just in angels and stars. This is the God who is truly present in every fleshly moment of our lives, the God who loves us in the very earthiness of our existence, the God who will never abandon us, no matter how ordinary or troubled our lives might be. This is the God who comes into our everyday human lives, and makes them holy.

We love this picture because we can see ourselves in it. A God who was born in a stable in the year 1 is a God who is also born in our lives in the year 2011, whose love reaches out to warm anyone who has ever been cold, lonely and far away from home. A God whose parents were traveling at the whim of a faraway emperor, with no place to stay at the time of his birth, is a God who understands about the distant forces that affect our lives, families and governments and economics, and who comes to us to offer a solid foundation when everything else seems to shake.

A God who was visited by dirty shepherds from a dark field outside of town is a God who welcomes every person who lies awake in the dark and prays for light to shine from somewhere, somehow. A God who was born to a young girl who ponders these things in her heart is a God who offers love to every person who yearns for meaning and purpose. And a God whose angels proclaim peace and goodwill in a backwater country that has known only war and heartache for hundreds of years, is a God whose peace is deeper and more complete than any peace the world can offer, and yet who offers that peace to the world, on a silent, holy night, in a dark street shining with everlasting light, in a newborn child who is infinitely dear to us, because his new and precious life is the picture of perfect and eternal love.

Merry Christmas, everyone. May the Christmas memories you make this year fill your hearts with the light of Christ’s love.

Sermon for 12.18.11

2011-12-18T16:14:00.000-08:00

Scriptures for today are Here

Frederick Buechner, in his book Peculiar Treasures, wrote: “She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been entrusted with a message to give her and he gave it. He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. ‘You mustn’t be afraid, Mary,’ he said. And as he said it, he only hoped she wouldn’t notice that beneath the great, golden wings, he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.”

We don’t see the angel in our icon of the Annunciation (created by Laura Fisher Smith) – we have no way to know whether Gabriel was truly trembling or not. We see Mary, as she becomes aware of a reality unseen by anyone else. An icon is more than a painting, a decoration – an icon is painted with prayer at every step, from selecting the background material to making the paint to every brushstroke the artist makes.

And therefore an icon is intended to be an aid to prayer – not something you pray to – but something a bit more like an icon on a computer screen. When you click an icon on your computer, a new world opens up. This is what Christian icons are: think of this icon as a passageway between our ordinary everyday reality and the deeper reality that exists around us at all times and places – the reality of God.

In God’s reality, we see Mary as a dark-skinned peasant girl – not yet transformed into the Queen of Heaven in our other icon – but in the moment that she becomes aware of an angel’s presence. In this moment, she herself has become the window, the entryway, the portal between heaven and earth, as angels hold their breath and wait for her reply.

She stands expectantly, hands upraised, bathed in light. Young, dark-haired, she seems to be a young woman poised on the threshold of adulthood, still full of the dreams of childhood. You can imagine what the girl Mary has been dreaming – dreams of the carpenter Joseph, of the new home that awaits her when she marries him, of the large and happy family she hopes will come her way. And maybe she has bigger dreams too – dreams that the Romans who oppress her people, and the Israelite hierarchy that profits from the common people’s distress, will be overthrown, that peace and justice will come to her people so that no one will starve and no one will risk crucifixion by speaking against injustice.

Maybe she dreams of a new world in which the rich and powerful will be brought down and in which God will lift up the lowly. Maybe she dreams of a God who will defeat death and renew all of creation. Maybe she dreams of a new kingdom of God, of possibilities that seem impossible. And maybe it is her sheer openness to impossible dreams that allows her to become aware of the presence of an angel.

We don’t see the angel in our icon – we see only Mary experiencing him: a rush of wings beating around her ears, a sudden warmth that fills her with fear and longing, a light that bathes her in the illumination of angel’s presence. And, as Gabriel and all the angels tremble in anticipation, Mary says yes, and becomes the mother of God, the window that opens up to allow heaven to pour through into our world.

About a year before my first child, Sarah, was born, I had a dream about a little girl who would be my daughter. The little girl in my dream looked a lot like Sarah turned out to be, and she acted a lot like the daughter I eventually had. Maybe that dream was just my own hopes of what a daughter would be like. Or maybe God had a way of letting me see the gift he was bringing me – I don’t know. But I treasured that dream as a picture of my hopes for my daughter.

As mother of our Lord, Mary is more than a passive vessel – she is somehow open to the hopes God has for her and for her child. In the gospel of Luke, Mary is clearly a prophet. A prophet is not someone who foretells the future. A prophet is someone who is a window into a different reality – God’s reality. A prophet sees things with God’s eyes, is able to speak God’s words to us and open up our eyes to God’s reality that exists all around us at all times and places, if only we had eyes to see. A prophet is an icon of God’s kingdom.

So Mary opens her eyes to see what God is doing in her and through her. And then she opens her mouth and begins to sing – the song that we heard in place of the psalm today – the Magnificat, named for its first line in Latin: my soul magnifies the Lord. The Magnificat helps us see the truths that Mary sees with prophet’s eyes, the reality that God wants us to experience, we who are so often blind to God’s reality: that in Jesus, the mighty have been brought down, the humble have been exalted, the hungry have been fed, rich have been sent away empty. She sings that in Jesus, all of God’s promises to Israel have been fulfilled.

The interesting thing about her song is this: with a prophet’s voice, Mary expresses all these things in past tense: these are things God has already accomplished, not things in the future. Well, we can look around our world and ask ourselves – is this true? The mighty have been brought down, the hungry fed, the humble exalted? One look around our world tells us that God’s reality is not yet our reality. Yet with prophet’s eyes, Mary sees into a deeper truth: that God’s kingdom has already begun to break into our world.

Think of it this way: our present time is the reality most of us can see. Alongside it, parallel, just as real but mostly invisible to us, is God’s kingdom. Every now and then, a window opens up so we can see through. It takes the eyes and voices of prophets to become icons, windows into that reality. Because we are not prophets, most of us are blind to God’s angels, God’s dreams. We must put our faith in the words of other prophets like Mary who can see.

Mary invites us to live as citizens of God’s kingdom, in the age to come and here and now. Mary is describing the truth that a prophet’s eyes can see: that in Jesus, the kingdom of God has already broken into our world, because God has taken flesh. And one day, God’s kingdom will be the reality that all creation lives in: the kingdom Mary sings of – the kingdom of peace, justice and love. It may seem impossible – but Gabriel tells us: nothing is impossible with God.

So what might God be working to bring to birth in us, 2,000 years later? Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says that “Few of our people imagine God to be an active character in the story of their lives.” But 14^th century German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, “What is the good if Mary gave birth to Son of God a long time ago, if I do not give birth to God today? We are all Mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.”

Do we think of God as a benign presence that hovers in the background scenery of our lives, kindly hoping that everything turns out all right, patting us on the back with a little bit of comfort now and then? Or do we believe that angels might come to us, ordinary everyday people that we are, making dangerous requests, promising the impossible? Do we believe that God is active in our lives, opening our eyes to greater hopes and deeper realities? Do we believe that Jesus’ kingdom is not only something far off, but a hidden reality that we can see working here and now? Can we believe that God’s visions can become reality for us, if we say yes?

How many of us, like Mary, are nurturing dreams within our hearts? Longings for a world yet unborn, hopes for a time when God’s justice will prevail and God’s people will no longer suffer. Dreams of how God might be calling us, ordinary everyday us, to bring new ways of life to birth. Dreams of how even we might be filled with the Holy Spirit to become God’s prophets, singing God’s hope to the world.

Mary’s song is a song for today, just as much as it was for 2,000 years ago. The dream that brings Christ to birth in this world, the dream of Christmas, is more than a sentimental story of a small child born in a manger. It is God’s story and God’s dream that the prophet Mary sings about today: a dream that transforms this world, that enters into our own hearts and begins to speak through us, that sings us out into the world where we can live God’s vision of a world made right.

God’s true Christmas dream is the new creation that has already become a reality in Jesus. And you and I? We are Mary too. We are ordinary people called to see God’s reality with prophets’ eyes, we are people hoping, praying, expecting a new and better world – a world that has already begun to come to birth in Jesus.

And like the young Mary, we stand, expectantly, hands lifted, bathed in the presence of God – waiting on the threshold of new life; and as we wait, angels hold their breath – waiting, hoping, praying that our answer will be yes.

Sermon for 12.11.11

2011-12-18T16:10:00.000-08:00

Scriptures for today are Here

Boyd Lee Dunlop came to live in the Delaware Nursing Home in Buffalo, NY four years ago, age 81, bent and a little forgetful (according to a story in the New York Times on Friday). In the corner of the cafeteria was a dusty old piano that no one had played in ages – out of tune, with several keys missing, and several other keys that just wheezed. Boyd Lee saw the piano and sat down, and in a home where music generally meant the weekly sing-along with someone’s badly played electric keyboard, he played a few chords, then a few more, then he began to coax beautiful jazz melodies out of the ancient piano while nurses listened astonished, learning which keys didn’t work and shortening those notes, elongating the others.

He played often, every day, so that the sound of jazz piano filled the home. The Times article went on to tell Boyd Lee Dunlop’s story. He grew up poor on the east side of Buffalo, the child of a single mother. One day he saw a dilapidated piano in neighbor’s back yard and said to himself, “I got to play you!”

He got some friends to help him push and pull the piano into his house. He taught himself some chords with a 25-cent lesson book; he took 5 piano lessons for 50 cents each, but quit when the teacher complained he was getting ahead of the lesson plans. By age 15, he was playing gospel hymns in church and jazz melodies in nightclubs, where prostitutes took up a collection to buy him a decent suit.

This was the beginning of a lifetime of playing the piano he loved. He grew up and went to work, and would come home from his shift at Bethlehem Steel, sit down and the piano and play, soot-blackened hands blackening the keys, until one day he said, “What am I doing here?”

He realized that he could do nothing else but his true calling, quit the steel industry and started traveling around the country for a lifetime of playing gigs in smoky bars. Until one day, four years ago, he came to the nursing home, with 50 cents in his pocket.

A photographer was at the nursing home one day, heard Boyd Lee Dunlop playing the old piano in the cafeteria, recorded the sounds on his cell phone, and sent the recording to a music producer friend. His friend agreed that the playing was remarkable, and signed Boyd Lee Dunlop to record his first CD, called Boyd’s Blues.

This is the story of a man who knew from the moment he saw his first piano, what he had been created to do and be.

Today’s scriptures tell us two of the most important things we will ever hear about God, and about ourselves. They address the question, what kind of god is God? And they address the question, who does God want us to be? Who is God? And who are we? These are the basic questions of Advent, and in fact, the basic questions of our lives as Christians.

To these questions, what kind of god is God? And who are we? Two prophets speak. Isaiah opens his mouth and begins to proclaim who he is and what God has called him to do, and as we hear the voice of that calling, we begin to understand more about God’s relationship with the world. Isaiah is a prophet: not a person who foretells the future, but a person who understands how God is working in the world and speaks God’s words. He speaks about his calling in our Old Testament reading today. “The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,” says Isaiah, “because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.”

Those beautiful and famous words tell us who Isaiah is: he is the one who is called to speak words of good news, comfort, healing, freedom. Isaiah is speaking to a group of Israelites who are living in disappointment. They have returned from exile in Babylon, exuberant at going back home. But they have found Jerusalem in ruins, have rebuilt Temple but to nowhere near its former glory, they have met disappointment at every turn.

To a group of people living with disappointment, God speaks words of hope. And God’s words, spoken by Isaiah, tell us who God is: God is the God of the Exodus, the God who loves the poor and comforts those who mourn; God is the God of all who suffer and all who have lost all hope. God is the God who brings freedom and deliverance.

