Sermon for 1.16.11

Scriptures for today are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Epiphany/AEpi2_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 1.16.11

Glory to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.

I was at a conference this week called Gathering of Leaders, for Episcopal priests engaged in transformational ministries like church planting. One of the other participants was the rector of Trinity Church, Asbury Park, NJ, David Stout. He became the rector there 7 years ago, and since then, the church has increased average Sunday attendance from 45 to 280. But if you’re like me, the first thing you want to ask the rector of Trinity Asbury Park is not, how did you lead this remarkable renaissance – but have you ever seen Bruce Springsteen? Because of course Asbury Park’s one claim to fame, as far as I know, is that it is the boyhood home of arguably the biggest rock star of last 35 years.

He laughed indulgently when I asked him this question, as if he had never heard the question before (although I heard at least two other people asking the same question at the conference), and told me this story: Trinity Church has a soup kitchen to feed the many homeless people in their area. Two years ago the Health Dept. was ready to shut them down because they needed a $3,000 commercial sink. They were interviewed on local radio about the problem because they just didn’t have the money and didn’t know what they were going to do. Two days later a check for $15,000 arrived in the mail from guess who. Apparently Bruce Springsteen still listens to Asbury Park local radio.

But even more striking: Bruce heard the story of what this congregation was doing to transform lives and decided to be a part of it, help make it possible. What a blessing to be able to help God’s mission in this way. Money truly empowers mission and is one of the things that makes it possible. We don’t all have the power to write $15,000 checks, though some do. But we all have the power to be part of God’s mission in some significant way. When you see Christ’s power at work in the world, it’s hard not to want to be a part of it – because Christ’s power is absolutely life-changing.

All three scriptures today are about how God calls us to be partners in God’s life-changing ministry of transforming the world. In our reading from Isaiah, the prophet tells us about his call to become a prophet, an agent of God’s life-changing power. Before he was born, he says, God formed him to be a prophet – the prophet genes are in his DNA. Remember who a prophet is – not a fortune-teller, but someone who sees where God is working and calls people to join in that transforming work. A prophet is someone like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday we celebrate this weekend, who gave his life for his ministry of prophecy (as public servants too often do – as we saw in Tucson last week). The ministry of the prophet is a lonely and dangerous one, as both MLK and Isaiah discover. But there is comfort: we are not all called to be prophets, though at some point we are all required in some way to listen to prophets, hard as it may be. But, the Bible is clear, we are all called to some kind of ministry. We are all agents of God’s transformation, called to use the gifts and talents God created us with, in some kind of ministry of God’s justice & love. Because following Christ means being part of God’s work in the world, an agent of God’s transformation.

And how are we to react when given the impossible task of transforming the world It won’t necessarily be easy, says Paul in the letter to Corinthians today, but it won’t be impossible either. Anything that God calls us to do is possible, says, Paul, because God has already given our church communities every gift we need to answer God’s call. One person is given the gift of healing, one the gift of prayer, another the gift of leadership, another the gift of teaching, etc. One individual doesn’t have all the gifts, but a church community together has all the gifts they need to accomplish whatever God calls them to do. Which is one reason we are called to be part of church communities, instead of worshiping on the golf course – all of us are called to take part in the community’s call to transform the world around us. In the words of retired Bishop Claude Payne of Texas, we are a community of miraculous expectation – if Christ is present, miracles occur routinely, and each of us has our part to play in making miracles happen. Whatever it is that we are called to do by the circumstances of our lives and the situations we find ourselves in, whatever God calls our communities to become, God has given us the strength and the means to do it already.

If we are a community of miraculous expectation, the challenge our gospel lesson gives us today shouldn’t be too difficult – the challenge of evangelism – sharing the good news of Christ with others. In our gospel lesson, John the Baptizer points to Jesus, and two of his disciples follow Jesus. Jesus turns and asks them: what are you looking for? A profound question each of us could ask ourselves – what are we looking for? What brings us to seek out this Jesus, to be one of his followers? What kind of personal or world transformation are we asking for? Maybe Jesus’ question is a warning: do you truly want to see and feel the power of God at work in you? Because if not, Jesus isn’t the person to follow.

Perhaps it’s too big a question, so they ask him a smaller question – where are you staying? And he invites them to come and see. We don’t know what they saw, but we know that it was powerful enough and amazing enough that they couldn’t keep it to themselves. The next day Andrew brings his brother Simon, Peter or Cephas. And John’s gospel goes on to tell us of ever-widening circles of invitation and sight, as more people are invited to see Jesus and stay with him. The power of God at work is so transformative that people can’t keep it a secret – once people see it in action, they have to share it. Being a community of miraculous expectation means that we routinely expect Christ to transform the lives of not only ourselves, but others too.

I read an article this week by Anglican bishop Bill Atwood, who tells of meeting an old retired priest in the 70s, who told him this story. His Bishop hired him in the late 30s to plant a church in a small town in the US. The priest knew exactly how to go about it, and knew he couldn’t do it alone. So he called for help: he hired – get this – an engineer, an architect and a builder. He bought tickets for them all to go to England, toured the English countryside until they found the perfect English village church, created blueprints from the church, bought native stone in England to be shipped to the US, and came back and built that church – an authentic reproduction of an English village church. As a church planter, I said – what??? I read that story with astonishment. You want to plant a church, so you hire an architect? That’s the old model of doing church – the model where you expect everyone to be Christian, so if you come to town and open an Episcopal franchise, you might attract people away from the Presbyterian franchise, the same way they might choose McDonald’s over Burger King.

But things aren’t like that in our world any more. It was clear to me from the beginning of planting this church that a church is not a building; to plant a church, you don’t build a building, you build a community. The building will come in time – I have confidence in that. But people don’t come to church to see a building, except perhaps out of mild aesthetic appreciation – if it’s really a church, then people come to church to see the authentic power of Christ at work – and when they see Christ working and transforming lives, there is no power that will keep them away.

I see an amazing power of Christ at work here at Nativity – a power that enables us to build houses with Habitat for Humanity; to give blood, to donate blankets for Navajo youth to give to the homeless, to provide Christmas presents for children and young people, to provide food, education and medical care for barrio children, etc. I see the power of Christ at work in our children and youth, who are growing together as a community of young people who love God and love each other, experiencing amazing growth and transformation to equip them for life. I see the power of work among our ministries of healing, prayer, meals for the sick, as we live out the power of Christ in our care for each other. I see the power of Christ at work in our ministries of worship, which provide our own touchstone to God who strengthens each one of us for ministry. And I see the power of Christ at work in people in our congregation who go out from here to live out that power in their everyday lives, as teachers, healers, bankers, businesspeople, parents, friends, neighbors.

