Sermon for 1 Lent 2012

Scriptures for today are Here

Remember back to the last time the power went out in your house. There you are, doing whatever you do in the evening, reading or watching TV or messing around on the computer or talking with your family. And suddenly there is a big shudder, and a click, and the lights go out, and the whole house seems to give a great sigh, and fall into silence. And you frantically jump up and start rustling through drawers looking for that flashlight you last saw a year ago, and you poke your head out the door and look up and down the street to see if the neighbors’ power is out too, and you call the power company to report the outage. And if the power outage lasts, eventually you fumble around finding your pajamas, switch off all the light switches, and go to bed in the darkness.

When this happens, when I finally settle down, the thing I notice most is the silence. The mechanical hums of the air conditioner and the refrigerator and the other machines in the house are things my ears don’t hear any more, normally. But when they lapse into silence, I notice their absence; and I can hear a different kind of silence than what I normally think of as silence. It’s a silence punctuated by the sound of the breeze outside, and maybe a bird chirping, or a coyote howling, and maybe a car driving by now and then.

And maybe another sound too, a deeper sound I never stop to listen for.

John Cage, an avant-garde composer of the mid-20^th century, composed a work he called “4 minutes 33 seconds” in 1952. This work was on NPR’s list of the 100 most important compositions of the 20^th century. It is a work that can be performed by any instrument or set of instruments, and it is played in three movements of 30 seconds, two minutes twenty-three seconds, and one minute 40 seconds. During these three movements, what the musicians are instructed to do is to put down their instruments and sit in complete silence. The music becomes the sounds that the listeners hear during that silence.

John Cage has written about the experience that inspired this composition. It happened on a visit to Harvard, where he spent some time in an anechoic chamber, a chamber that is completely sealed on the outside, so no sound comes in, and on the inside the walls are built so that they do not echo – no sound comes back to your ears. In other words, it is as silent a place as you can be, without actually being in the vacuum of space. Inside, his perfect ears picked up two distinct sounds – one high, one low. When he described them to the engineer in charge, Cage learned that the high sound was his nervous system in operation, and the low one was his blood in circulation. “Until I die there will be sounds,” he wrote afterward. “And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.” Somehow, for John Cage, it took the profound induced silence of the anechoic chamber for him to hear the music of his own heart.

How do we listen for the music of our own hearts? For Jesus, it seemed that he looked for a place of silence in order to hear. In the gospel today, we see Jesus in his own wilderness experience of silence – leaving the busyness of the company of other people and even leaving behind the lingering echoes of God’s voice at his baptism, declaring him Beloved, and going out into the silent wilderness for a deeper experience of that Voice.

Mark’s version, which we read this year, is admirably terse, leaving out the details that Matthew and Luke give us about the temptations and fasting. Because Mark is so short, we also get a wider perspective: we see what happens before and after Jesus’ time in the wilderness: before, Jesus is baptized and hears the words: “You are my Son, the Beloved: with you I am well pleased.” Afterwards, fortified by his wilderness experience, Jesus goes to Galilee and begins to proclaim the heart of his message: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near: repent, and believe in the good news.”

In the middle, he spends 40 days in the wilderness, living without the sounds of other people, listening to the beat of his own heart. And listening also to the sound of other voices that come to him in the silence. Because of Mark’s terseness, we can’t tell exactly what happened to Jesus in the wilderness. We only know that he came out of the wilderness understanding who he was and what he was called to do: fully formed and ready for his ministry. Something about that wilderness experience, that time of quietness and emptiness, helped Jesus to begin to understand the purpose of his life. Something about the experience of temptation, fasting, emptiness, silence, something about the harshness of the desert environment, with its thorns and snakes, helped Jesus to hear the voice of God, helped that voice to meld and harmonize with his own heartbeat, helped him co-create with God a new kind of music.

As I think back on the wilderness experiences of my own life, and the wilderness experiences that so many people have told me about over the years – times of sorrow and grief, times of anger and bewilderment, times when people have felt assaulted by the voice of Satan and abandoned by God – the common theme that strikes me in all those experiences is opportunity, new beginnings, new understandings. Some people, like Jesus, choose to go to the wilderness, to listen for the voice of God. Emptying themselves out through their Lenten fast, to hear that voice clearly.