Five centuries after Isaiah, the last of the Hebrew prophets arises – John. (Just to be clear – John the Baptizer is the person the story is about; John the gospel writer, not the same John, is the writer of the story.) John the Gospel Writer has a different view of John the Baptizer than the other gospels – in fact he doesn’t call John the “Baptist.” Today’s reading calls John simply a “witness” – this is John the Witness.

And this John the Witness knows just as clearly as Isaiah who he is called to be – he knows he is NOT the Messiah, NOT Elijah or another Hebrew prophet. He is the one who is witness to the light – he sees the light of Christ coming into the world, and he helps open the eyes of others to see this light.

Which tells us something not only about who John is, but who God is. God is the one who sees darkness in our world, and shines light into the darkness. Christ is the light who comes into the world. We are the ones who stand with this light in our midst, and may never know it. We are the ones who need to open our eyes to see what God is doing .

All this tells us who the prophets Isaiah and John are, and they tell us something about who God is. But what about other question: Who does God want us to be?

A theme that runs through today’s scriptures is the theme of vocation – calling. Like Boyd Lee Dunlop the jazz piano player, who knew the moment he saw his first piano, “I got to play you!”, and made that a lifelong calling, these prophets know clearly their own calling, clearly and without doubt. And these prophets who have spoken God’s words and transformed the world, speak also to us in our lives. They speak to us of who God is, and they speak to us of who God calls us to be: people who live to transform the world in God’s name, people who yearn to shine God’s light into the darkness of this world.

There is a story about Basil the Great of Caesarea, a saint and bishop of the 4^th century. When the Roman emperor Valens became displeased with Basil and sent a messenger, Modestus, to threaten him with exile, torture or death if he didn’t submit to the emperor’s will, Basil stood firm. When Modestus exclaimed that he had never known anyone to act that way before, Basil answered, “Perhaps you have never met a bishop before.”

What if you and I could make people exclaim with amazement at our determination to do God’s will and live God’s way? What if you and I could understand God’s calling in our lives so completely that others would say that they had never seen anyone act that way before? I have a dream that our church community could smile and say simply, “Perhaps you have never met a follower of Christ before.”

Make no mistake, it is sometimes difficult to understand God’s calling the way Basil did – so deeply and joyfully that no one can sway us from it. It is sometimes difficult to act in accordance with God’s will, even if we believe we know what it is. But I believe that God calls each of us to a vocation, a particular calling. So as Christ-followers, we help do the things Jesus, Isaiah and John did: humble the proud, exalt the lowly, feed the hungry, free those who are captives of sin and oppression, and shine God’s light into a world that too easily slips into darkness.

We may do these things through music, through prophecy, through teaching, through organization, through outreach, through hospitality – whatever the gift is that God has given us. And I think we begin to discover our calling as we think about what we love. As Boyd Lee Dunlop loved the piano, saw it and knew, “I got to play you!” each of us also has things that draw us – something we can’t NOT do. Wherever we go you can’t NOT – assume leadership of a group; speak the words of God; care for children; make things with your hands; etc.

Christian author Frederick Buechner said that each one of us is called to a vocation, and asked how we can identify that vocation, he said this: “Your vocation is that place where your deepest gladness and the world’s deepest hunger meet.”

Boyd Lee Dunlop has a vocation of playing the piano, bringing beauty and joy to the cleanser-scented halls of dilapidated nursing home. We all also have a calling that comes out of our unique gifts and talents and life experiences; And we each have passions, needs that the world has that God has brought to our attention in a very special way. And where those two things meet is our vocation – and that is the place where we can give God’s gift to the world.

As you are doing your Christmas shopping, think about one more gift. As Jesus brought the gift of himself to us on Christmas Day, pray, think, ask: what is the gift of yourself the world is waiting to receive?

Sermon for 12.4.11

2011-12-04T13:35:00.000-08:00

Scriptures for today are Here.

Some years ago, I read a story –a personal reminiscence by a man who had been an American soldier in World War II. He saw a lot of battle in Europe, a lot of darkness, cold and pain. He couldn’t believe he had survived – but he found himself on his way home at last – and the night before he was to get on the ship home to America, in London, he went to see the musical Oklahoma!, which had just opened there. He described what it felt like to sit alone in the theater as the lights went down, to sit in complete darkness with strangers all around, in silence, waiting. And then a light slowly began to dawn on the stage, sunrise on a cornfield, and the chirping of birds began to sound, and some notes of music began to play. And as day dawned, a man rode out of the cornfield on stage into spotlight, began to sing: Oh, What a Beautiful Morning, Oh What a Beautiful Day. And the soldier sat in the dark in the theater with tears running down his cheeks – because he had suddenly realized that in a world that for years had been only darkness, cold and death, that light was dawning and peace had come. A beautiful new day had dawned, he was alive, and he was going home.

Think of our gospel passage today as the sudden dawning of light in darkness. Think of the people of Mark’s time as sitting in a theater, wishing the lights would come up, tired and hurting and worn out, not sure what to expect. And then a spotlight comes on, and a man strides out of the wilderness. And Mark begins to proclaim: a whole new day has come: the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

I think this is a fascinating beginning to a gospel that is also fascinating. Unlike other gospels, Mark does not begin with a Christmas story or theological background about who Jesus is. Mark just plunges right in, with an adult John the Baptist arriving on stage. John arrives out of darkness and silence, to a people living in fear and despair.

By the time John the Baptist began his preaching and baptizing, the prophets in Israel had fallen silent for hundreds of years; one foreign emperor after another had conquered Israel; the gap between rich and poor was ever-widening, the worship of God continued in the Temple, but the Temple rulers were notoriously corrupt; the Roman conquerors were harsh and merciless rulers who would torture and crucify anyone who caused a disturbance. The ordinary people of Israel must have wondered if God had forgotten them.

Out of this darkness, suddenly light begins to shine – not center stage, in the Temple, where people would have expected God – but off to the side, in the wilderness, away from the capital where important things happened. And the hero doesn’t take the stage, not yet – we see the forerunner, the herald, the one who will proclaim what the story will be about: and John begins to preach: Prepare the way. The images in this story are familiar to Israel: wilderness, prophets, river Jordan. Moses had led the people out of slavery into the wilderness, and Joshua (after whom Jesus is named) led them across river Jordan into Promised Land – a new day.

What John tells the people is that another new day is dawning. And what they must do, as they wait for God to act, is to prepare themselves, with repentance, – a word that in Greek doesn’t just mean feeling sorry for what they have done. The Greek word is metanoia, and it means a turning point, a change in life, a whole new mind – John is telling them to begin looking at the world differently. With their repentance, they will prepare to learn a whole new way of living, guided by the One who is coming, who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.

I’ve said this before: in any Bible passage, you can interpret it on three levels: the level of the story itself; the level of the writer; and the level of our lives today. So let’s talk about the second level, what did the author intend? We are entering lectionary Year B, when we will read a lot of Mark’s gospel. Mark is the earliest of the four gospels, the first to be written, between 65-70. Mark actually invents a whole new form of literature – he is the first to decide that story of Jesus should be written, and he calls it a “gospel” – which simply means good news.

What is going on in Mark’s world that makes it necessary for him to invent a whole new literary genre? A lot: 30-35 years before, Jesus had died and been resurrected. The disciples’ hopes were crushed when he died, but were awakened with new hope when he rose: they underwent metanoia, a whole new way of seeing the world. The resurrection meant a new light dawning in the darkness of a world of death. Resurrection helped them understand that Jesus had come not to conquer earthly empires, but to bring light in darkness, a new heaven and a new earth – to usher us all into a new way of life, resurrection life that begins now.

The earliest disciples believed that Jesus would return any day to bring his kingdom to fulfillment. But the years go by, and Jesus doesn’t return, between the years 60-70 major events happen that turn the fledgling Christian community upside down. Leaders begin to die: James – leader of church in Jerusalem and brother of Jesus, is martyred in 62; Peter and Paul were both martyred in Rome around 64-65.

A shocked Christian community is living through other cataclysmic events too. Rome, where Mark is probably living, burned in 64; in Jerusalem, a rebellion in the years 66-70 will end with mass starvation, the Temple destroyed, the Jews scattered all over the world. For the disciples, the world is falling apart, Jesus is not coming back anytime soon, the generation of eyewitnesses to his life are dying off, beloved leaders are being martyred.

In a situation like this, many small cults withdraw into themselves, wait for the end, focus inward. But if you decide not to withdraw and stay an inner-focused cult, you have to figure out how to adjust to a new world, how God is working in new ways, how to undergo metanoia, how to begin seeing the world with new eyes, new life. The only reason for Mark to write down the events of Jesus’ life in a new gospel form is because he realizes there will be future generations who need to know about Jesus: a revolutionary change in expectations, metanoia.

So Mark sits down to write a gospel, and writes a title across the top of the page. And the title is not “The Gospel according to Mark” – that name comes later. The title is “The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, Son of God.” That first line is not a complete sentence– it’s the title of the whole gospel. The whole gospel, the story of Jesus’ life, is the beginning of good news.

Mark’s gospel ends strangely, it doesn’t really end at all (and I’ll talk about the ending in a later sermon). It just sort of ends with a dot dot dot … because, for Mark – the story continues. The gospel according to Mark, the whole story of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, is only the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Because that story continues, down through history, by the power of the Holy Spirit. It continues through one metanoia after another, through the upheavals that inspired Mark to write his gospel, through change after change in Christian history.

With each change, God acts in a new and unexpected way, through people who learn to see the world with new eyes, again and again, through new actors who come onto the stage and introduce new ways of thinking by the power of the Holy Spirit: all working in ways that will continue the good news of Jesus Christ. Right down to the present day, when more change and upheaval is happening.

I don’t have to tell you that the world is changing, almost faster than we can keep track of. Our church is changing along with it; the church’s position in society, its way of doing things, what we believe about our mission. And each of us, in our personal lives, have also been through huge changes and upheavals. Sometimes those are good changes, like the birth of a child or a move to a warmer and sunnier climate. But sometimes they are disturbing and disorienting changes: the loss of a relationship, the death of someone we love, terrible challenges and difficulties.

When these things happen, I believe God is calling us to undergo metanoia once more, to look at world with new eyes, to look for how God is working in new ways. Here’s what I find exciting: what God did long ago in Jesus was an entirely new thing, a movement that would change the world. But it was only the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

That story hasn’t ended yet; Jesus’ earthly life ended with a dot dot dot. Because the story continues with us – we are the disciples who are writing a new book in Christian history. We are the ones figuring out how to live in a new world, preparing for new ways of following Christ. We are the ones whom God is calling, right now, to repentance, to metanoia. Metanoia is not something you can decide to do for yourself; it is a gift God gives you. But you can prepare yourself for metanoia, you can open your hearts to it.

We are called to cleanse our hearts, to prepare for new things God is doing. We are called to prayer and worship and service and love of neighbor. These are all acts that will open our eyes and open our hearts to the continuing drama of Christ who has come and will come, and is always coming, into this world. Because a new light is dawning, and the curtain is going up, and it is our turn to take our place in the continuing story, the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Sermon for 1 Advent 2011 - 11.27.11

2011-11-27T13:44:00.000-08:00

Scriptures for this Sunday are Here

If you came to my house, and you went to the closet under the stairs – that closet with the sloping ceiling, slanting to a narrow point at the back – and if you opened the door, what you would want to do is to stand back with hands at the ready, in case it all came tumbling out on you. And assuming it all stayed in place, you would need to start pulling things out.