The transformation Christ asks for is the revolutionary power of love that spreads through every place that Christians gather, live or work. So Christ asks each one of us to pray and think about how we are called to live out that power of love, in church and in the rest of our lives. And Christ gives each one of us a call to evangelism, a word that simply means, telling the good news. It means saying, I’ve found something that means a lot to me, and I invite you to come see for yourself.

A book I’m reading on evangelism (Unbinding the Gospel, by Martha Grace Reece) says most mainline Protestant churches aren’t “how” churches but “why” churches. A “how” church wants to know what steps to follow to do evangelism. A “why” church wants to know why to do evangelism. A “why” church is where someone says, You do evangelism, I’m going to go alphabetize the Sunday school closet. Episcopal churches have been a “why” church for too long – which is why we plant churches by building buildings rather than building communities. A church founded like that is at risk of becoming a nice club to belong to instead of a community of miraculous expectation. No wonder many Episcopal churches are in decline.

But we are part of a community of miraculous expectation. Which is why I think we are called to invite others, why we bother to do evangelism: the reason is, Christ has made a life-transforming difference in my life, I have felt the power of God working in me, Christ is transforming the lives of other people around me and other people I don’t even know. Life transformation means simply inviting others to come and see Jesus. When the power of Christ is at work, Christ will do the rest. So we say: Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God in the highest.

Sermon for 1.9.11

Scriptures for today are found here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Epiphany/AEpi1_RCL.html

We wake up this morning in a world that has been shocked by an act of senseless violence. Eighteen people were shot by a lone gunman in Tucson yesterday. Six of them died, including a 9-year-old girl and a federal judge. And a U.S. Congresswoman is in very critical condition, fighting for her life. It is heartbreaking and horrifying, and it reminds us that people die in senseless acts of violence every day. And it makes us wonder how to make sense of what is happening in our world and our country.

And then we come to church and hear this lovely story of Jesus going down to the river to be baptized, and we have to ask ourselves, what does this nice sweet story have to do with a world where a horrible shooting like yesterday’s in Tucson can occur. What, in fact, does it have to do with the everyday lives that most of us lead?

Heather Murray Elkins, professor of preaching and worship at Drew Theological Seminary, tells this story that might help us begin to make a connection. She was leading a pastor’s retreat, several days long. At the beginning, she instructed the pastors gathered to spend the next few days searching through the Bible for a story that told their own story. The Word speaks through our lives, she says, the Word is living and active. And somewhere in it we should each be able to find our own story, the story that utters us. And that story will give us a new name, a Biblical name that speaks our lives.

On the last day of conference, she asked each person to tell their biblical name. She set up a circle of chairs with one chair in the center, and each person took a turn to tell their biblical name, and explain how it told their story. They took turns, names were spoken: Jacob, Rebekah, Mary, Peter, John. Then it came turn for one young man to sit in the center chair, and he sat. He sat for a long time in silence, till the silence became uncomfortable and people began to fidget and look at their watches. Finally, Heather asked: “Do you have a name to speak for us?”

He said: ‘I can’t speak a name from the Bible, because I have another name. This name is so strong that no other name can overcome it. My father gave me this name, and it was repeated so often that it has become a part of me. I can’t imagine myself by any other name.”

Silence fell again. Finally, Heather asked: “What is this name? Will you share it?” And the young man answered: “My name is, Not Good Enough.” And he began to cry.

The pastors all sat in silence, shocked. Someone was drowning, said Heather, and here we were, a room full of lifeguards, and no one knew what to do. But after a moment, a spirit swept the room, she said, like a wind, or maybe just an impulse, and one by one, people stood, walked to him, laid hands on him. And several of them began to speak, words they hadn’t rehearsed, words that came to each one separately. One after another they said these words: “You are my Child, my Beloved. With you I am well pleased.”

We don’t have any way of knowing how Jesus felt when he was baptized. We don’t know what made him one day put down his hammer, take off his apron, and walk out of his father’s carpenter shop, and walk south to find his crazy cousin John on the banks of the river Jordan. We don’t know what struck him as he listened to his cousin preach about One who was to come, who would baptize with water and fire, or what made him decide to walk down into the river and wade in the water. We don’t know whether he felt he was good enough to be the Messiah.

What we know was that he apparently answered the call to baptism, not because he needed his sins forgiven, but simply because it was God’s call. And we know that as he emerged, dripping, from the baptismal water, he heard a voice that named him, affirmed him, and loved him. “You are my Son, my Beloved. With you I am well pleased.”

All 4 gospels tell us that Jesus’ baptism was the beginning of his ministry. That somehow this affirmation of his identity as God’s Beloved Son was foundational to everything Jesus would ever accomplish or teach or lead. It was in a sense, his commissioning ceremony, his anointing as the Messiah. It was the moment when God’s affirmation gave Jesus his identity, and his identity empowered him for his world-transforming mission.

On this first Sunday after the end of the 12 days of Christmas, the question of Jesus’ identity is fresh in our minds. We know who Jesus was: the Son of God. But it helps for us to understand what the people who first gave him that title would have meant by it. When people of Jesus’ time said that Jesus was the Son of God, they would have had in mind what a son was in their culture. A son was not only expected to enter into his father’s business. A son was considered to represent his father in every way – if the father was honored and respected, so was the son, and vice versa. You could look at a son and understand who his father was.

With Jesus, this title of Son of God tells us this: if Jesus is the Son of God, then we know that Jesus is like God, Jesus is God-like. This was utterly shocking to the people of Jesus’ time, for a person to claim to be God-like. So shocking that it is one reason they put him to death. But it gets even more shocking the more you think about it, because the converse is also true: if God is Jesus’ father, then we know that God is Jesus-like. God does all the things that Jesus does. God eats with sinners, God heals the sick, God proclaims good news to the poor, God opens the eyes of the blind, God says to love our enemies and then puts that love into action by forgiving his killers from the cross, God gives his own life for the sake of the people he loves. This is God, the creator of heaven and earth, who is claiming Jesus for his Son, and on the cross it is God who is dying for us.

And the implications go on and on, because it doesn’t stop there. Not only is Jesus God-like and not only is God Jesus-like – shocking though those are. Here’s the kicker: in our baptisms, God is claiming us as God’s children too. We become one with Jesus in our baptism. And that means that we too have become God-like. And in claiming us, in becoming one of us, God has become like us. We can look at each other and say: you are baptized. And that means that God is Bob-like, God is Susan-like, God is Christine-like, God is Dorothy-like. We can look at each other, baptized children of God, and see God in each other.

Now sit with that for a moment. Sit with that idea: I am a baptized child of God, and that means that God said to me: You are my beloved child, and with you I am well pleased. Now ask yourself: what are the implications of that as I live out my life?