Many others find themselves in an unwanted wilderness, an emptiness in their lives through no fault of own – the loss of a job or a relationship or some other devastating event. And when people come to me and tell me about their wilderness experience, I listen, and eventually I almost always ask them this question, and some of you will recognize this question: What in this wilderness experience, this difficult and challenging time you’re going through – what about this experience is a gift for you?

We don’t normally think of wilderness experiences, those power outages that cause everything around us to collapse into silence with a great sigh, those times when we are left, panicking, with sound of our own heartbeat, as gifts. But if we didn’t have the wilderness, we might never hear that sound. I know for me, it has been the times when I was restless and discontent, when I was unhappy and searching for something new, when I was disgusted with my own behavior and questioning my own character – those have been the times when God has found ways to speak to me with a new voice.

If we’re happy all the time, we may never hear that music. As St. Augustine said: You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they find their home in you. It is that very restlessness that drives us out into the wilderness and that opens our hearts to recognize our yearning for God, our desire to turn toward God. It’s not our perfections, but our imperfections, that open our ears and our hearts. We may think of Lent disciplines as something good, religious people do; but that’s not what Lent is – Lent is made for imperfect, messy, confused people, people who have no time for God, people who don’t know where God is in their lives. That is to say, Lent is made for all of us.

Because it’s the wilderness, the suffering, the questioning, the emptiness, the silence, that teaches us to listen for the beat of our own hearts. And to listen for the sound of another voice we rarely hear. The Jesuit Gerald Fagin has said, ‎"It is not just our hearts that are restless until they rest in God. God's heart is also restless. God's longing for us knows no bounds." People who allow themselves to fully experience the wilderness and the silence learn to listen for the voice of God’s longing, and have a chance to come out of the wilderness healed, reconciled, with a better understanding of the music their own hearts are yearning to play.

Sometimes it takes going into the wilderness, of body or of soul, to find out who we truly are. Traveling toward where the familiar contours of our lives disappear. Leaving the landmarks behind, the people and patterns and possessions that orient us. Which is why the church gives us the season of Lent. Lent is the wilderness time, the time that so well reflects the contours of our human lives, which are not always feasting and singing, but sometimes include fasting and silence. Lent is the wilderness time when we are all called to empty ourselves in certain ways, to silence ourselves so that we can hear the beat of our hearts, to allow God to speak into the silence with a new voice. Jesus’ time in the wilderness tells me that when we find ourselves in a wilderness place, that we can open ourselves to God’s redemptive love, and allow God to transform that experience into a gift.

When you find yourself in that wilderness place, ask: what is the gift in this? If you are fasting from something for Lent, or adding something – what is the gift of that discipline? It may not be evident now, but keep your ears and your heart open to receive the gift God has in this discipline, for you.

And, if you are in an unintentional wilderness, a fast you did not seek out – what is the gift in that for you? If you are lonely – what is the gift of the loneliness? If you are angry – what is the gift of the anger? If you are depressed – what is it in your spirit that is begging to be set free? How can that dark and wilderness place of depression become a gift for you?

I do not mean to say that these terrible experiences are things God sends to us on purpose, because I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that God sends illness and suffering to teach us lessons. But I do believe that God can bring good out of any situation – because after all, that is what God did with the cross.

On the cross, the Word of God gave a great cry, and a shudder, and a sigh, and lapsed into silence – yet even in the tomb, the voice of God would not be silent. Into the silence of the wilderness, the silence of death, God breathes new life, sings a new song. And the Word of God sings, across the centuries, into our hearts.

So listen.

Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday, 2.19.12

Scriptures for today are Here

In her book, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard shares stories of doctors who performed early cataract surgery in Europe. When a doctor removed bandages from one girl’s eyes, she saw “the tree with the lights in it.”

Dillard wrote about her own response to those words. “It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all, and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost, charged and transfigured…I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance…The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it.”

The sudden Transfiguration of an ordinary day, when the world glows with God’s presence – such holy moments have been described by novelists like Dillard; by poets; by saints – Moses at the burning bush, Elisha watching the chariot of fire. They are moments of vision, moments that open our minds to the wonder and glory that surround us at all times and places, less like seeing than like being for the first time seen: moments of mystical connection to the divine that give us strength and courage, for all the ordinary times, when we walk along thinking of nothing at all.