You would pull out the vacuum cleaner, and the bag full of wrapping paper scraps for every possible occasion – because you never know when you might need a one-foot square piece of sunflower-print paper (slightly crumbled). You would start sorting back through layers of Snook family history. Old Halloween costumes, craft supplies for crafts not yet complete. Posters made for school projects, explaining fine points of biology and literature. The box of my old elementary school papers, artwork, and photographs that my parents decided would be better gathering dust at my house than theirs. Boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations. Supplies for goldfish and birds we no longer have.

And after you got all of that out of the closet, you would be almost to the back. And there you would see it: under the shelves at the very narrowest back part of the closet, gleaming and white and still looking new: my bread machine: relic of a Christmas long ago, when I was sure what I wanted more than anything else was a bread machine.

I had gone to a friend’s house, she had made fresh bread, the house smelled divine, the bread she made was delicious – and she explained that she just dumped flour and water and yeast in, and the machine did the work, and I decided that even I could do that. I think I actually used it once or twice, and the bread it made was wonderful. But somehow it got put in the back of the closet, and never used again.

And I think back on that bread machine, and I realize: it wasn’t the machine I wanted at all; and it wasn’t the bread either. What I wanted was the smell: the smell of bread baking. Smells can take you back in time in a very immediate way – more than just a memory, a smell connects your brain to experiences, to feelings. I think that humans must have some ancient primeval gene connecting the smell of fresh bread with the love of our mothers.

That smell of bread baking reminds me of my mother, who in my childhood every now and then would bake fresh bread, the old-fashioned way, without a machine, dusting the countertop with flour, plunging her hands in, kneading and rolling and kneading again. My sweet, kind, generous mother, who could easily have bought Wonder bread at the grocery store, but who every now and then wanted to do something special for her family. It reminds me also of her mother before her, who taught her how to do it: my smiling, cheerful, hardworking grandmother, who was a farm wife in the Depression and who knew how to do things the hard way.

What I was longing for, all those Christmases ago, was not bread, it was the feeling. The feeling of being with those wonderful women, of being surrounded by family, of being loved in that very particular way. I was longing for that feeling of love.

What are you longing for, this first Sunday of Advent? The holiday season has officially begun, the Thanksgiving feast has been shared, the Black Friday crowds have stormed the stores. The shopping frenzy escalated on Friday to the point where 9 Wal-Marts reported violence, including fights, a shooting, and an incident where a woman pepper-sprayed the competition to get her hands on some electronics.

Somehow I don’t think this is why Jesus was born in a stable.

And even for those of us who didn’t darken the door of any stores on Friday, many of us are creating Christmas lists, desperately searching for ways to fulfill the Christmas wishes of the people we love (or are obligated to buy for).

And yet, I have to think, those items on our Christmas lists aren’t really what we’re longing for at all – we’re longing for something else entirely.

So what are you longing for? Are you longing for a better job, are you longing for the presence of someone you love, are you longing for healing, longing for relief from stress and worry? Are you longing to go back in time and see someone you loved a long time ago, or do something differently than you did the first time? Are you longing to skip forward to the future and see how something you’ve already set in motion is going to turn out? Are you longing for new relationships, new emotions, new hopes? Are you longing for the world to become a better place, for wars to end and poverty to be defeated and diseases to be healed?

Are you longing, quite simply, to be loved?

This Advent season, that begins today, is the season of longing. It’s the season when we recognize that we have a longing for a perfection we never quite achieve, a certain empty place even in the most contented life. I am convinced that all of our Christmas buying frenzy is our way of attempting to address this emptiness, this longing, this recognition that things are not quite right in our lives, that we have not reached perfection yet. Few of us would say that a bread machine, or any other Christmas gift, would make our lives complete. And yet we always hope that we might come one step closer to filling that empty place in our hearts.

Advent is the time when God says to us: wait. Wait, hope, expect, pray. That empty place in our hearts is a place that ultimately, only God can fill. Jesus came to us as God’s gift of God’s own self, the gift that fills our longings. The promise of Christ is the promise that he has come to us to bring perfect love to birth; AND he will come again to bring his kingdom to completion: that kingdom where the world will be made right again, where suffering will cease, where people will learn to walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself for us.

In the meantime, the time of waiting for God’s Kingdom, when the world is still imperfect, when our hearts are still longing – that is, that time between Christ’s first and second coming, when we will almost certainly live our entire lives – during this time, our calling as followers of Christ is not only to seek Christ who came long ago, not only to wait for Christ who will come again, but also to look for how Christ is entering into the everyday events of this world today, to look for how Christ’s kingdom is even now breaking into this world – and to JOIN CHRIST in that work.

Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians today, counsels the church in Corinth to wait, with longing hope and expectation – the same way we are asked to wait today, in Advent season – adopting spiritual disciplines of waiting, hope, prayer, worship, community, generosity. All of these things are grounded in what Paul points out: the discipline of gratitude – recognizing God at work in our lives, and understanding the grace God has given us. In our spiritual state of gratitude, we realize that God’s grace comes with spiritual gifts that allow us to do what God has done, to pour ourselves out as gifts to the world, to join God in his kingdom work of bringing love to birth.

I am convinced that all our striving to buy the perfect gift for everyone, that activity we spend so much time and stress on every Advent season, is merely our way of diverting ourselves from our true longings. I think what we really long for is the gift of love. And I think the best way to experience the gift of love is to give it.

So what if we adopted God’s kingdom as our gifting project this year? What if we decided to devote our Advent season to giving the gift of love? Honoring Jesus with the gifts we give? By finding out what Christ is doing, and joining in?

You can do this by giving to help those in need – our Advent outreach fair next Sunday will give you an opportunity to find out about the many ways we help people in need here at Nativity, and if you wish, to make a donation in honor of someone on your Christmas list.

You can do it also by being or becoming a steward – giving money to God’s work – here at Nativity, in our ongoing operations and mission work, and in our building project. The ultimate purpose of everything we do here is to spread Christ’s love, and when we join together in community, we are joining God’s work.

And, you can give the gift of yourself to the people you love – not trying to satisfy their heart’s longings with mere presents, but giving your time, your words, your service. What would it mean to give dinner at your home to someone who is lonely? What would it mean to do a few household chores for someone who has little time to do it themselves? What would it mean to write a Christmas letter to someone who has meant a lot to you, letting them know how much you appreciate them?

It would mean not trying to fill the emptiness in our hearts with mere things. Not trying to say “I love you” with a mere bread machine, or a tie, or a shirt, or something else that might end up at the back of a closet. But instead, doing what Jesus did – joining Jesus in his mission: pouring our love into the world.

Because this Advent season, and every season, I believe that what we are truly longing for is Christ. Christ who has come, Christ who will come, Christ who is always coming to us, to bring the gift of himself: the ultimate gift of love.

Sermon for All Saints 2011

2011-11-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

Scriptures for today are Here

Years ago, when we were younger and living in Texas, Tom and I used to take a vacation each year to the Big Bend Country – the part of Texas where the Rio Grande curves in a kind of elbow – a mountainous, desert country. It’s not so different from the desert mountains around here, except for the fact that it is right on the border between Texas and Mexico. In the Big Bend Country, you travel through a vast, empty national park on the US side, so there’s no real difference between the desert on one side and the desert on the other – the only way you know where the border is, is by the river, the Rio Grande.

One day, Tom and I were out hiking in the park, and we saw a trail that led down to the river. The river was just a small, gentle stream, and there we found an old Mexican man with a raft. He didn’t speak English but we managed to communicate; $1 each to go across. So we paid the money, and he poled us across to the other side.

On the Mexican side, we walked up the riverbank, fended off the children trying to sell us pretty rocks for a dollar, and walked up a dusty path to a tiny town, where we sat on the porch of a rickety restaurant and ordered the only things they had on the menu: borracho beans with fresh-made tortillas and Dos Equis. We sat on the porch, swatted flies, listened to the ceiling fan and the recorded conjunto music, and watched what little activity took place on the dirt main road of this tiny town. And then, after awhile, we decided to walk back down to the river and cross back over to the U.S. side. **

I don’t know if it was because it was a different place, or a different era, but there in the Big Bend Country, there were no passports, no checkpoints, no guards. The border was thin and porous, hardly recognizable as a border at all.

The ancient Celts, living in Britain and Ireland long before Christianity came there, recognized certain places as “thin places,” border crossings between heaven and earth. Somehow at these places, they felt the borderline was thin and porous, and the spirit world could pour through at any moment. So they built shrines at those places, and later Christians built churches and cathedrals and graveyards on top of the old shrines. And I’m told if you go to those places, sometimes you can feel the border between heaven and earth crack open just a little bit, and feel the presence of God.

The Celtic people also recognized certain times of the year as border crossings, such as the three-day harvest festival when they remembered their ancestors. Later Christians baptized and made this festival our own in our three-day festival of Halloween, All Saints and All Souls, all three of which happened this past week. And today, we are observing All Saints Day.

All three of these days in a way take us down to the border crossing between heaven and earth; they help us to look at questions of life and death. Halloween does this in kind of a parody – dressing up as the things we fear – monsters and ghosts, and the living dead, vampires and zombies – to somehow shake our fists at death, laugh in its face, proclaim life instead. All Saints was originally the time when the Roman Catholic Church remembered saints and martyrs, who they believed were able to skip Purgatory and go straight to heaven; and All Souls was the time when they remembered all the faithful departed, and said masses for ordinary dead loved ones.

For us Episcopalians, we’ve never believed in the idea of Purgatory, which is found nowhere in the Bible; though we do remember many people as saints, heroic examples of witnesses and martyrs for the faith. We also recognize that there are many faithful people, quietly living lives of devotion to God and service to others, and it is up to God to recognize their quiet sainthood; so we don’t make that much distinction between All Saints and All Souls Days. We believe that it is up to God to bring all of us, as God’s children, into God’s home: that country that waits for us beyond the final boundary of death.

Which is a faith that is beautiful and true, and I believe it. But we should not make the mistake as Christians of thinking that the whole goal of our life of faith is to escape from this life into a better life on other side. Chrstian author Brian McLaren (Everything Must Change) states, "More and more Christian leaders are beginning to realize that for the millions of young adults who have recently dropped out of church, Christianity is a failed religion. Why? Because it has specialized in dealing with 'spiritual needs' to the exclusion of physical and social needs. It has focused on 'me' and 'my eternal destiny,' but it has failed to address the dominant societal and global realities of their lifetime: systemic injustice, poverty, and dysfunction”, i.e., life on this side of the border between life and death. McLaren asks, "Shouldn't a message purporting to be the best news in the world be doing better than this?"

Well, the answer is yes – Christian faith should focus our eyes on this world too. Because if our lessons for today make anything clear, it is the fact that the life of the Body of Christ takes place here on this side of the border as well as in the heavenly court; it takes place now, in this moment, as well as in a future hope. The Christian life is not only about escaping suffering into the beautiful vision of the heavenly city in our lesson from Revelation today, where we will hunger and thirst no more, and every tear will be wiped from our eyes.

The Christian life is also about working to alleviate hunger and thirst here, to wipe tears from the eyes of people who are suffering now: taking our life of sainthood seriously here. It is about becoming a community grounded in love, the love that God has given us (as 1 John says) – “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God.” What we will become, the communion of saints that lives through eternity, has not yet been revealed, but children of God is what we are. And because God loves us, God gives us love to share with others.

In fact there is something beautiful and true about this fact: that in the earthy reality of our lives right here, in places of suffering and anguish as well as times of joy and laughter, Jesus is here, loving us, making our life holy.