It is said that Martin Luther, the prophet of the Reformation, as he was trapped in a castle in Wartburg, hiding from the church officials who wanted to bring him to trial, struggled with the darkness of despair. And as he struggled, he would repeat to himself over and over: I am baptized, I am baptized, I am baptized. He wrote it on a sign above his bed, he scratched it into the wood of his desk. That assurance of who he was and how much he was loved gave him the strength he needed to continue his mission. So much that throughout life, he would tell others: Remember your baptism.

Many of us were baptized as infants, and we can’t remember the event. But that’s not what Martin Luther meant by “remember your baptism.” We remember our baptism by living into it, by accepting our identity as children of God, by realizing that as God’s children we have been initiated into the family business: to heal the sick, to associate with sinners and all those in need of God’s love, to open the eyes of the blind, to proclaim good news to the poor, to give ourselves for each other, to change the world.

We remember our baptism when we work to bring justice and peace to our hurting world, a world in a sad and troubled state that was brought home to the citizens of Arizona forcefully yesterday in that terrible shooting of 18 people. A world where a senseless act of violence like this can happen is a world where people have forgotten about God’s love, where people are failing to see God’s image in one another, where anger and violence has taken the place of careful and compassionate debate, where people have forgotten the spirit of God that dwells in them and in others around them, where people think it’s okay to see each other as objects instead of beloved children of God. Our world is in desperate need of God’s love, it’s crying out for people willing to live out a ministry of love, remembering our baptism.

Which is what we do today, on this celebration of the baptism of Jesus. Not just remember his baptism, but also remember our own. Remember who we are and whose we are. Remember that we are like God, and God is like us. Which means that no matter what names the world has given us, no matter what life situation we struggle with, no matter who we think we are or who we have been told we are, only one thing matters, only one name defines us, only one label will be ours for eternity: We are God’s children, God’s beloved. And because we are God’s children, God empowers us to change the world.

Heather Murray Elkins continued her story of the young man who believed his only name was, “Not Good Enough.” She says that after the conference was over and everything was packed up, she saw him in the parking lot and went over to him. She asked, “I have to know, will what happened make any difference to you?” He answered, “I don’t know. I really don’t know. But I feel like something inside me had been broken, and it’s not any more. And what I do know is that it will make a difference every time I baptize someone else. Every time I hold a child in my arms to baptize him, or every time I put my hand into the water to name another human being, I will remember who he is, and I will remember who I am.”

And that, she says, is the secret of our baptism.

We are God’s beloved children, and in us God is well pleased.

David Deppen's Sermon for 12.19.10

This sermon was preached by The Rev. David Deppen, on 12.19.10 at Church of the Nativity, on the occasion of the 51st anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood.

First of all, let me express my appreciation to Susan for her generous offer to let me celebrate the Eucharist this morning. After she had asked, I upped the ante by offering to preach as well. I wouldn’t have done that except for the fact that I have a sermon left over from a year ago – a sermon that went unheard. On this same Sunday last year, I was to celebrate my 50^th anniversary of ordination and the rector of our parish in Cape Cod – St Mary’s in Provincetown - issued the same invitation as Susan. Our family were all in Wellfleet for Christmas and all was in readiness. But that Sunday we awoke to a major snowstorm with a foot already on the ground and more coming down. The roads were a mess, the police warned against venturing out, and the 15 mile drive seemed foolhardy. Consequently, my 50^th went unheralded and the sermon went in my file. Until today! Not new, but unused and with a few obvious adjustments, here is what I wrote.

Fifty-one years ago today I was one of eleven men ordained to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church at St. James Cathedral in Chicago. Fifty-one years ago tomorrow I struggled through my first Eucharist, trying to get all the prayers and hand gestures and genuflections correct as befitted a proper newly minted Anglo-Catholic priest. I never did get the silent prayer at the Lavabo right, and when I confessed that a year or two later, my confessor nearly had a heart attack. Had I robbed a bank or run off with the organist, I would have upset him less. Well, fifty-one years later, I just wash my hands and to heck with the prayer.

In the greater scheme of things, fifty-one years is a pittance; in a lifetime, it amounts to a lot. Fifty-one years ago was like another world. Church going, for one thing, was all the rage. The parish where I was curate had an active men's club and several women's guilds, but the really big thing was the couple's club.

What a lot energy and creativity was poured into that group - and how much fun they had! The Church was a real focus for people's social lives, and I remember as if it were a refrain, the oft-repeated phrase "Church friends are the best friends."

Few of us were prepared for the changes that were to come, least of all this newly ordained cleric. It still amazes me that I could have gone through three years of seminary training, ignorant of and untouched by the breezes of Change that were soon to blow with gale force over the Church and nation.

In Seminary we used to joke that we were exquisitely trained to be 19^th Century English country parsons - right out of Trollope, if you please. It was not that there was any absence of prophets to caution us about the inevitability of the future, but as usual it was easier and more comfortable to ignore the prophets than to take them seriously. This has been the fate of prophets from the days of Israel down to the present.

In 1959, The Standing Liturgical Commission of the Episcopal Church had been at work for ten years in the long process leading to a new Prayer Book. It would be another 20 years before the new book was approved. But what phenomenal failure of vision led my seminary to ignore the work they were doing? The Civil Rights Movement was already underway, and its prophets could certainly be heard if we had listened. Viet Nam was, for most of us, still a failure of French Colonialism, but already CIA advisors were filling Saigon to prop up the Diem regime against a resurgent Ho Chi Minh, and the tragedy of the Viet Nam war was only a handful of years away. 'The voices of feminism were heard here and there, but who would have believed that women would be ordained priests within seventeen years when at that time they were not even seated as deputies to the General Convention of the Church.

Of course the issue of human sexuality was not on the radar screen then. AIDS had years to wait before it began to lay waste to so many gifted and vibrant men. And while there were gay priests by the dozens, no one raised the issue and "Don't ask; don't tell" worked like a charm.

Finally, the manifold advances in science and technology which have so altered our times were multiplying faster than anyone could keep up with them. The tempo of change was increasing dramatically, yet in 1959 I was ready to slip into a stable, secure and respected slot in what many of us still believed was a world we understood and could master. How soon that was all to change.

Today that old worldview which sustained us for so long has faded, and we are in the process of fashioning a new one to take its place. This is an uncomfortable time; we are in transition, and that is a suitable situation for our reflection in this Advent season. Advent is a time for waiting, a time of hope and expectation. What will be is not yet fully formed, and so we wait.

Many of us find it difficult entering that new world, but the birthing process is usually accompanied by trauma and pain. What we have to bring to the situation is our natural intelligence, the resilience and adaptability of our species, and, for those of us who profess the faith of Jesus Christ, a vision of what the world might be, indeed, what the world will be in the Day of the Lord. We bring the element of Christian hope, and the assurance that God reigns, into whatever confusion, doubt and uncertainty lie ahead.