And every now and then in life, God might give a few of us ordinary folks such moments of transcendent glory. It happened to me one day. I went to a worship service at a Greek Orthodox cathedral. If you’ve ever been to an Orthodox service, you know what they are like: a vast gold dome overhead, beautiful gold icons lining the front, clouds of incense billowing so that you could hardly see. And above us in the back somewhere was a choir balcony, with the choir singing heavenly chants, all in Greek so you couldn’t understand a word, their voices soaring like the song of angels. And I stood there, an ordinary person leafing through the prayer book and trying to figure out what was going on. And I looked up at the people in front of me, and suddenly, unexpectedly, they glowed like fire. I looked at them and knew they were just like me – they had eaten breakfast, brushed their teeth, rushed the kids into the car, gotten to church late – and they were blazing with God’s glory. I felt that for just a moment, I got to see them as God sees them – and then it was gone, and they faded back into ordinary people again. But I never forgot what I had seen.

It makes sense that I should catch a glimpse of transcendent glory in a Eucharist. The Orthodox believe that the Eucharist, what they call the Divine Liturgy, is going on all around us, at all times and all places. Angels and archangels are always celebrating Eucharist, constantly singing Holy, Holy, Holy. And when we step into liturgy ourselves, we simply … join in with the angels – whether we see it or not.

Maybe once or twice in a lifetime, we are granted a gift of vision – the ability to catch a glimpse of the world as God sees it.

But here’s my question: which time is holier? The times when we become aware, have a sudden insight of God’s dazzling presence on the mountaintop, or the times when God is walking along beside us, unseen, in the valley? Were those people who were glowing with uncreated light at the Greek Orthodox church – were they holier at that moment, or were they holier as the rushed around to get the kids ready for church that morning, or as they scrambled into the car afterwards, making plans for the afternoon? Were they holier as they listened to choirs of angels singing, or are they holier as they move out into the difficult times of life, sicknesses and work problems, addictions and difficult relationships and sorrow?

Are we holier here, now, in this mountaintop experience we bring ourselves to each Sunday to gain strength for the coming week, or are we holier as we go out into the world to answer God’s call for each one of us? What is the holier time, the time on the mountain or the time in the valley?

Well, maybe looking at Mark’s gospel can give us an idea. This story of Transfiguration stands at the center of Mark’s gospel. Everything has been working its way up to this point, and everything will go downhill from here on out. Just before this story, Peter has declared that he believes that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. Jesus has turned around and astonished the disciples by telling them that he is not the kind of Messiah who will rule in glory; he is the kind of Messiah that must suffer and die.

They go up to the mountaintop and see what must seem to Peter like the vindication of Peter’s faith that Jesus is a Messiah of glory. Jesus is talking with Moses and Elijah, symbolizing the law and prophets. All of Jewish salvation history seems to have led to this moment of glory. Surely God is about to act! Surely this glory will shine forever! Peter offers to create dwellings, in Hebrew “booths,” for Jesus, Moses and Elijah, because there is an ancient Jewish prophecy, where the messianic age will begin during the Festival of Booths. Peter wants to be ready for God. Peter believes the messianic age is dawning, and he’s right. What he doesn’t understand is what messianic age involves: suffering and death.

We can broaden our perspective on Mark’s gospel to understand this a little better. There are three “mountaintop” experiences in Mark’s gospel. This Transfiguration mountain stands at the center, but it points backwards to the first and forward to the third, and all three are similar. The first is the baptism of Jesus, when the heavens open and Jesus hears a voice saying, “You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased.”

Today’s Transfiguration story is second, Jesus glowing with uncreated light and the same voice saying the same thing: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Both are times of glory, mountaintop experiences, times when Jesus must have been alive in every nerve, tingling with presence of God coursing through him.

But Mark wants us to understand that Jesus will plunge down off this mountain and immediately begin to make his way to the third mountaintop. That third mountain is the hill at Calvary, Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. Here on the mount of Transfiguration, his clothes shine dazzling white; there they are stripped off. Here a cloud descends on the mountain; there the world will be shrouded in darkness. Here God’s presence shines all around; there he will cry out “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?” Here God’s voice will pronounce him the Beloved Son; there a centurion will look on as he dies and say in wonder, “truly this man was God’s Son.”