I believe this is what Jesus is talking about in our gospel lesson today, one of the most famous passages in all of Matthew’s gospel, known as the Beatitudes (“Blessed”). The original Greek word translated here as “Blessed” is “Makarios,” which means “happy.” Jesus seems to be saying not so much that God will bless you in your suffering as that happiness comes in the midst of suffering – you are “happy” now. This doesn’t seem to make sense – we all know that suffering is real, and it is hard to find happiness in the midst of it. Yet Jesus seems to say with no irony, Happy are the poor in spirit, happy are those who mourn, happy are the meek.

And to me, this seems the opposite of truth, it almost seems to promote a Pollyanna style of faith. But the truth is, of all world religions, Christianity may be the one that is most realistic about suffering, because we worship a Savior who suffered . We worship a Savior who chose on his own to cross the thin and porous border between heaven and earth, to leave the place where there are no tears, to come to a world where suffering, hunger, thirst, death are everyday affairs.

In 2006, the rock star Bono, lead singer of the band U2, spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast, a famous speech that has been quoted thousands of times: “God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill. I hope so…. But the one thing we can all agree -- all faiths, all ideologies -- is that God is with the vulnerable and poor. God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.”

I think this is what Jesus means when he says to the sick, suffering and poverty-stricken folks who crowded around him in the hills of Galilee to watch him heal and to hear him speak, Happy are you when you are poor in spirit. He is saying more than just the kingdom of heaven will be yours someday. He is also saying, the kingdom of heaven is among you now. He is pointing to his own presence, for the kingdom of heaven comes to us in the person of Jesus, the one who loved us so much he came to be among us. The border has already been crossed, the barricades have already come down. The kingdom of heaven has already leaked across the border into this world. And it is here among us; it is here IN us. It is what empowers us to live as saints in the world.

It is in the name of the God who crosses all borders, that we live our lives as baptized saints and citizens of God’s kingdom. Making choices, crossing borders to be with others who need our help. Because he is here with us, we make the choice to be with them. And we know that someday a new border crossing will open up for us. And we will be with him, God’s beloved children, every tear wiped away.

So, on All Saints and All Souls Days, we remember all Christians who have died, and give thanks for their lives. Because we believe the promise of Jesus was true for them, and will one day be true for us, that as we make that final border crossing between earth and heaven, that our Lord will be there to greet us, welcome us, and pole our raft to the other side – where there is no crying, no sighing, but life everlasting.

** Years after we crossed the Rio Grande at Boquillas, I happened to be listening to Robert Earl Keen one day and I realized that he had crossed the Rio Grande at the same place. There couldn't possibly be another crossing just like it. He sang about it in his song "Gringo Honeymoon" - click the link to hear his amazing, fabulous song. He had the same experience we did, except -- we didn't rent the donkeys (too expensive); we didn't meet the cowboy who was running from the DEA; and we sadly didn't hear the crusty caballero play the old gut-string guitar.

Sermon Notes for 10.30.11

2011-10-30T18:31:00.000-07:00

Scriptures for today are Here

It’s Halloween weekend, and once again, if we’re lucky, we will see lots of small people dressed as princesses, pirates, Jedi knights, Giant M&Ms, witches, goblins, mermaids. It’s one of my favorite things, to distribute candy to small children (and let their parents worry about hiding it later).

A few years ago, I was at Party City shopping with my daughter for her Halloween costume. I happened to be wearing my clergy collar, and I saw a woman looking at me, puzzled. She finally asked me, are you dressing up as a priest for Halloween? I said no, I am a priest. She said (because it always helps to point out the obvious when advancing an argument), but you’re a woman. I said, yes, that’s why it wouldn’t be a good costume for me, no one would believe it!

Many people are puzzled by my clergy costume, not sure what to think when they see me wearing it. But I also find myself behaving slightly differently when I am wearing it in public. I tend not to drive in a way that might irritate other drivers; I am less likely to complain about poor service in a restaurant; I feel more obligated to smile. Maybe you’ve found yourself doing the same thing wearing a cross – behaving slightly better, knowing that people will expect you to act like a Christian. And we have to ask ourselves, why should the costume we wear make a difference in how we act; if we think Christians act a certain way, shouldn’t we act that way all the time?

Wearing a costume and acting like religious people is exactly the critique Jesus gives of the Pharisees in the gospel today. The word “hypocrite” that Jesus often applies to the Pharisees actually means “actor.” The Pharisees wear phylacteries – small boxes with scripture inside, to remind themselves and others of God’s law – and long fringes, so people can see that they are wearing a prayer shawl under their normal clothes. Now there’s nothing wrong with wearing these things – Jesus probably did too.

The problem comes if these things are only a costume and don’t reflect the reality of the person wearing them. What Jesus critiques is acting religious in order to gain status and approval. Pharisees were people who obeyed law to the nth degree. For instance, written law said not to work on the Sabbath; Pharisees added interpretations such as, a tailor shouldn’t carry a needle around the day before Sabbath – he might get caught out on the Sabbath with the needle in his pocket, and carrying it back home would be “work.”

And even more difficult, Pharisees took the extensive purity and hand-washing regulations that were meant to apply to priests worshiping in the Temple, and tried to apply the same rules to ordinary people on everyday basis, which would make it impossible for them to earn a living. Poor people were unable to meet the Pharisees’ standards, so they were considered less holy; Pharisees were considered teachers, leaders, authorities, better than everyone else. Which Jesus criticizes as hypocrisy – it’s one big act, a costume that fools no one. Making life difficult for other people is not what God’s law is about. God’s law is about leading a new life, living according to the law of love, expressed clearly in Torah (which Jesus respected), letting our inward selves reflect the truth that is expressed by whatever costume we wear. God’s law is about living life with integrity.

In any Bible reading, we can interpret it on three levels:

· What was going on in the original story, at the time it happened?
· What was going on when it was written down, what did it mean then?
· What does it mean for us now?

It’s pretty clear what is going on in the original story: it’s Tuesday of Holy Week, Jesus is in Jerusalem, he has made some powerful people really angry, and they are about to conspire to bring him to the cross. Jesus knows this, and he doesn’t back down – he keeps pushing them. Jesus actually seems to be carefully stage-managing this entire confrontation in order to give up his life on the cross. What he tells the disciples today – those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted – isn’t just a saying. He is going to demonstrate it decisively on the cross in a few days, as he dies in utter humiliation – yet two millennia later, we will see that cross as a throne – the throne of God’s love, poured out for us. There is no costume here, no act: Jesus will show us, not tell us, what love is.

Well enough – what’s going on at the next level, when this story was written down? Matthew wrote his gospel around 80-90 AD, wrote to a community of mostly Jewish Christians near, but not in, Israel – possibly in Antioch in Syria. This is a time of revolutionary change in Judaism. In 70 AD, Romans had destroyed the Jerusalem Temple, Jews had dispersed all over the world, and Judaism changed forever.

The Jewish world had been absolutely centered in the Temple. Worship occurred only there – this is where all the sacrifices mandated by the law occurred. Judaism since that time has been missing one huge aspect of what God commanded the Jews to do: sacrifice in Temple to atone for sins. We should not underestimate the heartbreak and sheer urgent revolutionary re-thinking necessary for all Jewish people at the time Matthew wrote.

Since the Temple had been destroyed, Judaism had to change – and it could have simply disappeared. But how it survived was under the leadership of the Pharisees. Their careful rule-keeping became the hallmark of Jews down to this day; it became the way the Jews, dispersed all over the world, kept themselves distinct from other people. Their view of how to live became a big controversy for Matthew’s community, who had also grown out of Judaism, and which had to decide, in this time of revolutionary change, whether people had to become Jews and keep all the commandments in order to become Christians.

Matthew’s answer, like the answer that eventually prevailed for all Christians, was no – it is not the keeping of rules that makes us Christian. We do not have to keep all of the Jewish law; we only need to obey the primary rules of the Jewish law: to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Because the early church made this decision, Christianity was able to grow and spread throughout the world, and we are Christians because of it. The Pharisaic version of Judaism, focused on Torah and keeping all the commandments, has come down to the present – and we need to be careful not to judge it negatively. Clearly, Christian judgment of Jews has led to horrible abuses in history. But even more, remember that what Jesus is judging is not following the law itself, or wearing phylacteries & prayer shawls. Jesus himself probably did these things, and Jesus says the law is good. The Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so do what they say, he tells the disciples. What Jesus is judging is doing these things while imposing them unjustly on others: changing one’s costume without changing one’s heart.

Which brings us to the third level of interpretation: what does this mean for us? I think all of us can point to times when the Christian church has been more interested in Pharisaic rules and regulations than in changed hearts. Almost 500 years ago tomorrow, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of the cathedral in Wittenburg, protesting abuses of power and corruption in the church, things that led ordinary poor people to become victims. One abuse was the church’s decision to rebuild the cathedral of St. Peter in Rome using the sale of “indulgences” to ordinary people, which purported to offer them early release from Purgatory. One enterprising seller of indulgences went around Germany singing this catchy little rhyme: “When the coin into the plate pings, the soul from Purgatory springs!”

Modern churches can likewise become fixated on outer things, like ceremonies and costumes (like these nice fringes and phylacteries – err, stole and chasuble – that I’m wearing). And we can easily forget about the change of heart that Jesus calls us to, when he says those who exalt themselves will be humbled, while those who humble themselves will be exalted. Which is another way of saying: the basic law is to love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and love neighbor as yourself.

So how do we modern/postmodern Christians follow Jesus’ law of love? I believe that the church, for all its tendency to become a bit Pharisaical in its observance of rules, is still the best way for us to keep ourselves renewed and reminded of the law of love. Being part of a church community helps us keep growing on a personal level – adopting spiritual disciplines like prayer, worship, Bible study, repentance, and serving others, that keep us close to God, and open to hear God’s call to us.

Having a community of other Christians, to nourish our own spirits, to demonstrate God’s law of love, to serve alongside, to work together to pour love into our world, is the best way to keep growing spiritually through life. A church community can bring people together to do amazing things, like the 18 members of Nativity who are away this weekend on a mission trip to Navajoland – they are rebuilding houses, repairing a church, worshiping with our Navajo Episcopal brothers and sisters. And I imagine that the people who go on this mission trip, like anyone who goes on a mission, will find themselves changed even more than the people they serve – because loving our neighbors as we love ourselves changes your heart from the inside out.

It’s not an easy thing, to let God change our hearts – it’s a discipline that sometimes calls you to do things you would prefer not to do: as G.K. Chesterton said, Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried. Being a Christian in more ways than just wearing a Christian costume takes courage and openness, willingness to let God call us to new adventures.

So how do we let God change our hearts? I suggest this: try going around pretending that you are wearing a great big cross emblazoned across your forehead. It’s just like wearing a clergy collar – I think if you believe that cross is there like a costume for all to see, if you believe that people will see what you do as a reflection of what Jesus would do, then you will find that you start acting more like a Christian – loving God and loving your neighbor.

Because the truth is, it’s not a costume. We all do wear a big cross right here across the middle of our foreheads. We received this cross at our baptism, when we were marked with it, with the words, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” It’s not a costume. It’s the real thing. And that cross is what gives us the power to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Address to the Living Stones Banquet, 10.22.11

2011-10-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

If you’re like me, you grew up saying things like, “What church do you go to?” And answering something like, “I go to the Episcopal Church of the Nativity.” Or maybe, "I don't go to church." Which makes perfect sense if a church is a building, a place you go once a week to worship.