What might we expect the role of the Church to be in this new age? First off, let me say what I think it will not be.

The Christian Church will never again enjoy the kind of centrality and power she experienced in the Western World for so long. The Western World itself has lost its grip and while the West may still be in the game, any dreams of the Church recovering its ancient supremacy are doomed to failure. The magisterium or teaching authority of the Church has largely vanished, as recent Popes know all too well. The very word magisterium speaks of an arrogance which makes honest men cringe. The days of "Father knows best" are mercifully long gone.

The popularity of Christian fundamentalism is a kind of last-ditch effort to hang on to what has been. It will not go away, but I believe it will become more and more eccentric and less and less influential over all. The Church that survives will be a genuinely constituted community of believers - of the committed. As for those who now cling to the fringes as a kind of insurance policy for heaven, or who utilize its services to be hatched, matched and dispatched, these will fade away.

Finally, I believe that for the Church to go forward with integrity into the future, she must embrace fully her calling as a servant Church. Triumphalism is not only dead; it was wrong in the first place. Jesus, at the Last Supper, washed his disciples’ feet as a sign of that servanthood. He said "The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, but not so with you; rather the greatest among you must be like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves. I am among you as one who serves."

In the Near East and North Africa, where travel through barren and desert places was an arduous undertaking, it was the custom on caravan routes to set up shelters along the way where travelers might break their journey for a night's rest. It might be a small oasis or some other spot where comfort, shelter and safety could be found. Travelers would send servants on ahead to prepare at the next of these caravanserais, or resting places, for their arrival. It is this image of the caravanserai that Jesus used in his farewell discourse to the Disciples in John's Gospel. This is what He said, "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself; so that where I am, there you may be also."

In the context in which they were first spoken, Jesus was clearly referring to his approaching death and resurrection - and his promise to his followers of their place with him in God' s Kingdom. In the translation I have used, the Greek word [unknown Greek word] is rendered as dwelling places; in others the word is rooms and in the familiar King James Version it is mansions.

Whatever the translation, it is Jesus who is the servant going on ahead to prepare a place and we who are His guests.

But in striking reversal of roles, today’s collect has us praying that we become the servants, so that at His coming Jesus may find in us a mansion prepared for Himself. That word mansion is misleading - it conjures up images of so many overbuilt properties peppering our area. Of course, no mansion would be great enough to house the Lord, but this is the servant king who was born in a strong smelling stable and was laid to rest in a borrowed tomb. Surely we can do better than that!

Servanthood was the hallmark of Jesus' life and ministry, and so it should be for the Church - for you and me who follow in His steps.

If we are to welcome the Christ-child into our lives this Christmas, if we are to prepare ourselves as a mansion for His dwelling place, we will need to clean house and lay up those treasures of the spirit which are uniquely ours to give, and in love and humility of service, embrace the world for which He gave his life.

Joy to the world! The Lord is come; let earth receive her king;

let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.

Sermon Notes for 12.12.10

Scriptures for the day are found here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Advent/AAdv3_RCL.html

SERMON NOTES FOR 12.12.10

Imagine that you are holding a handful of M&Ms in your hand. Look at them, sort through them with your fingers. If you want to, do what I like to do and sort them by color – brown over here, orange over here, blue, green, etc. Note the little M in middle of each one. Now reach out and pick up one of your favorite color – mine would be blue. Put it in your mouth, taste it, feel how it crunches, feel the soft chocolate in the middle, notice how it tastes. Now if you get bored with the sermon, feel free to eat the rest of them too. Otherwise you can put them in your pocket and save them for later.

Or, if you’re on a diet, you might want to go ahead and eat them right now. That’s right – eating imaginary M&Ms apparently helps you lost weight. At least that was the finding of a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon: those who imagined eating M&Ms ate fewer of them when offered real M&Ms later. Apparently if you imagine eating them, you feel full, as if you had eaten them. Imagining something makes your brain believe it is real. Which a lot of people believe to be true in a lot of contexts – if you want something to happen, visualize it happening. It’s a kind of prayer. Imagining something, in a way, makes it reality.

In fact, this is the job of a prophet – not to foretell the future. The prophet in the Bible is the person who imagines a reality that no one else can see. The prophet is the person who can see God’s will coming to life before it happens. The prophet looks at ordinary prosaic life and sees where God is working – sees an underlying reality that others don’t see, by the power of imagination. And by imagining this reality, the activity of God that underlies everything that exists, and describing it to others who come to believe in it, the prophet helps make it come true, as an outer, visible reality and not just an imagined one. Without a vision, the people perish, said one prophet in the Bible. The prophet is the one who opens the eyes of the people to God’s vision.

In our scriptures today, we hear of three prophets: Isaiah, Mary, and John the Baptist. Isaiah speaks to a people in exile, and describes a vision of how God is working with them, even in exile, and a vision of what they will become. Mary sings the song we hear in place of our psalm today – the Magnificat, named for the Latin word that begins it, meaning “My soul magnifies the Lord.” Mary has stood in the presence of an angel, she has heard that nothing will be impossible with God, she has discovered that she is pregnant, and she has come to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who is also miraculously pregnant. Seeing Elizabeth, Mary breaks into song, not a characteristic song for an uneducated peasant girl: Mary turns into a prophet who can see God’s reality when no one else can see it. She has been told that she will bear a son who is the Son of God. And she understands not only this fact, but what it means – she describes a vision of God’s hope for the world. The famous preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor, says: Mary is not just singing the song, the song is singing her. She sings of the greatness of the Lord, she sings of God who brings down the mighty from their thrones and lifts up the lowly, she says the hungry will be filled and the rich sent away empty.

We who are skeptical may believe that this is religious romanticism. But don’t underestimate the power of the religious imagination. The government of Guatemala in the 1980s didn’t – they forbade anyone to sing Mary’s song – afraid that people would take it to heart and begin believing in the power of God to bring down the powerful. Afraid that imagining God’s truth would make it start to happen, they knew and fled in fear from the great truth that the prophetic imagination can truly help God describe and therefore create a new reality.

But what if the converse is true? If you can’t imagine it, you can’t make it reality? What happens if you can’t imagine a reality that runs under the surface of all things? What happens if you believe that the mundane everyday world is all that exists or can exist? Maybe you can’t see a deeper reality even if it’s there.

Some reporters at the Washington Post decided to test this question in 2007. They set up a hidden camera in L’Enfant Plaza subway station, where thousands of people pass through every day. As the camera rolled, a young man in jeans, Washington Nationals baseball cap and T-shirt walked into the station, set down a violin case, took out a violin, put a few dollars and coins in the case to seed the pot, and began to play. For the next 43 minutes, as 1,097 people passed by, he played 6 classical pieces – some unknown but exceedingly difficult, and one, perhaps the best-known and most beloved religious song of all time, Shubert’s Ave Maria.