Mark wants us to see that the place of glory and transcendence shines with God’s uncreated light, and so does the place of shame and suffering. Jesus is God’s anointed Messiah on the mountaintop, and on the cross. You can’t understand Messiahship by looking only at this mountain of glory. You have to look also at the mountain of shame – and vice versa. One explains the other.

And which is holier? The place of glory, or the place of shame? They are both holy; they are both glowing with the dazzling presence of God; they both reveal to us the truth of who God is. God is the one who loves us, and who is present with us, whose glory shines on the mountaintop, and on the cross too.

It’s my belief that Jesus and the disciples were given this gift of vision in order to strengthen them for the holy time to come – that this vision of God’s transcendent glory gave Jesus what he needed to go to Jerusalem to die. Jesus too, human as he was, needed God’s strength and comfort.

As we ordinary human beings do too. On the night before he was killed, 4/3/68, Martin Luther King, Jr. told of his own mountaintop experience: how God came to him in a time of fear and filled his heart with God’s presence. He sat in the kitchen of his house, afraid for his life and his family’s lives, and suddenly knew that God was all around him. He heard a voice: Martin, stand up for justice. Stand up for righteousness.

That stormy night in Memphis, April 3, 1968, Dr. King talked about that experience and about the valley he somehow knew he was entering: “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop…And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land…Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

So where are you, today? On the mountaintop, or in the valley? In the church each week, God calls us to the mountaintop, joining with angels and archangels, shining with Jesus in the glory that is the destiny of all of us, whether we can see that glory or not. But this is not the only holy place: this is merely the place we come to get strength for the rest of our lives ahead.

And those lives are holy too: the everyday ins and outs of relating to our spouses and children and friends and neighbors; the work we do, whether we enjoy it or not; the casual conversations with people we meet in the grocery store. The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: “Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes. The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

And the real valley times, the real desert times, when we are suffering through illnesses or difficult relationships or grief – those are the most holy times of all. The mountain is given to us as God’s glorious gift of vision, which strengthens us for whatever will come. That light is God’s gift to us – the gift of glory, of veils being lifted, of new hope being granted. It’s a gift that lets us know that wherever we go as Christians, Christ will be there with us. God’s light is shining all around, at all times and all places – and the Messiah is here with us, whether we feel his presence or not.

And which is holier? The mountain is holy, and the valley is holy. So, as we celebrate Eucharist together today – come up the mountainside. Let God nourish you and give you strength. Whether you see it or not, your life is holy, and God’s light shines in you.

Sermon for 2.5.12

Scriptures for today are Here

It’s Superbowl Sunday, and that means many prayers will be ascending today. People rooting for opposing teams will be praying in a cacophony of voices for conflicting outcomes; and no doubt advertisers will be praying that their zillion-dollar ads will be hits. Denver Broncos Quarterback Tim Tebow brought prayer in sports into the spotlight this season, dropping to one knee and giving thanks after touchdowns, making open proclamations of his faith. A recent survey showed that 43% of Americans believed that God did answer Tebow’s prayers and helped him win.

According to a Saturday Night Live skit in which Jesus shows up in the locker room after Tebow and the Broncos beat the Bears, Jesus goes wherever he’s called to go, which means he spends a lot of time at football games, beauty pageants, and country music awards. And because he’s so busy running from one event to another, that’s why last season he didn’t have time to attend the whole of any one Broncos game – he could only show up in the fourth quarter – explaining all those wins in the last minutes of the game.

The Tebow phenomenon – complete with the one-knee gesture that for him is a prayer, for millions of others has become an icon of sorts, has made him famous, along with his Christian faith – causing both praise and ridicule. The logical, and faith difficulties of opposing teams offering prayers to win gave rise to a New Yorker cartoon. A grumpy-looking football player talks to a reporter after a game, saying, “First of all, I’d like to blame the Lord for causing us to lose today.”

In Tebow’s defense, he doesn’t seem to be praying for victory, according to an open mike recording of one of his prayers – he seems to be praying for strength and for the ability to give glory to God. And his is not an empty faith. He takes care to use his fame to help sick and injured children – flying a seriously ill child and his family to each game, paying all their expenses, visiting with them before and after the game. After losing badly to the Patriots in the playoffs, he still visited with a young man named Zach McCloud, saying, ”I got to make a kid’s day, and anytime you do that it’s more important than winning a game, so I’m proud of that.”