But I want to challenge all of us to start thinking of our church differently. Because a church is not a building; a church is a community of faith, built of living stones like you and me, on the one foundation that will never crumble: the sure, solid, unshakeable foundation of Jesus Christ. A church is a center for life transformation. It is a community that empowers you, that nourishes your spirit, that inspires you to go out into the world and do what God is calling you to do.

So a church is not a place you go; it is a place you come from.

I dream of a Church of the Nativity where all of us come out, empowered and nourished to be God’s ministers, God’s holy priesthood in the world. You and I are the Living Stones that God uses to form that church. You and I are God’s church.

So why are we building a new home for Church of the Nativity? There are some good solid practical reasons:

· Our lease on our current facility, provided to us by the generosity of a member of our congregation for a five-year period, expires at the end of next year – and we won’t have a place to worship after that, unless we build.
The space we're in now is hard to find; from the outside you can't even see our sign because it's covered by landscaping. I've had people tell me that they had to drive around for three Sundays before they could find us, even though they knew we were here.
· Our three tiny classrooms are not big enough for the number of kids we have; we don’t have a place for adult education at all, and our adults meet on Sundays in an alcove in the upstairs office building hallway.
· We spill out into the office building lobby for hospitality and fellowship.
· Our sanctuary seats about 125-140. We average about 165 on Sundays with two services – the only reason we can fit all our folks is that we have two services during the prime 9 a.m.-noon Sunday morning slot – but there’s no time during that time slot to add another service.
· Even though we now have two services, our 9:30 service now is almost as full as our 10:00 service was back in 2008, when we decided to go to two Sunday morning services.
· Studies show churches stop growing when the sanctuary gets 70 – 80% full.
· At about 90 on average at 9:30, our sanctuary is about 70% full at that service already.
· There’s a little more room to grow in the 11:00 service, with an average of 72 in that service – but we’re growing – our attendance this year is up 15% from last year, which means we’re on pace to top out in both services by this time next year.
· And we don’t want to grow to the point where there’s no room for new folks – we want to welcome all.
And there are great things to say about our new location - it's in a neighborhood near where many of our folks live, on a main street, close to a school, a library, a retirement home, a hospital, etc.
But those good reasons aren't enough - we want to share what we have with more people.
· Because we have something good to welcome them to, at Nativity.

So let me tell you about that – let me tell you how I see God working here. In the Gospel of Matthew, there is a story: John the Baptist is in prison, he knows that the end of his life and his ministry is coming, and he wonders if it has all been worth it; he wonders if his cousin Jesus is truly the Messiah he has been pointing to all this time. So he sends some of his followers to ask Jesus: are you the one we’ve been waiting for, or should we keep on waiting? Jesus doesn’t do what I would do and just say clearly, yes, I’m the Messiah. He tells John’s followers, Go and tell John what you see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

When the Messiah is present, you can see it. So I’m going to draw you pictures, with words, so you can see what I see.

The first picture is this: last Sunday evening, I came to youth group to help Klayton teach teen Confirmation class (we have 12 teenagers being confirmed in 3 weeks, in addition to the 11 we had confirmed last May). And here’s what I saw. In our tiny youth room, roughly 15 x 13, the one right off the narthex with a couch in it, I saw 27 teenagers, 3 youth leaders and a puppy.

That’s 27 teenagers who come together on Sunday evenings to eat, talk, laugh, pray, share stories of their week, read the Bible, and talk about where God is in their lives. 27 teenagers who will grow up thinking deeply about God, experiencing Christ’s presence in worship, knowing that Jesus loves them. 27 teenagers who will have the support of a community of faith, and the love of their Savior, as they grow up into high school and college and young adulthood, and begin to make the most important decisions of their lives. This is life transformation; these young people come from Nativity each week strengthened with God’s love. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

Here’s the second picture I want to draw for you. At worship last Sunday, at both services we did the once-a-month prayers, laying on of hands and anointing for healing. At the 9:30 service, 22 people came up for healing; almost that many came forward at 11:00. You can’t see their faces as they come forward, but I can. I see the tears in many eyes. I see faces filled with hope. I see how through the ancient sacrament of anointing, people are filled with the Holy Spirit, and become conscious of Christ’s constant presence and strength in their struggles. They find themselves healed, not going to Nativity, but coming from Nativity. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

Here’s the third picture I want you to see in your mind’s eye. It’s a group of people heading off to Navajoland to rebuild houses, bring donations and build relationships with our Navajo Episcopal brothers and sisters. These are people who have labored hard all year to raise funds and physical donations for the Navajo, who have poured their hearts into improving the lives of other Americans, who are working in partnership and making new friends in Navajoland, as they are transforming lives. That’s not the only remarkable, life-transforming mission work I see going on at Nativity: I see a group of folks who are passionate about the work being done to educate children and lift them out of poverty in our sister church in Veracruz, Mexico; I see a parish that is the #1 contributor to the Episcopal Coalition for Habitat for Humanity here in the Valley; I see youth who do mission work each summer; I see a faith community that works to make sandwiches for homeless people, give Christmas presents to children who otherwise wouldn’t have any, and other outreach ministries too numerous to count. These are ministers, not who go to Nativity, but who come from Nativity to transform lives with the love of Jesus Christ. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

A fourth picture: a recent Wednesday evening at Nativity. At 4:30 p.m., if you came there, you would see two people in each of two classrooms – adults being mentored for Confirmation, two of our 7 adults who will be confirmed in a few weeks (in addition to all the teenagers). At 5:30 p.m., you would see a group of 12 or 15 people studying the Gospel of Matthew and coming to amazing insights about where Jesus is in their lives. At 7:00 p.m., the choir would arrive to practice to lead our beautiful worship, at the same time the Healing Ministries team arrives to talk about the many ministries of healing we have through Nativity. Standing there in the midst of all this, you would see your pastor, amazed, smiling at all the activity, giving thanks for the ministries that people are being empowered to lead and participate in, in this community of faith, marveling at how the Holy Spirit is working with our people. These people don’t just go to Nativity, they come from Nativity to transform lives. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

One last picture: a picture of people whose lives have been changed by being part of Nativity. People who never knew Christ before, or who have even spent their lives avoiding Jesus. You may not know their stories, but I know them. They are people who have made new decisions, who have become followers of Christ in this church. People whose lives have been transformed by this community of faith. Here is what one of them wrote to me recently – someone who has been through a lot of life transformation, and has become a part of Nativity and decided to become a follower of Christ through our ministries (I have this person’s permission to share this, anonymously). Here’s what he wrote: “I [have come to an] understanding that what I have gained in life is all a gift and that I should be extremely grateful. Every moment is an opportunity to realize Grace in the world - in my life, in others' lives, in the beauty of creation. I think we can even learn to see Grace in places where it seems entire[ly] missing at first glance.” People like him don’t just go to Nativity, they come from Nativity, transformed and emboldened and renewed as agents of God’s love in this world and the next. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

This is why we’re building a church. Not just because we’re running out of room, though we are. And not just because our lease is expiring, though it is. And not just because our leadership (the whole Bishop’s Committee and Tom and myself, also, and several other parish leaders) is 100% committed to this project, through verbal support and also through our own financial commitments, though we are. Not just because we need a holy and transformative space for our worship, education, prayer, healing, fellowship and evangelism – though we do. Not just because we need room for the people we believe God is calling us to touch and transform in the future – though we do.

Those are all good reasons, but they’re not why we’re building a church.

We’re building a church because a church is not a place you go. A church is a place you come from.

A church is a place where we are healed and transformed, where we grow into our vocation to be followers of Christ in all we say and do. I hope that as all of us grow in our faith, as all of us live into God’s vision for our church, as all of us fulfill the ministries God has called us to do, that we will always remember to say: NOT, I go to Church of the Nativity. But, I come from Church of the Nativity.

Because as we let God build us into Living Stones in this holy community of faith, we find: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

Sermon for October 16, 2011

2011-10-17T21:41:00.001-07:00

Scriptures for today are Here

Back in the mid-90s, a railway pension fund in Britain, by some odd chain of events, found itself the owner of a small jeweled casket that was said to contain the earthly remains of St. Thomas a Becket.

In case you’re a bit rusty on your medieval church history, I’ll refresh your memory by telling you that Thomas a Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury in the late 12^th century. In a dispute with King Henry II over whether the church should be subordinate to the state, or vice versa, Thomas a Becket refused to budge. King Henry exclaimed in the presence of four knights something along the lines of “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Whereupon the four loyal souls rode off, caught Thomas on his way to evening prayer at Canterbury Cathedral, and assassinated him.

Which would have been the end, except that Thomas’ cause survived him. He became the object of veneration among the common people of England. And Henry II finally had to do penance: he walked to Canterbury Cathedral in sackcloth and ashes and allowed himself to be flogged by the monks. As for Thomas a Becket, he became a saint 3 years after his death; his tomb at Canterbury became one of the most-visited and venerated pilgrimage sites in Europe; and his relics were rumored to be the agent of miraculous healings. The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s classic collection of short stories, was about a group of pilgrims on their way to pray at the shrine of Thomas’ relics.

So imagine, 800 years later, being a railway pension fund and finding yourself in possession of these venerated relics, this casket that was at one time the center of piety in all England, these bones that could cure the sick and raise the dead. What would you do?

Well, in 1996, the pension fund did the obvious, for the 20^th century if not the 12^th: it put the jeweled casket on the auction block at Sotheby’s, where it was in the process of being sold to a Canadian who thought it would grace his country home nicely. A national uproar ensued: if no one any longer believed that the casket had miraculous powers, at least it was a treasure of history that didn’t belong in Canada – and the sale was stopped at the last minute, and the casket is still in Britain.

I bring this up because it is an example of what an eminent theologian, Harvey Cox from Harvard Divinity School, called a “reverse sacrament.” If a true sacrament is where God takes ordinary elements such as bread and wine and blesses them to make them holy signs of God’s grace, a reverse sacrament, says Cox, is where ordinary people take a sacred and revered object and transubstantiate it into nothing more than a commodity. A process that is all too common these days, he says.

He wrote this thought out in detail in a 1999 essay in The Atlantic called “The Market as God” in which, somewhat light-heartedly, he opined that the market these days functions as a sort of god in our society. A god with qualities we impute to it such as:

· Omnipresence – being everywhere, something we can’t argue – the power of economics, our use of money, rules a lot of things in our world, our lives
· Omnipotence – don’t we somehow have the idea that money can buy anything – even happiness – there is a recent study that correlates optimal happiness with having income of $75,000 or more
· And even omniscience (knowing all things): in the mid-80s in B-school I had to study the efficient markets hypothesis, which says the market already knows and reflects all publicly available information. The “strong” version even says it also reflects even non-public, secret information – we could say that this strong version says that to the market all hearts are open, all desires known, and from it no secrets are hid.

And yes, the market god includes high priests, saints and holy places of devotion, and reverse sacraments, in which sacred things, like the relics of St. Thomas a Becket, become nothing more than commodities to be sold at auction. I’ve read Cox’s essay, and I’m not entirely sure just how serious he is. I think he is speaking at least half tongue in cheek. But we who live in 21^st century America have to admit that money is certainly a kind of god, a god we spend a lot of time revering and serving, if not worshiping.

Which sets today’s gospel in a new light. The famous saying, Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s, is read by many to be a vindication of the principle of separation of church and state. Believe me, I believe in separation of church and state, since I think separating the two is a blessing to both church and state. When religious power is allied with state power, it can easily turn into an unholy alliance, like the alliance that conspired to kill Jesus in today’s gospel. But it is a concept that would have been utterly foreign to Jesus or to anyone in his time: the concept of state religion was as universally accepted in Jesus’ time as Thomas’, when the only question was whether church or state was going to end up on top.