Each of those 1,097 people passing through the subway station had a choice: rush on by, stop to listen, put a little money in the case? As the Post said, the violin sang, it sobbed, it shivered. What the commuters didn’t know was that the young man was Joshua Bell, one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing his multi-million dollar Stradivarius; 3 days before he had sold out Boston’s Symphony Hall, where pretty good seats went for $100.

Here’s a short clip of what happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw

In that 43 minutes, 7 people stopped to listen for a while; a few put in money; only one person actually recognized him. Many people interviewed later didn’t even remember there was a musician in the subway station. Many of those had iPods in their ears, their music already pre-programmed, but some didn’t have their iPod as an excuse – they just didn’t notice. Interestingly, every single child who walked by stopped, pulled their parent toward the violinist, wanted to listen, and every single parent hurried their child away.

The Post’s question was this: “His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?” The answer, apparently, was no. We expect to hear beauty in a symphony hall. In a subway station, we can’t imagine it – so we just don’t hear it.

John the Baptist had this problem in the gospel today – what he imagined the Messiah to be was what we heard in last week’s gospel – wrath, fire, separating wheat from chaff, awe-inspiring displays of God’s power. Yet that isn’t what Jesus is doing, so he has trouble imagining this is the Messiah, and he rather plaintively sends a message to Jesus – are you the one to come, or is there another? Jesus sends a message back to his cousin inviting him to imagine a different reality, a reality that the prophets Isaiah and Mary had described. The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, poor have good news brought to them.

Imagine, Jesus says, that this is how God works – not by smiting the wicked, but by bringing new life and healing to the poor and suffering, as Mary sang in her beautiful song. Imagine that God’s kingdom could become a reality on earth in a whole new way than John had imagined – a way that comes quietly, like a baby in a manger, to the least and the lowest, without displays of power, but with humility, with healing, with love that invites the world to join in.

We don’t know whether John was convinced – Matthew doesn’t tell us – but we know that this was exactly how Jesus continued his ministry, in a way that only those with God’s imagination could understand was God’s kingdom. The powerful understood it, and had him put to death, but Jesus’ kind of ministry was so unimaginable to most people as a picture of God’s kingdom that most of them missed it altogether.

Could this be true of us too? Could God be in action all around us and we can’t see it because we can’t imagine it? Could the Holy Spirit be weaving beautiful music all around us, sobbing, singing, sighing, the most beautiful music we’ve ever heard, the music of the Kingdom – and we can’t hear it because we can’t imagine it? Maybe we can only imagine Jesus at work in church, and can’t see or hear what he’s doing the other 167 hours of our lives. and because we can’t see or hear it, we can’t live in the reality of God’s kingdom, we can’t be like Mary the prophet.

Maybe we’re the blind and the deaf who need to be healed, we’re the lame who need to be taught how to walk, we’re the dead who need to learn to live. We’re the poor who need to hear good news, or we’re the rich who need to understand that feeding the hungry and helping others is part of our mission.

So let’s ask God to open our eyes and ears. Let’s ask Jesus to show us: where is God working in our lives? What is God calling us to do with the 167 hours a week that we’re not in church? Each one of us has a call from God – a call to teach a child to read or understand the mysteries of science, a call to provide accountability for an organization’s money, a call to relate to the person in the next cubicle or the house next door in a way that enriches their lives and helps them experience God’s love, a call to raise children, a call to love a spouse, a call to help the poor and the needy, a call to make life beautiful for others.

If we could only recognize God’s work in the world all around us and understand that everything we do is holy, if we could open our eyes and ears and see Christ here and now, all of life might be infused with the sweetness of his presence. And our very lives might sing Mary’s Song.

Like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvlTuBnpKpc&feature=related

Sermon for December 5, 2010

Scriptures for the Day are found here:http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearA_RCL/Advent/AAdv2_RCL.html

Down in the Deep South where my father grew up, in the cotton farming country of Northwest Louisiana, people are fascinated by genealogy. I grew up hearing stories of various illustrious and notorious ancestors. One of my ancestors was apparently Leonidas Polk, the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana in the mid-1800’s – that’s not a bad thing. He's even fondly remembered as the founder of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, a prominent Episcopal seminary. But when the Civil War came, Polk wrote to his old friend, Jefferson Davis, and got himself appointed a Confederate general, a career for which he is best remembered for his constant squabbles with both superiors and subordinates, and his failure to follow an order at the Battle of Chickamauga, which his commander later said may have cost the Confederacy the war. So let’s give thanks for incompetent ancestors who lose the war for the bad guys!

I happened to be perusing Polk’s Wikipedia entry recently, because when you have a Southern father you can’t help but get interested in this stuff, and discovered an even more interesting ancestor: Polk married the great-granddaughter of Jonathan Edwards, a Puritan preacher in mid-1700s – one of the greatest preachers in American history, who is credited with sparking the Great Awakening, a movement of spiritual renewal that is considered to be one reason that America is such a religious country even today. That’s right folks, and not only that, Edwards is famous for having many descendants who are also famous preachers, as well as university professors, college presidents and other well-known speakers. (Never mind that my actuary spouse did a few calculations and determined that Jonathan Edwards is likely to have approximately one million descendants alive in the United States today, so it would be surprising if he didn’t have a number of clergypersons and preachers among them. Who has time for math when we’re talking about the Bible?)

So I have obviously inherited preaching genes from Jonathan Edwards, which means you’ll be hearing a lot more hellfire and brimstone from me! Because Edwards’ most famous sermon, a work which is a classic of early American literature, is the immortal “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in which he provided detailed descriptions of the tortures of hell. And guess what – John the Baptist throws me a softball today, with his talk of wrath and chaff and unquenchable fire – I can hit this one out of the park with “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God!”

Now I can see you all shifting in your pews and checking your watches and remembering important appointments you need to get to – because who wants to hear about wrath and unquenchable fire?

And yet – something brought all those crowds out to hear John preach, to repent and be baptized. What is the attraction of this angry man with the odd wardrobe and the unbalanced diet, preaching fire and brimstone and the wrath of God?

First, we need to understand that there are three groups of people present here: Pharisees, Sadducees, and everybody else. And when John shouts “Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” – he is talking to Pharisees and Sadducees, not to the ordinary people.

So who were these Pharisee and Sadducee people? Very good question – I’m glad you asked. The Sadducees were the leaders of Temple priesthood; they took care of Temple sacrifices, and were appointed by the corrupt King Herod with consent of the Roman occupiers. What this meant was that they were collaborators with the corrupt Jewish King and his corrupt counselors, and with the Romans who oppressed the ordinary people, terrorized them and kept them in poverty.