Tebow seems to have a solid handle on what is important to God in prayer. Perhaps other athletes don’t: he’s certainly not the first player to drop to one knee after scoring a touchdown, to cross himself before stepping up to the plate, or to give a post-game interview attributing his success to God, or to ask God for help with the game. The wife of Tom Brady, the Patriots quarterback, has requested prayers for her husband in today’s Superbowl, hoping God will help him win because he deserves it, because he’s worked so hard (as if the other athletes on field haven’t).

All of this begs the question, does God really concern himself with the outcome of football games? And with all those conflicting prayers ascending, how does God decide which ones to pay attention to? And most important, exactly how does God interact with this world?

Strangely enough, God does seem to have paid attention to the fact that today was Superbowl Sunday when inspiring church leaders to design the lectionary for this day. Because a verse from our Old Testament scripture is one that Christian athletes famously use for inspiration. Tebow has at least once etched it in eye black under his eyes. That scriptures is Isaiah 40:31: “Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

You can see how this verse would inspire young men who are hoping to play strong, but I have to say this verse was not intended to inspire football players. Instead, it’s a verse that can provide inspiration to anyone who is feeling weak or alone or troubled – it’s the idea that strength to face it comes from God.

Isaiah is writing five centuries before Christ, to a dispirited group of captives – the Israelites in Babylon. The empire of Babylon had invaded Jerusalem, burned the Temple to the ground, and carted away the Jewish leaders into slavery in Babylon. Interestingly, the Israelites’ time of failure and degradation in Babylon seems to have been an absolutely formative experience in development of Judaism, one example of how God can bring strength to us in our weakness. Where many captives, or immigrants, in foreign countries eventually assimilate, subverting their own culture and beliefs to the stronger culture that surrounds them, the Jews used that time in Babylon to more strongly define who they were in contrast to their Babylonian captors. Scholars tell us that a great deal of Old Testament oral tradition was probably put in writing by the Jewish people during their time in Babylon.

In the Old Testament reading, we see a long passage about God’s power in creation. By knowing the context in which Isaiah prophesied, we can understand more about what he is saying. The Babylonians worshiped nature gods, stars and suns, and had creation myths where the world was born out of conflict between gods. Isaiah proclaims a very distinctive truth: that there is one God who created everything, who is supreme over all nature, and all squabbling lesser gods.

“Have you not known? Have you not heard?” Isaiah cries. “Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” God is supreme over all powers of nature and over all powers of earth, those frightening powers that hold us captive and proclaim their own might. They will fade away like grass in the wind, and God’s power will be revealed.

When I read this, I am reminded of Carl Sagan’s billions and billions of stars, and our little star and our tiny earth taking our minuscule place on the edge of universe. Yet we may be tempted to think that a God so mighty as the creator of universe, could never be concerned with beings as small and inconsequential as we are, grasshoppers, in the words of Isaiah. But Isaiah counters this too: God is concerned with human beings, our lives, he says. Nothing is so small and so weak that God does not take notice of it: in fact, it is the weak who receive the power of God. And therefore this scripture tells how God brings strength to those who are weak: “Even youths will faint & be weary, & the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run & not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Israel’s prophetic tradition shows that when Israel was strong, mighty and independent, God sent prophets to call them away from their pride and self-service to remember to care for the poor and weak, to put themselves in service to others. But when Israel is downcast and weak, God sends prophets of hope like Isaiah, and Jesus, promising that God will pour strength into them.

It’s an illustration of the truth that so often, it is not our strengths and successes that make us better people – it is our troubles, failures, weaknesses, our repentance and willingness to change and grow, that bring us closer to God. And it seems that God, who is concerned with not just great and mighty things, but also with the minutest events of human life, acts in this world not by hurling thunderbolts at the wicked or manipulating world events like toys, but by pouring strength into those who are weakened. By standing on the side of the downtrodden, by working through human beings who recognize their own weakness and open themselves to him in faith, and by giving them what they need to change human history and transform the world.

I do not mean to imply that God sends us troubles in order to teach us things. A woman once said to me, “I know that God gave my mother this sickness so he could teach me a lesson.” Well, I don’t believe God does things like that – I don’t believe God sends illnesses any more than I believe that he sends hurricanes or tsunamis. These things happen in the course of nature, because we live in a finite and imperfect world – nothing will ever be infinite and perfect within creation. Suffering, disasters and death will always be with us in this world, until God’s kingdom comes in its fullness.