Separation of church and state is not what Jesus is talking about here. What he is talking about is giving our devotion to God, instead of whatever other god we might be tempted to serve. To understand what Jesus is saying, let’s set the scene. It is Tuesday of Holy Week, Jesus has infuriated the temple officials by overturning the tables of the money changers, now he is teaching in the temple, when insincere enemies come to him with a question intended to entrap him.

Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?, they ask him. Of course, if he says no, Rome will have a reason to arrest him – imagine the Herodians hanging on his words, waiting for him to make a mistake. But if he says yes, he will become very unpopular: religious Jews were chagrined at being a conquered country and paying taxes to Rome was unpopular. But even worse, the coin used to pay the tax had an image of Caesar on the front, violating the second Commandment, you shall make no graven images.

And it had the inscriptions: "Tiberius Caesar, August Son of the Divine Augustus" (i.e., Son of God) and "Pontifex Maximus" (high priest) - violating the first commandment: you shall have no other gods but me. Jesus’ disciples, beginning to suspect that Jesus was the Son of God, by saying this out loud were committing treason against Caesar – you couldn’t serve them both, you had to serve one or the other.

It was unlawful for observant Jews to use such a coin; it was unlawful for them to carry it into God’s temple (which is why there were money-changers there, to change the unholy Roman coins into coins that Jews could use in the Temple). And so the minute that Jesus asks them to show him the coin, and they produce it, he has them – they have admitted to idolatry in the Temple.

His answer is masterful – give to Caesar this bit of metal with his image on it. And, listen carefully: Give to God what has God’s image on it. And what has God’s image on it? We do. In the beginning, God created us male and female in God’s image. This is what separates us from all other creatures – the Bible tells us that we bear the image of God.

Those paltry coins, those dollar bills that carry images of Caesar, George Washington, Ben Franklin or whoever – those are small things, not gods at all, though they may lay claim to our loyalty, our reverence, our worship in all kinds of obvious and not-so-obvious ways, we can get trapped into serving them. But what bears the image of God is us – all of us – every part of us.

Which means that Jesus isn’t saying what we think he is saying. Jesus is not telling us to compartmentalize our lives. He is not saying, carve out this 10% for God, and the other 90% can go to whatever Caesar we happen to be serving. He is not saying, allocate 1 hour a week to God, and the other 167 to Caesar. He is clearly and simply saying, it is all God’s.

All we have, all we do, all the time.

It all came from God and it all belongs to God – because we bear God’s image.

Every hour of the 24 that we are given each day, the 168 we are given each week, came from God – this gift of time is to be used in every part of our lives for God. Every dollar we possess came from the gifts God has given us – the talents we are able to employ for our livelihoods – and every dollar is to be used for God. Every relationship – with those who love us and whom we love, with those who trouble us and those we trouble, with those we agree with and those we disagree with – every relationship, every act of service, every interaction with every person is a gift from God.

Jesus is standing in the Temple in today’s gospel, saying that what goes to Caesar is insignificant; what goes to God is no less than everything.

There is no Temple in the 21^st century, Jesus is the new Temple, and we are the Body of Christ – every part of this Temple, the temple of our selves, belongs to God.

So this is an opportunity for prayer, and I urge you to pray about it this week: God, how would you have me use the gifts you have given me? How can I use the gift of time, the gift of money, the gift of relationship? How can I use the gift of who I am, this self that is stamped with God’s image? God, help me to use the gift of your holy image stamped on me.

All I have. All I am. All the time.

Sermon for Oct. 9, 2011

2011-10-09T16:31:00.000-07:00

Scriptures for this week are here

Steve Jobs died this week at age 56 – the brilliant, visionary founder of Apple, the design genius who brought us the Mac and the iPod and the iPad – all products I use and delight in – and the iPhone, the one I hope to buy when my current contract runs out. I am a fan of Apple, and therefore I have deep appreciation for Steve Jobs.

In so many ways, he revolutionized the way we use technology, vaulting us out of a world of blinking green cursors and incomprehensible code into neat little pictures, icons that we could click on to open up new worlds of meaning. The Mac revolution was quickly copied by Microsoft, so that now every computer operates with Steve Jobs-designed simplicity – point and click.

Over the past 10 years, an age of deep anxiety in America, Steve Jobs has been in a way an icon himself, an icon of a kind of hope. While Americans grew ever more anxious about the things of the outside world, in our inner worlds of technology and entertainment, our lives grew easier, neater, more beautiful, full of elegant simplicity.

I admire Steve Jobs’ business ability, his design sense, and I am a wholehearted fan of the products he created. And I didn’t know him personally, so I can’t speak to what kind of man he was – but he was a passionate articulator of a certain view of what human hope is, a very common view in our society, beautifully described in his famous 2005 commencement address at Stanford, when he said:

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose…. No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it….Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life…. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

In speaking these words, Jobs described a view of our human life that I agree with – to a point – which is: if you are not doing what you are gifted and called to do, then find a way to change your life so you are doing it. Many people in our world agree wholeheartedly with this wisdom. Any number of self-help gurus will tell you to follow your heart in order to realize true happiness – a very attractive goal. But we have to be realistic – doing what we love doesn’t always pay the rent, and ordinary people have to pay the rent. And there’s more to life than what we do: relationships, service to others.

Steve Jobs didn’t claim to be preaching any kind of Christian gospel, but there are plenty of Christian preachers who will take what he said and go a step further with it. Joel Osteen comes to mind – Your Best Life Now – saying that yes, life is all about pursuit of personal happiness, and, if God is truly blessing you, accumulating personal wealth into the bargain.

What’s missing in this idea of doing what we love, and hopefully amassing lots of money doing it, is any hope beyond the personal, any idea of transcendence, a faith in a greater purpose for your life, a trust in something that lies beyond the simple boundaries of this world. So what if we could find a meaning to life that lies beyond this, that fulfills our innermost yearnings while still leading us to greater meaning and purpose? And still telling us that our lives encompass something greater than their physical life spans, that in fact our lives have deep and eternal significance?

Enter today’s gospel – a very strange parable of celebration and judgment. It is a parable that begins to describe God’s dream for us that is greater than all human dreams – because it is a parable of the kingdom of Heaven. But what a strange parable it is – with an angry king disinviting one set of guests from the wedding banquet, dragging in another set off the street, yet flinging someone into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, for a dress code violation – what’s going on here?

Like any gospel, you have to understand what is going on in context. In today’s gospel, Jesus is standing in Jerusalem, knowing that his death is around the corner, and will come at the hands of the very temple leaders he is talking to – scribes, Pharisees, temple authorities. And he begins to tell parables of the kingdom of heaven.

Today’s parable is the third in a row of stories that pointedly tell the religious authorities in Jerusalem that they have lost sight of God’s dream for them. They are the first ones invited to the wedding banquet, yet they have other priorities, dreams of their own to fulfill, and they can’t make time for God’s invitation. So riffraff like you and me are invited to the banquet instead. Latecomers to God’s covenant, we are not Jews, we haven’t done anything to deserve this invitation, no achievements could earn us this ticket – yet here we are.

We need to be very careful in this parable not to read it as anti-Jewish rhetoric. Remember that Jesus and all of his followers were Jews. Jesus is very specifically directing this parable against temple leaders who know God’s hope for them very well, yet can’t make time for God’s priorities. These are people who have put their own desires, their own pursuit of happiness in front of God’s dream for them. They may love what they’re doing, and many of them are accumulating great wealth doing it, but they use the temple that should be dedicated to God’s worship for heir own gain. They grasp onto their own power so hard that they don’t recognize God’s invitation when it comes – so they choose to avoid it.

So Jesus makes them angry by saying that others, less worthy of an invitation perhaps, good and bad alike, will have their places at God’s banquet. It is a parable of judgment, and judgment makes many of us uncomfortable – but notice, it is the temple leaders’ choice to say no to the invitation. Everyone was invited. We can exclude ourselves from God’s kingdom by our own choice, our decision to say no – but God invites everyone.

But then what’s going on with this poor fellow without a wedding robe? Some people say that great hosts, when they gave a banquet, would provide a rack of wedding robes at the door for those who didn’t have one – so refusing to wear the robe provided was just disrespectful to the host. This guest wants to eat the food provided, but not celebrate the occasion – he refuses to accept the clean new clothing the host offers.

What Jesus seems to be telling us here is in accordance with a theme that runs throughout Matthew’s gospel – the church is a mixed lot of folks. Some are good, some are bad, some will ultimately show that their heart belongs to God’s kingdom and some will show that it doesn’t. During this age, the age of the church, it is not for us to judge other people. On judgment day, God will separate the good from the bad.

In the meantime, that is to say, the time in between Jesus’ resurrection and the final judgment – so, our entire lifespan – Matthew tells us that we have some accountability for our actions. Yes, we have been invited to the banquet, yes, we have accepted the invitation – but while we wait for that day when the king arrives, we are accountable to God for the way we use the gifts he has given us. God provides the party, God brings us in to enjoy it, God even gives us the robe, the clothes of salvation to wear – but it is up to live in a way that honors what God has done for us

And how to honor God’s gifts is a choice we all must make. Steve Jobs believes that our greatest happiness lies in doing what we love; some Christian preachers believe that amassing personal wealth will bring us happiness. I believe that our greatest joy lies in loving God and loving each other. Yes, God will empower us to do what he has created us to do –what we love is what we do best. But God will also empower us to use the good gifts he has give us to build up the kingdom of God – which is hope beyond any transitory human happiness, lasting longer than any human lifetime. Which will bring us something far deeper than happiness: it will bring true joy in our abiding relationship with God, no matter our external circumstances. The kind of joy that Paul describes, writing from prison, when he says, rejoice in the Lord always.

Anthony Bloom, Russian Orthodox metropolitan bishop of Britain till his death in 2003, talking about Nazi occupation of Paris when he very nearly was caught by the Gestapo for his work with the French Resistance, wrote in Beginning to Pray:

During the German occupation of France I was in the resistance movement and, coming down into the Underground, I was caught by the police.... What took place at that moment was this: I had a past, I had a future, and I was moving out of one into the other by walking briskly down the steps. At a certain moment someone put a hand on my shoulder and said 'Stop, give me your papers.' At that moment . .. I realized that I had no past, because the real past I had was the thing for which I should be shot.... I found myself standing there like the lizard who had been caught by the tail and had run away leaving the tail somewhere behind, so that the lizard ended where the tail had been."

For the Christian, the place where we stand, walking briskly from past to future, is always the place of the cross – it is the place of decision, the decisive break between what we were without Christ and what we become as we accept his invitation and then enter fully into the joy of the kingdom. We are no longer to find our identity in our past, our accomplishments, our history. In future we find our identity in Christ – and our story becomes Christ’s story.

Jesus Christ IS the threshold where our past and our future meet. Jesus Christ is the one who extends the invitation. And Jesus Christ is the one who gives us all we need to enter the kingdom. His is the invitation that will bring us far more than simple happiness. It will bring us true, deep, eternal and abiding joy.

Sermon for September 25, 2011

2011-09-26T21:44:00.000-07:00

Scriptures for today are Here

Is the Lord among us, or not? This is the question the Israelites are asking in the wilderness in the Old Testament lesson today. And perhaps this was the question Mark Gwin was asking himself as he battled wildfires in Central Texas last week. He is the publisher of the local paper, Bastrop Advertiser, a member of Calvary Episcopal Church, and a volunteer firefighter.