Sadducees didn’t believe in an afterlife or any notion of judgment. As a result, they felt free to do whatever they liked in this life, and many of them grew very wealthy because of their corruption. In effect, they gave lip service to God, took part in Temple ceremonies, but for practical purposes, acted like God didn’t exist – they were functional atheists. John warns the Sadducees that they will stand in front of God and be accountable for their actions – and because God's judgment would come one day, they should change their ways.

Pharisees are a different order of people altogether, the opposite extreme. We have to be very careful when we critique the Pharisees, because they were good observant Jews who centered their religious life on reading and discussing the Torah, and carefully observing the law – and these are good things. But like any good thing, when taken to an extreme, it can become a harmful thing. And evidently, by the time of John the Baptist and Jesus, extreme Pharisees had become rigid observers of the law, all 613 rules, who left very little room for God’s love or grace, and had a tendency to judge harshly anyone who didn’t meet their religious standards.

What John and Jesus critique in Pharisees is their tendency, taken to extreme, to judge others, and their literal interpretation of scripture – these are biblical fundamentalists who want everyone else to behave the same way they do. These are people who are pretty sure they’re on the fast track to heaven – and John is beside himself with frustration over it – he wants them to think again. He warns them that those who judge others will be judged themselves. And their genealogies won’t save them.

Now when we look around our world today, we see plenty of Pharisees and Sadducees. Fundamentalist extremists spring up in every religion – certainly there are Christians who spend lots of time judging others and forget to look at themselves – taken to extreme, we see people like Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, the group that goes around picketing soldiers’ funerals with signs that say “God Hates America,” and other, worse, things I won’t repeat in church. To those who want to point fingers at others, John says they need to look at themselves first.

Sadducees are even more common in our world, I think. Our society is filled with people who may or may not give lip service to God, but who live as if God didn’t exist and they can do whatever they want to in this life. Whether or not they say they believe in God, they act as if God doesn’t care how they treat others, or what kind of business ethics they pursue, or how they spend their money. They are functional atheists, and to them, John says watch out, judgment is coming. They will one day be accountable to God for how they lived their life.

And if we want to be honest with ourselves, we have to admit that there’s a little Pharisee and a little Sadducee in each of us. We all would rather pass judgment on other people than on ourselves. And we all have times when we are tempted to live for our own benefit and no one else’s, forgetting Jesus’ command to love God and our neighbor. And so if we’re really honest, we listen to what John is saying and we ask God to help us separate this chaff from the wheat in each of us, ask God to remake us into the loving human beings God created us to be.

But note: there is a third group of people in this gospel story – the people in the middle. And really, most of us are somewhere in the middle – sometimes tipping a bit in the Pharisee direction, sometimes tipping a bit in the Sadducee direction. But most of the time, we’re ordinary people muddling our way through life.

Matthew tells us that ordinary people like us are coming from all over Judea to hear John preach, and that they’re confessing their sins and being baptized. Matthew doesn’t tell us that John screams about God’s wrath to these ordinary folks – he tells us that John preaches a very simple sermon to them: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.

Now you and I may hear this simple sermon and say, that sounds a lot like a sermon that could be titled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” We hear these words, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near, and we hear them as a warning that violence and terror are going to descend on us if we don’t bow down before a God who wants to scare us into submission. But it is really important to understand – this is not what John is talking about.

John is talking to ordinary people who live very difficult lives in the middle of an oppressive empire that cares nothing for their troubles. These ordinary people are waiting for God to act, hoping for God’s justice, longing for a new and better world to come. To a people with little hope, a people who live in longing for salvation, John brings a glimmer of light: a hope that something new is around the corner, a hope for salvation and new birth and new life.

The word John uses that is translated as repentance is a Greek word: Metanoia. This word comes from “meta” – beyond, above – and “noia” – knowledge, understanding. A metanoia is a reorientation, a fundamental transformation of outlook that changes everything about how we see ourselves and the world. John is telling them to open their eyes and see the new kingdom that is coming, brought to birth by love and living by the law of love. It’s a vision that Isaiah describes for us in our Old Testament lesson today: a world governed by the Messiah, who judges with righteousness and equity for the poor and meek, and rules a creation that has been remade. John is lighting for the people an Advent candle: a candle of hope.

Every year, while the world around us dissolves into the overwhelming stress of a holiday season that seems to bring more and more obligations all the time, we come to church and hear instead this Advent vision of a new world, anchored in the peace that passes understanding, ruled by Christ, the Messiah. And every Advent, we ask God for metanoia – we ask God to help us change. We ask God to help us give up on the things that are keeping us separated from God – our self-righteousness, like Pharisees, or functional atheism and our indifference to anything but our own wealth, comfort, and success, like Sadducees. We ask God to help us give up on our belief that a world of violence and power, where people live with poverty and oppression, is the only way the world can work, and begin truly to pray for a new world, God’s kingdom, to come.

So listen to John’s Advent call to us today: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near – and hear it as a sign of hope. Into a dark and troubled world, a Savior is coming. Let us prepare a way for him, a way through the wilderness of our hearts, so that in us, he can bring a new world into being – a world of love and grace.

Sermon for All Saints 2010

Today's Scriptures are found here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/HolyDays/AllSaintsC_RCL.html

In honor of All Saints’ Day, I’d like to try a thought experiment. Close your eyes and try to picture one of the most famous saints of all time: St. Francis of Assisi. Picture his hair, what he’s wearing, where he’s standing, what he’s doing. Now, if you have him, open your eyes.

How many of you pictured him with a monk’s tonsure – bald on top? If you did, you’re right, he had the tonsure. How many pictured him in a simple, coarse brown robe with a hood and a rope tied around his waist? If so, you’re right, he pioneered the use of the simple brown habit.

How many of you pictured him as a statue in a garden next to a bird bath, with birds and squirrels perched on his arms? Yes? It seems this is what we remember him for the most – supposedly he was fond of animals and would preach the gospel to them when he had no people around to listen – and the animals apparently listened attentively. This is sort of thing we tend to remember about people – quirky undemanding traits that allow us to caricature them – so we remember Francis as a lover of animals and bless them on his feast day. And in fact, he was truly a lover of God’s creation, and wrote some beautiful poetry about its beauty – he called the sun, moon, trees, rocks etc., his brothers and sisters.

But we tend to forget other things that are maybe a bit more challenging. How many of you pictured Francis as a young soldier, marching off to war? No? But that was his first career – he was captured and held as a prisoner of war for a year, during which time he may have had his first conversion experience. How many of you pictured Francis standing in front of the sultan of Egypt, attempting to make peace between Christians and Muslims during the Crusades? No? But this is a true story too.