What God does do is gives us strength to meet the challenges we face. Sometimes by curing, as Jesus does in today’s gospel, and as I have seen happen – miraculous cures that I can only attribute to God’s intervention. And sometimes not by curing, but by healing, which is not the same thing – healing sometimes involves a physical cure, but not always. Sometimes it involves a different kind of healing: a spiritual strengthening, an ability to learn new ways of confronting problems. A realization that God is present in the midst of our suffering. Why God cures some people and not others, I don’t know – it’s certainly not the strength of one’s faith or the fervency of one’s prayers that brings cure. But I do believe that prayer always works to bring healing of some kind. By opening ourselves to God’s power, we grow into stronger, braver people. And by allowing God to give us strength, we are healed whether or not we are cured.

So – does God care who wins a football game? I don’t really know, but I’d say if so, he cheers for the underdog. But does God care about the people playing and the people watching? Absolutely. He cares about the people who are there, and he cares about the sick kids who Tim Tebow brings to games. Because God cares about every aspect of our lives. And it is true that “those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

State of the Parish Address, 1.29.12

Scriptures for this Sunday are Here

When Jesus shows up, things start happening.

That seems to be the message of Mark’s gospel. Where the other gospels tell us in a leisurely way about Jesus sitting on mountains or in boats, preaching long sermons, teaching people how to live, Mark’s story gallops along at breakneck pace, with Jesus hurling himself from one situation to another – teaching, healing, casting out demons. Mark is not interested in what Jesus says as much as what Jesus does. Mark often uses the term “immediately” – immediately Jesus went here, immediately Jesus did this – in today’s gospel, this word is translated as “just then” and “at once.”

In today’s gospel, Mark plunges right into the story – immediately, right in Chapter 1, without taking any time for a Christmas story. Jesus has appeared in the wilderness, been baptized, has been driven out into the desert to be tempted by the devil, and now we see that immediately, the first thing he does in his entire public ministry, is this. He appears in the synagogue, begins teaching with authority, and casts out an evil, unclean spirit from a man, so that everyone is amazed.

We 21^st century Americans are left with a bit of puzzlement at a story like this, because when we hear about things like exorcising demons, we tend to think of movies like The Exorcist, with heads spinning around – and think it’s mythical. But Mark is very clear that this is the first thing Jesus does, and we should pay attention – because the first thing is symbolic of what his whole ministry will be.

What Mark tells us today is that Jesus’ whole message, “The Kingdom of God has come near, repent, and believe in the good news,” will be framed in terms of Jesus confronting evil. And what is evil? Not simply demons causing heads to spin. Evil is this: where God wants to build us up, evil tears us down; where God wants us to flourish, evil starves us, shrivels us up; where God wants us to grow into the full and glorious human beings we were created to be, made in the image and likeness of God, evil holds us trapped by the worship of false gods, lesser images. And Mark gives a little extra emphasis by calling this demon an “unclean spirit” –something that must be separated from holy society, exiled – and we see that evil is what isolates and separates us from each other.

Jesus brings this man back from exile, reconciles him to the holy community, brings him back into relationship with God and his neighbors. Which is exactly what Jesus promises each of us. Jesus comes to set us free from these evil things that hold us in bondage, to reconcile us to God and each other, to restore us to our true home with God, to establish God’s Kingdom, beginning immediately.

When Jesus shows up, things start happening.

Well, that’s as good a title as any for my State of the Parish Address – when Jesus shows up, things start happening. If Jesus gallops at breakneck pace through Mark’s gospel, sometimes it feels like what we’ve done at Nativity has been like that. In only a little over 5 years, we have seen remarkable things happening. We started meeting in homes, Jesus showed up, and immediately people started joining the team. We launched worship in a school, Jesus showed up, and immediately people found a church home with us. We lost our lease in the school, Jesus showed up, and immediately an angel stepped forward to help. We needed a permanent home, Jesus showed up, and an amazing location became available, along with the dedicated people and resources to make it happen in this coming year.

All along the way, our people, our ministers, our financial support, our growth, have all seemed like miracles, casting out evil, restoring people in our community and people touched by our ministries to right relationship with God, establishing in some small way a corner of the kingdom of God.