He wrote: “My family and I fled from our home on Sunday afternoon, Sept. 4, while a gentle dusting of ash fell and the sun glowed red overhead in the thick plume of smoke that covered the sky….I've been a volunteer fire fighter for five years now, and I've never felt as helpless as I did Sunday night watching as the fire, whipped by a vengeful wind, had its way across the Lost Pines…. I was the first firefighter with Heart of the Pines to lose his home….By the end of that day, there were only a few firefighters left who still had a place to call home. Here's the crazy, heart-wrenching thing – they were demobilized, released from duty because operations realized what kind of loss our department was experiencing. But not a single one of them stopped…. They're fighting the fire still.”

It’s the kind of wilderness experience that makes humans ask: where is God? Is the Lord among us, or not?

The Israelites in today’s Old Testament reading are experiencing a sort of symbolic moment, a sojourn in the wilderness, where they learn to question God, ask for what they need, and search for God’s providence in difficult times. You and I may never have wandered through a desert in search of water. And we may never have battled wild fires or lost a home to them. But each of us has probably had a wilderness experience at some point – an illness, the loss of a relationship, an addiction, a spiritual crisis. And almost all of us have asked some form of that question: is the Lord among us, or not?

We see a version of this same question in our gospel story today: when the temple officials ask, by whose authority are you doing these things? They are asking, quite simply, is the Lord among us in this Jesus who is getting all this attention, or does his power come from somewhere else? They are asking the same question differently than the people of Israel in the Old Testament lesson, whom God answers graciously with water to preserve their lives. The temple officials are pretty sure they are acting under God’s authority, for after all they are in charge of God’s temple and they obey its rules. But they are pretty angry about this Jesus fellow, because just before this in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus swept through the temple, overturning the tables of the money changers and chasing them out, calling temple a “den of robbers.” Understandably upset at being called robbers, the temple officials come to Jesus and demand to know what right he has to do such things.

And they don’t know it, but they’re in a wilderness experience of their own – a test of whether they are able to see God’s hand at work in their world, or whether they will be so attached to their own positions, that they won’t be able to recognize the Son of God when he stands before them.

Jesus answers them pointedly with the parable of the two sons: one who says “yes” to his father but doesn’t do what his father says, and one who says “no” but does it anyway – and clearly he is speaking to religious officials who pretend to do God’s will but are really in it for themselves, and letting them know that tax collectors and sinners will go into heaven ahead of them.

God is standing before them in this wilderness of anger, this spiritual crisis they find themselves in, he tells them – and can they recognize God’s work? Or are they going to say “yes” to God but refuse to join in God’s ministry? This, by the way, is the kind of pointed question that will get him killed, not too long from now.

And we can sit and watch this, and understand exactly what Jesus is doing, and exactly why he attacks the temple officials who pay lip service to God, obeying all the rules and rituals, yet getting rich off the backs of the people and ignoring God’s call to act justly, to help the poor, to follow God’s teachings with their hearts and not just their lips. And yet, watching how Jesus criticizes these other folks from long ago, perhaps it doesn’t take long for us to realize how these things apply to us too.

Back in Chapter 7 of Matthew, Jesus had said, “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but those who do the will of my Father in heaven” – similar to today’s parable of the two sons. Well, we’re here in church because we are saying to Jesus, Lord, Lord. And we have been assured that our faith in Jesus is what brings us to the kingdom of heaven, and not anything we could do to earn it. We truly believe that in the wilderness experiences of our lives, God will be with us, bringing water from the rock, manna in the wilderness, filling our spiritual needs – giving comfort in times of sorrow, promising life in world of death.

Yet here is Jesus saying something more is required that simply believing this, accepting God’s love, worshiping Christ – God wants to see actions as well as words. So what is he saying to us?

First, we need to understand that Jesus is not saying that our actions earn our way to heaven; he is saying that our actions indicate where our heart truly is. If we are truly following Jesus; if our hearts have been converted to him, then we will live kingdom lives; our actions will show where our hearts are.

Second, we should realize Jesus’ parable doesn’t exhaust all possibilities. You can say “yes” to God but then not do what God says – like the temple priests. You can say “no” to God but then do God’s will anyway – like sinners who come out of their wilderness of sin to follow Jesus. You could also say “no” to God and not do it – like too many people today who are lost in their own spiritual wildernesses. Or you could say “yes” to God and do what God says – and this is the category we hope we are in.

So, for those of us who have decided to follow Jesus, who have said “yes” to him – how do we make sure our hearts and actions are in line with what our lips have said?

I think it comes back to the question: is the Lord among us, or not? I believe the Lord is among us when we ask God to be there. In the wilderness experiences of our lives, when we are wandering lost, ill, grief-stricken, worried about tomorrow and about how we are going to find what we need to survive, like the Israelites searching for water in the desert – when we reach out to God, God is there. Not judging us for questioning, not requiring us to prove ourselves to him, but caring for us as a loving parent. Giving us not necessarily what we want, but what we need, like water in the desert – God’s own presence and care, that we can count on.

There are other times in our lives, other wilderness experiences, when we don’t even know that we are wandering lost. When Jesus unsettles us, calls us to account, and we stand in front of God and question him, like the temple priests, requiring him to prove who he is. It’s times like this that Jesus turns our question back around on us. The question is not, is Jesus acting under God’s authority. The question is, are WE acting under God’s authority? Are we doing the things God has called us to do, are we living the law of love, are we caring for our neighbor as ourselves? Are we saying Yes to God with our lips, and with our lives? Because if we are, it will show in our relationships with the world around us.

Back in Central Texas, firefighter Mark Gwin talked about where he saw God – and it was in the love of the people of the community who have banded together to help. “As a personal recipient of more kindness and generosity than I can comprehend or am even comfortable with…the love is staggering and helps more than I know how to say….I can never give back even the half of all that has been given me, but I suppose that is the truth and the beauty of the human condition. Human kindness is grace made flesh.’

And he wrote a prayer: “I loved my home…. I built it with my own hands…. So much is gone….But so much is left. In the Lord's Prayer, the only material thing we ask for is our daily bread. My family has been given that and so much more. So I offer thanks. Thanks that so many found safety in the face of such a ferocious and fast-moving fire. Thanks for the women and men who fought the fire and all the other responders. Thanks for the abundant generosity of the community. We are good people, backing up our good intentions with diligent work. I pray that we grow in kindness, wisdom and generosity. And that, having seen what we are capable of, we nurture it and develop it over the years as we rebuild our community. Rain and time will restore the earth. Love and work will restore our community.”

That’s the prayer that I pray for each one of us today. I pray that we may grow in kindness, wisdom and generosity. I pray that each one of us finds the grace to act as this community acted. To reach out to those in need, to live out love in our actions as well as our words, to be the incarnated presence of Christ in our church and our world. Because it is in being the presence of Christ, acting as Christ would act, that we find that the Lord is truly among us.

Sermon for Sept. 18, 2011

2011-09-18T14:36:00.000-07:00

Scriptures for today are Here

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, talks about the phenomenon of Canadian hockey: at all levels of play, from grade school through NHL, Canadian hockey is a strict meritocracy. You get what you deserve; you can’t buy your way onto top teams or into the best training facilities; it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you went to school. The top opportunities in Canadian hockey leagues go to the best players.

Or so everyone thought, until a psychologist named Roger Barnsley noticed a very strange fact: an overwhelming number of players on championship teams were born in January, February or March – if you were born in January, you were 5 times more likely to be on a championship team than if you were born in November. This effect was true for all levels of hockey, from grade school to the NHL.

It turns out that training for Canadian hockey begins at the very youngest age: when kids first start to school – and the cutoff birthdate for joining a league is Jan. 1. At very early ages, a few months’ difference in age makes a big difference in ability. But coaches, not recognizing that, started pegging the bigger, stronger, faster players early on, and lined them up for more specialized training and higher-ability leagues – and the effect snowballed from there, so that even in professional hockey, birth months are noticeably skewed toward the beginning of the year. In fact, even at the professional level, this matrix holds true: 40% of players are born in the first quarter of the year, 30% in the second quarter, 20% in the third quarter, and only 10% in the fourth quarter. A sport that is rigorously arranged to reward people based strictly on merit turns out to give strong preference to people based on a mere accident of birth.

Which is interesting, because so many of us credit ourselves for our achievements – and rightly so, because we have worked hard. But think about that hard-working, 6-year old hockey player born in January, looking at his November teammate and thinking, he works hard, but he just doesn’t have what it takes – I deserve these higher honors. Yet it’s partly based on an accident of birth, a 10-month difference in birthdates.

I think back on my academic achievements and wonder, how much of my good grades in school could be traced back to the accident of being born to a mother who loved to read, and who started teaching me to read and write at a very young age, so that for me, reading was not something that meant schoolwork and testing and sitting in hard uncomfortable chairs. It meant sitting on my mother’s lap, with her arms around me, and her voice reading me the perfect cadences of Dr. Seuss – and she and Dr. Seuss made reading inextricably associated with love and happiness for me. And how much of my achievements were made possible by a father who believed that his girls could do anything any boy could do, and by being born in a time and place where our culture had more or less arrived at the same conclusion?

So often we fail to recognize how the things we receive, and achieve, are partly due to the care of other people, the accidents of birth, the circumstances we find selves in – even, by God, the grace and generosity of God. We’re like Bart Simpson at Thanksgiving, praying: “Dear Lord, we paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing. Amen.” Yet we’re surrounded by things that have come to us through what we call “grace”: the free gift of circumstances we did not deserve or work for.

Living in the kingdom of God means recognizing God’s grace in our lives. The miracle of the manna in the wilderness is an illustration: God leads the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt into freedom, yet they find themselves in a wilderness, desolate and uncertain, and begin to yearn for the familiar certainty of being slaves, where at least Pharaoh gives them food, as a subsistence investment in the labor he can get in return. Newly arrived in the kingdom of God, they yearn for the kingdom of Pharaoh instead.

Yet God, having birthed this new people, shows them what the kingdom of God is: God gives them each day just enough manna to feed them for one day. If they hoard it, it will spoil. So the newly birthed people of Israel must learn to live according to the discipline of grace: living in certainty that God will provide for their daily needs, but not looking beyond, not hoarding, not taking more than needed, not taking more for one person than the next – everyone has enough, none of it is deserved.

We Americans who were raised on Aesop’s Fable of the ant and the grasshopper, where the ant is rewarded for working hard and storing up food for the winter, while the grasshopper is on his own after having fun all summer, have trouble with this kingdom of God – and like the Israelites, we may yearn for the kingdom of Pharaoh instead. But somehow this story tells us what God wants to give us – undeserved grace.

I read that if you go to the Sinai desert, you can see manna to this day. There is a certain insect there that secretes a white flaky substance which is pure sugar and carbohydrate – it is secreted as liquid overnight, and dries by morning in a flaky white crust over all the ground – perfectly edible to humans. On one level, you might say, well that’s not a miracle, that’s a natural phenomenon.

On another level, you could look at that manna in the wilderness and see God’s hand in it – God who led the people of Israel to the place that provided what they needed. And God who creates the world–why would it not be a miracle? After all, everything we eat, everything we wear, everything we build, comes from the earth; even our own lives; it is God who makes the whole natural world available to us. There is a Jewish prayer: “Days pass and years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.” We live among miracles, and give credit to ourselves.

If we start believing, like Bart Simpson, that we have done it all for ourselves, we become like the laborers in the gospel parable today, measuring the grace we think God, or the world, owes us, and grudging the grace given to others; living in a world of resentment, the kingdom of Pharaoh, hoarding what we think we deserve, instead of in a world of gratitude, the kingdom of God.