How many of you pictured Francis in a dramatic confrontation with his father and his bishop, getting so angry that he renounced his inheritance, tore off all his clothes and threw them at his father, and walked away naked? This happened too: Francis gave away all his property, his claim to any inheritance from his wealthy businessman father, threw the clothes he was wearing at his father’s feet, and took a lifelong vow of poverty. He began to wander around the countryside, preaching the gospel; he was soon joined by many other devoted Christians who answered the call to spread the kingdom of God, founded an order of monks and missionaries, and went on to be one of the most influential saints in Christian history.

Francis explained his life this way: "(The Lord) looked down from heaven and must have said, 'Where can I find the weakest, the smallest, the meanest man on the face of the earth?' Then he saw me and said, 'Now I have found him. I will work through him, for he will not be proud nor take my honor away from myself. He will realize that I am using him because of his littleness and insignificance.'" In his own smallness, Francis found his greatness.

In fact, you could say Francis was the perfect embodiment of today’s gospel from Luke. He embraced poverty, hunger, humility, poor reputation – when he could have had wealth, plenty, advancement, position.

So here’s my question – do you have to be like Francis to be a saint? Well, here’s the answer. On All Saints Day, we remember three kinds of saints. We remember great heroes of the faith like Francis, people who were leaders and martyrs and examples for all time of how Jesus asked us to live. We also remember all those who have died in faith, who are now in the arms of God’s mercy, and we rejoice for that mercy which is our destiny also. And third: we remember that all of us are saints – every single one. If we are baptized, we are holy and sacred members of Jesus’ family, and the Bible calls us saints.

We misunderstand Jesus if we think that in this gospel he is laying down the rules we have to follow to get into heaven – God’s grace does this for us. It’s already been done. What Jesus is doing is way more radical than that: he is calling each one of us who are baptized children of God, otherwise known as saints – to join him in his quest to live out the kingdom of God right here on earth.

God has already given us the gift of the kingdom in our baptism – we are already saints of God. The question is, what happens after we become saints. Because I firmly believe that God has a special calling for each one of us, a special way he asks us to live out our sainthood right here on earth. You know the old saying: if you were arrested and put on trial on charges of being a Christian – would there be enough evidence to convict you? Jesus wants us to live our lives to show evidence of our sainthood every day.

And yet, in the world we live in, that is exceedingly hard to do. We live in a world that values possessions, money, success, achievement, more than almost anything else – certainly more than sainthood. We live in a world where people brag about how busy they are, and where our busy-ness consumes our lives so that we fall into bed exhausted each night with no time even to think about God or about how God might be calling us. I think it’s to people like us that Jesus is talking today. He is saying, why are we filling ourselves with empty things that take all our time and energy and attention? And forgetting that it is God who truly can fill us up with the joy of heaven?

St. Augustine said: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they find their home in you.” Someone else said it more simply: We have a God-shaped hole in our hearts. We try all kinds of things to fill that empty hole –possessions, busyness, worry. But ultimately, only God can fill that hole. God’s kingdom is an upside-down world, where wealth, satisfaction and achievement are misfortunes that separate us from God by encouraging us to believe that our own efforts are enough to get us whatever we want. And good fortune comes in the shape of self-emptying that reminds us that true blessing comes from God alone.

Today marks the beginning of our stewardship campaign here at Nativity. Stewardship in the church often becomes a euphemism for asking for money, and some of our lay leaders will be asking you for money for our mission. But in this sermon, I want to explain to you why I think money is a spiritual issue. Let me tell you a story.

My husband Tom and I moved here in 1996, leaving our house in Houston. We were confident that our Houston house would sell soon, so we went ahead and bought a house here. But the Houston house sat, and sat, and sat without selling, and every month we wrote two mortgage checks and watched our savings account drain away. We joined a church immediately when we moved here, and the church began to mean a lot to us. The church was in the middle of a capital campaign, and so we would often hear appeals for money, but every time, we would say, we just can’t right now. We’re paying these two mortgages. One Sunday, about 6 or 8 months after we’d moved here, sitting in church one Sunday, we just looked at each other and said, “It’s time.” We wrote a check equal to one mortgage payment on the Houston house and put it in the plate. After church, there was a church picnic, so we got home about 2:00. As we walked into the house, the phone was ringing. It was our agent, telling us that we had an offer on our house. And a month later, we were the proud former owners of a house in Houston.

Now I can’t tell you it would be the same for everyone. I can only tell you how it worked for us. We realized that we had been relying on ourselves instead of putting our faith in God. We had to take a step of faith, to stop being anxious about our money and put our trust in God instead. And when we did, we found it was easy. Giving for us wasn’t about the church’s need to receive – our little check didn’t make much of a dent in their capital campaign. No, it was about our need to give. It was about our need to let go of what we were clinging to and depending on. And when we learned to let go, we found that we were blessed. Because giving always blesses the giver more than it does the receiver.

Stewardship is a word that’s about much more than money – it’s about sainthood. Stewardship is recognizing who we truly are, claiming the sainthood that Christ has given us in baptism, understanding that we are made in the image of God. Stewardship is asking ourselves how we can empty ourselves of all the things that distract us – the quest for achievement, the hope for prosperity, the busy-ness that consumes our days, the clinging to possessions – and open ourselves to God, who fills us up with true joy and gratitude. Stewardship is asking ourselves how we can model the virtues of poverty, humility, generosity, peace-making, love, in our lives as saints of God, because that is what our Savior did – in his gift of himself on the cross.

Sainthood is not something extraordinary that only miracle-workers can achieve, sainthood is something that can and should be lived out by every Christian. And so

in honor of St. Francis, please pray with me a prayer that for me embodies the virtues of stewardship and of sainthood, in the Book of Common Prayer p. 833 – a Prayer attributed to St. Francis:

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Sermon for 10.17.10

Scriptures for this week are here: http://www.io.com/~kellywp/YearC_RCL/Pentecost/CProp24_RCL.html

The world watched in wonder and awe as one of the most inspiring rescue stories I can ever remember unfolded over the past week. If you’re like me, it was hard to keep from watching the dramatic appearance of one Chilean miner after another, liberated by a capsule called Phoenix from a hot underground tomb where they had been trapped for 69 days. I watched the men step out of the capsule, allow themselves to be unstrapped, and then turn and step into the arms of their waiting families while the crowd shouted “Chi, chi, chi, le, le, le,” and the world watched, and wept. And I wondered whether any of the men felt just a bit like Lazarus, called forth from the dead, stepping out of the tomb, blinking in the sunlight, whether they felt as if the voice of God had shouted to them, “Lazarus, come forth!”