Today’s gospel is one of Jesus’ parables – and a parable is not like Aesop’s fables – we’re not supposed to get a tidy little moral for how to live like “Slow and steady wins the race” or whatever the moral was in the ant and the grasshopper story – "I got mine, you’re on your own," or something like that. What a parable does is surprises us – it opens our eyes to a new way of seeing. To understand a parable, you have to look first at how Jesus uses it. This is another in a long string of parables that begins: “the kingdom of heaven is like….” In this one, Jesus draws a picture from ordinary life that is familiar then and now – day laborers waiting on a corner for a job, a landowner who comes by in a pickup truck to hire a few laborers, five different times in one day. These are day laborers who start the day in uncertainty, not knowing if they will have food to feed their families at end of day, or if their children will go to bed hungry. Being hired is a moment of grace for them, manna in the wilderness of unemployment. This landowner who hires them makes sure that everyone has enough.

And we are surprised, as Jesus always surprises us in parables, because the landowner’s generosity takes into account not what the workers deserve, but what the owner wants to give: enough for everyone, manna for that day. The kingdom of heaven is like a God who gives grace to everyone – a beautiful lesson for us to learn.

But Jesus is realistic about human nature, so he tells us: the kingdom of heaven is also like a group of folks who begrudge that grace to others they think don’t deserve it - who would rather hold onto God’s blessings for selves. Having received everything they need, they would prefer to deny it to others.

I think in a parable, we can learn a lot by asking: where do we see ourselves? Do we see ourselves as the laborers hired early in the day? Late in the day? The landowner? Maybe some of us would identify with the laborers hired late in the day – we are conscious of giving little and receiving much grace from God in return. But most of us would probably identify with the laborers hired early in the day. Here we’ve been faithful Christians, gone to church, gone to school, held a job, taken our obligations seriously, supported our families, given and worked for the kingdom of God. We’re like Canadian hockey players born early in the year. We've worked for what we have achieved.

But what if Jesus sees us differently? What if we’re the late hires, the ones who didn’t deserve what we were given, but God gave it to us anyway? One of the truths of God’s kingdom is that we are all the late hires – no one deserves the amazing grace of God’s kingdom – nothing we could ever do could earn the gifts God gives us – but we receive them nonetheless. And like laborers in vineyard, we’re asked to share them willingly with others.

In the kingdom of heaven, things don’t work like they do in the kingdom of Pharaoh. In the kingdom of Pharaoh, we get what we deserve, punishments and rewards both – but we are also slaves. In the kingdom of God, all grace comes undeserved, along with freedom. We have to choose which kingdom to live in.

If we are going to live in the kingdom of God, Jesus asks two things of us: to understand what God has shared with us, and to share that grace with others. We can live with resentment, we can live with grace, but we can’t have both.

So here’s what I think Jesus calls us to do today and this week: ask ourselves two questions. What has God given you in abundance? It could be comfort, enough for each day, family, money, love, a difficult past that we learned from, and we are grateful for what we’ve learned; it could be eternal salvation and a place in kingdom of heaven. Take a moment and think about it – what are your greatest blessings?

Now, here’s the second question to think about today and the rest of this week: how is God calling you, today, tomorrow, and for the rest of your life, to share those blessings with others?

Sermon for Sept. 11, 2011

2011-09-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

Scriptures for today are Here

Human memory is a very strange thing. You may not remember what you wore yesterday or where you left your keys, but probably everyone here could tell detailed memories of where you were and what you were doing 10 years ago today. I was getting my children ready for school when Tom called and told me to turn on the TV. He told me a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, and I asked if it was an accident, and he said no.

And I still remember odd little moments from that day. The crossing guard at school who was helping kids cross the street with tears streaming down her face; the smell of candles in a church service that night; my 5-year-old daughter Julia asking me, “Mommy, why do you keep watching TV and crying?” The feeling of shock and utter disbelief that everyone shared.

And if I asked you, most everyone here could tell me the same kinds of memories. Somehow our memories of significant events exist for us in a whole package of facts, details, sensory images, faces, emotions. This is how our memories as human beings work: not linear reconstructions of facts, like computers that store strings of data, ones and zeros of equal weight, but bundles of human memories that are charged with emotional significance, which is why people never forget where they were and what they were doing when a tragic event happened: Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, 9/11.

Because human memories work this way: factual details tied up together with our senses and our emotions and our interpretations of their meaning, we humans can move beyond mere memory to something more important: remembrance. Remembrance is a word which means to re-member – to put all the members back together, to bring something together in a new way. When we re-member something, Episcopal author Diana Butler Bass says, we “rearrange the pictures of memory in order to make meaning, to heal, to forgive, or to inspire … Remembering is the hard work of seeing, understanding, making sense of, and learning from the past.”

Forgiveness, it seems, is a type of re-membrance – a way of understanding, making sense of, and learning from our memories, a way of re-imagining the past in order to bring ourselves to a place of wholeness and healing. We hear challenging words from Matthew’s gospel today: Peter came and said to Jesus, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” This number could also be translated seventy times seven times, 490 times, basically over and over and over.

Jesus brings his point home with the parable of a slave whose master forgives him an unimaginable amount of money – 10,000 talents was something like 150,000 years of wages for an Israelite wage-earner, or the entire Gross Domestic Product of Israel for ten years – but the same slave is unable to forgive another slave 100 denarii, basically 4 months’ living wages.

Clearly, Jesus wants us to understand that God has forgiven us everything, has made it possible for us to live healed lives, reconciled to God and others, has even offered us eternal salvation. Yet he says we often turn around and refuse to offer even a small portion of that same grace to others. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we express something similar, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”

It’s not so much that our receiving forgiveness is contingent on our giving it. It’s more of a recognition that our ability to live reconciled lives is dependent on our willingness to both receive forgiveness for ourselves and offer it to others. Jesus is asking us to move beyond our simple memories of sins past, into a new realm of re-membrance – putting back together a new self, and a world we can imagine of reconciliation and wholeness, a world of God’s love.

Now I am completely aware of how difficult a lectionary text this is to hear on the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, a day when our memories of a sin done against people like us are so strong and overwhelming. And by the way, I didn’t choose this gospel for this day, no one did – the lectionary texts are set in stone decades in advance, and all over the world, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox churches are struggling with this same text today. And the question of forgiving others over and over, as God does, brings all kinds of difficult problems to our human minds.

I think it is helpful to start by talking about what forgiveness is not. Forgiveness is not forgetting – our humanity does not allow us to simply forget memories of events that carry emotional significance. Forgiveness is not saying it was all right – some things will never be all right – sin and evil are real, and forgiveness does not change this fact. Forgiveness does not mean we allow the same thing to happen again – our responsibility to forgive is not an obligation to accept abuse. Forgiveness does not mean that we just let it go – there may be significant work to do to bring a relationship to healing and wholeness. Forgiveness does not mean that every relationship can be salvaged – sometimes as a last resort a relationship has to come to an end. Forgiveness does not mean that there are no consequences to sinful or evil actions – in a world that is short of the kingdom of heaven, a world where sin still reigns, justice must happen.

So that’s what forgiveness is not – let’s talk about what forgiveness is. I think that forgiveness is this: it is allowing God’s grace to move through us so that we can begin to release the sins that are keeping us separate from God and from our neighbor.

Forgiveness includes our own sins that we can’t forget, and our tendency to clutch tightly to the memories of other people’s sins against us. Many of us have trouble with both ends of this spectrum. We have trouble accepting forgiveness for ourselves, we hang onto our memories of our own failures, the whole package of facts and feelings, shame and guilt, and we have trouble letting them go. What we need to understand is that when God offers us forgiveness, God doesn’t so much forget our sins, as God re-members who we are. God imagines us whole and complete and reconciled, the children of God we were created to be – in re-membering us, God makes us whole. This is the great truth of reconciliation – in God’s love, God restores us to who we were created to be. Forgiveness is God’s self- giving act of love for us.

This remembrance of who we truly are is what God asks us to extend to others too – God asks us to imagine the other as God does, to see them as God’s beloved children, to work toward reconciliation, to realize that our hard and challenging call as Christians is to love even those who have hurt us. After all, Jesus forgave his killers as they nailed him to the cross. It’s a hard thing to ask humans to do, and I think most of us will never completely succeed, because we’re not Jesus – yet it’s our work, our calling as followers of Christ. Not because what others have done to us is all right, or excusable. But because forgiveness is the ultimate act of love, love in action.

And we should realize that forgiving others, allowing ourselves to become reconciled to them, becomes a path to healing for us too. If we hold onto toxic memories, if we treasure them and nurture them and allow them to grow into smoldering resentment or hurtful action, then we are the ones who will suffer. You may have heard the old saying: resentment is like taking poison yourself and expecting the other person to die.

One of the great spiritual truths that Jesus understood, that he asks us to understand too, is that forgiving others is the first step to healing for ourselves – if we can’t forgive, if we hold onto wrongs so tightly we can’t let them heal, then we become prisoners of our own memories, condemned to continue living in the world of sin. Letting go of a toxic bundle of memories means letting God transform them into holy re-membrance of God’s world as it should be, God’s children as they were created to live; it becomes our path to healing and to a transformed world.

We followers of Christ will not, by ourselves, be able to transform this world into a place of healing and forgiveness, where senseless acts of violence do not occur. Someday God’s kingdom will come in its fullness, and God will make this happen. What we can do is model an alternate way of living within the Christian community – a way of reconciliation that becomes a beacon for the world to see. We can choose how we respond to the sins of others, we can live a life of active love, we can transform our memories of past to different kind of remembrance.

Which is the kind of transformation that happened at St. Paul’s Chapel, a ministry of Trinity Episcopal Church on Wall Street, one block from the site of the World Trade Center. The little chapel built in 1766, where George Washington once owned a pew, became a headquarters for feeding recovery workers, offering them medical care, toiletries, eyewash, foot care, massage, a pew or cot to sleep on, and prayer. Firefighter John Misha, one of the recovery workers served by St. Paul’s, told a reporter: "'Every day, I spend most of my time on my hands and knees’ [at the site]…. he went on to describe [the work], in all the vivid language of somebody … who knew hell. Then, like he was rising out of hell, he stood up as straight as he could, threw out his chest, sucked in air, threw his arms into the air, and with a huge grin on his face and tears running down his cheeks, he said to her, 'And then I get to come here…When I walk in the front door of this place… they hug me, they kiss me, they bring me in and treat me like I'm a member of the family. I have never known such respect anywhere ... And I sit and cry and weep, and I am born again." In loving action, the compassionate witness of the Christian community, a new way of life becomes possible – where love transcends evil and violence.

Another worker at St. Paul’s, Courtney Cowart, in her book An American Awakening described the daily Eucharist that happened at a side altar in St. Paul’s while the ministry to recovery workers went on: on one side of the chapel, weary backs are being massaged; in pews and cots, firefighters are sleeping after 24-hour shifts, with teddy bears donated from all over country tucked under their arms; some people unwrap the cellophane on sandwiches, while others sit and stare blankly; an ironworker gives the sermon while a bishop mops the floor.

Into this holy space, a priest speaks the ancient words: Take, eat; this is my body, given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.

As the Eucharist is shared, at St. Paul’s Chapel, and here every Sunday at Nativity, and in Christian churches all over the world, Jesus is more than a memory. Jesus is re-membered; Jesus is truly present – his love, his forgiveness, his healing. Jesus is re-membered, and Jesus re-members us – calling us into wholeness and healing, and promising us eternal life.

And as we re-member him, Jesus calls us into a way of life. In this holy space, we come together in his name, to remember the one who has loved us so much, has forgiven us everything, has called us to share his love with the world. In his name, we remember. We remember the world as it was created to be. We remember to Love.