And in fact, it seems that, for a number of them, their Christian faith sustained them in very real ways. Mario Gomez acted as a spiritual leader for the trapped men, requested Bibles, prayer books and religious statues, and led them in prayers twice a day. Mario Sepulveda, the jubilant second miner out, who led the crowd in cheers and chanting, jumping and hugging, said he left 40 years of his life down in the mine. “I was with God, and I was with the devil. They fought, and God won.” He said he reached out for God’s hand, and never let go. And from that moment on, he never doubted that he would be rescued.

All of them, as they emerged into the fresh air, were beige T-shirts. On the front were the words, Gracias, Senor (Thank you, Lord), and on the back were these words from Psalm 95, words which they said had brought them great comfort: “In His hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to Him.” For many of them, it seemed, God was present with them, so that it was not 33 people underground, but 34.

We can look at this miraculous resurrection of 33 miners from an underground tomb and ask ourselves – Where was God in all this? Did God reach out his hand and rescue these miners? Is the rescue attributable to a divine miracle? This is not a question that I can answer, for several reasons. First, if you didn’t believe in God at all, you could look at the careful, methodical, dedicated, impassioned work of the engineers, medical workers, psychologists and many other people who devoted the last 69 days to getting these men home alive, and credit the rescue to them – and you’d be right, in a way. It would be wrong to discount the human ingenuity that brought them home.

More than this, in general, it’s always dangerous to say what God is and isn’t doing, and why. If we assert that God rescued these 33, we have to ask ourselves why other miners die in other accidents, why perfectly kind and faithful people get incurable diseases, why hurricanes strike and innocent people are swept away. Surely we can’t say that the faith of those who die in other situations is any less valid than the faith of these miners, or that more people were praying for the miners and therefore God paid more attention.

And we know perfectly well that everyone suffers – most of us not as publicly or dramatically as the miners, most of us in ordinary, humble, common ways. We might suffer from stress, from strained relationships, from financial worries, from substance abuse (our own or that of someone we love), from grief, from health problems, from fatigue and disappointment and fear. And as your pastor, someone who has the privilege of walking that road of suffering with many people, I know that faithful and prayerful people are just as likely to endure these things as anyone else – faith is not a magic bullet that will make these struggles magically melt away.

So let’s ask ourselves: where is God in our suffering? What’s the role of faith in times like these? And that is where our scriptures give us some excellent guidance.

In Genesis reading today, Jacob is experiencing one of those nights we’ve all had: night so caught up in worry and stress that you spend the whole night wrestling with something you can’t identify – yourself, an angel, God maybe. In Jacob’s case, here’s what’s happening: Jacob has spent years deceiving, scheming and tricking others out of what is theirs. As a young man, he schemed with his mother to trick his father into giving the birthright to him instead of his older twin brother, Esau. When his father found out what he had done, Jacob fled for his life, with Esau’s threats following. He then spent years with his uncle, married his uncle’s two daughters, engineered an ingenious breeding scheme to divert most of his uncle’s sheep to himself, and when his uncle found out and got angry – he fled once more.

With nowhere to go, he heads back home, to his angry twin brother. Afraid his brother will attack with an army, he sends his wives and children away to safety, and waits alone for his brother to arrive. And in the dark night as he waits for the showdown that will determine the course of his life, indeed whether he lives or dies, he begins to struggle. The text tells us that a man shows up and they wrestle all night – and when morning comes and the man tries to leave, Jacob refuses to let go until the man gives him a blessing. Somehow Jacob has identified the man as God, or God’s messenger. And God gives him a new name: instead of Jacob, the deceiver, he becomes Israel, one who struggles with God and prevails. The angel, or God, strikes him once more, in the hip, and marks him with a wound that will make him limp for the rest of his life.

And God’s blessing seems to bear fruit – because in the morning, a miracle happens. Esau arrives, and instead of doing what Jacob fears and attacking him, Esau weeps with joy, and opens his arms, and welcomes his brother home. Is it a miracle? Nothing supernatural happens as Esau weeps and holds out his arms – yet the miracle has happened inside him – rivalry and hatred has been transformed into welcome and love, and the nation of Israel is born.

In our gospel passage, we have another story of someone who refuses to let go. Jesus tells a parable of a widow who will not stop bothering an unjust judge until the judge relents and grants her justice. Now I don’t think Jesus is telling us that the squeaky wheel gets the grease and that God is like an inattentive parent who keeps getting interrupted by an annoying child until he finally says, OK, you can have a cookie. (I would do that, but I don’t think God does!)

On one level, Jesus is saying if a bad judge will sometimes listen, how much more will a loving God listen? Of course God hears our prayers. But there’s more to it, of course, because Luke records this story at a time when the Christian community was suffering persecution and in danger of losing heart, giving up on their faith that Jesus would return. Luke, in fact, is relating this parable of Jesus’ to a group who is wrestling through the same kind of dark night of struggle and worry that Jacob did. They are wondering: where is God? And how are we going to survive? And how will we find our way out of this dark and scary place? And what is going to happen in the morning? And Jesus is telling them, God is here, right here in this struggle, God is the one you are wrestling with – God is with you – and if you have faith in God, you will find the strength you need to face these worries.

Prayer is not a matter of asking God for personal favors, personal miracles. Prayer is a matter of staying in relationship with God, knowing that in that relationship we will find the strength we need to help us through our struggles. And that as we struggle with God, as we grab onto God’s hand and refuse to let go, we will be blessed.

In the case of the Christian community hearing the parable of the unjust judge. the blessing is the deep knowledge that God is not an unjust judge, that God is loving and merciful, and that God will always be present with them – a knowledge that gives them the ability to turn their small band of dispirited believers into a worldwide movement of divine transformation. In the case of Jacob, struggling with an angel, the blessing is a personal transformation that allows him to greet the brother he fears and loves, and to see that love, not fear, comes out triumphant.

In the case of the Chilean miners, the blessing seems to have been a spirit that brought together every single person involved in the rescue, from the president of Chile to the engineers at NASA who provided special protein drinks, to every miner entombed in that dark, cramped underground cavern, and made them think of every possibility, prepare for every contingency, and engineer the perfect rescue operation. But even more than that, it seems to have been a spirit of teamwork inside the mine that refused to give up, refused to let go, kept faith every moment that God would never desert them – and brought the miners together as a group.

And in the case of you and me, with our ordinary everyday struggles, I think prayer brings us a spirit of hope. Hope that in our own long dark nights of struggle, dark nights that for some of us last for weeks or years – we may begin to understand that underneath all our worry and stress, the one we are really wrestling with is God. That God is present, giving us the hope, strength and faith we need. That somewhere in our struggles, God has a call for us. That somehow at the end of the struggle, we will be transformed. And that we, too, at the end of the dark night, will emerge blinking into the sunlight, God’s voice echoing in our minds, knowing that we have never been alone, that every moment of the way, God was present with us.