When Jesus shows up, things start happening.

This week I received an email from the rector of All Saints Phoenix, the largest church in our diocese, addressed to me and 14 other priests in the diocese. His email asked that the rectors of the 15 largest parishes in the diocese join him in a Lenten appeal for Episcopal Relief & Development. And I thought, wait, what? We’re one of the 15 largest parishes in our diocese? I asked him where he got his figures, and he said he wasn’t sure, but he based it on a quick glance at the mission shares. He also said that if we’re not one of the largest parishes yet, we will be soon, because what we’ve done has been amazing.

So I’m not sure if he’s correct about the figures, but let’s talk about our numbers (which will be in your annual report materials). In 5 years, we have grown from zero to average attendance of 155 in 2011. On Sundays when we have two services, that is, during our program year of August through May, we average 170 each Sunday. From 2010 to 2011, our average attendance increased by almost 20%. We had 352 people in attendance on Christmas, up from 300 in 2010. The number of children enrolled in Sunday school increased from 21 to 33; the number of teens enrolled in youth group increased from 21 to 31 (about a 50% increase in both categories). In 2011, we had 2 marriages, 7 baptisms, 7 adults confirmed, and 23 teenagers confirmed.

Those are pretty amazing numbers for a parish that didn’t exist 6 years ago, that meets in an office building without permanent signage, that is pretty hidden away and hard to find. But people do find us, because when Jesus shows up, things start happening.

But of course, what we do at church isn’t about numbers. It’s about mission. People. Our mission is to transform people’s lives with the love of God in Jesus Christ. And we believe that’s God’s mission too. Someone wise once said, God’s church doesn’t have a mission. God’s mission has a church. We are that church, empowered by God to be the agent of God’s mission.

We get an idea of how we are accomplishing God’s mission by looking at numbers of people involved in ministry here. Your annual report materials will show a list of the number of people involved in various ministries at Nativity – and by our count, there are roughly 861 separate ministries going on here. In our Outreach area alone, which gives service to those in need, over 5,000 lives were touched last year by things Nativity people did. Hungry people were fed, homeless people were given a place to live, children were given an education, houses were remodeled, Christmas presents were given – lives were transformed.

When Jesus shows up, things start happening.

But it’s not time for us to rest and congratulate ourselves – we have an exciting mission still ahead of us – and I, for one, can’t wait to get started on it. Certainly our building project will take huge amount of energy this year – I am grateful for help of Bob Christopher, Art Graf, Bill Deihl, and the other Building Committee members. But we can’t concentrate on a building as reason for existence – God’s mission is why we exist.

I have been thinking and praying about our ministries and mission. I believe we have great strengths in areas like worship and outreach. And I believe that in the coming year, God is calling us to work to develop 5 areas of mission.

First, if we are going to transform lives, our first priority in the coming year is to reach more people with the good news of what Christ is doing at Nativity. George Hartz will be leading the effort to let people in our new neighborhood know about our presence, and we invite you to join him in this project. He has some great strategic ideas for how to reach new people.

The second priority is to build on a strength we already have – children and youth ministries. We have 64 kids now registered, and a very lively and active youth group. We need to build on these strengths, increasing the depth and creativity of our offerings for children, giving our teachers extra resources to help young minds learn about Jesus’ love for them. This will be a priority for me in the coming year.

And we also need to help our terrific youth reach out to other young people in our community. Klayton Chew, our Director of Youth Ministries, will be graduating from college in May and applying for a full-time job in the business world, so he intends to move back to an assistant youth leader position. We are fortunate that our diocese has a program intended to give partial funding for a full-time youth leader for four years. We intend to apply for this program and hope to call a Youth Ministry Apprentice, a full-time person with significant responsibility for meeting new kids outside of church. We are in an amazing position of strength in this area, and we can help our kids, and others, grow spiritually, socially, emotionally, and in their involvement with the church, by making our youth program even stronger.

The third priority I see is to deepen our opportunities for adult discipleship and learning. It is our calling not only to get people in the door so they can come to know Jesus through our worship, but also to help them grow as disciples through learning and service. This area will be a challenge for us this year, as Wayne Whitney, our Pastoral Intern, will be going on to another assignment after this summer, and at this point we do not appear to have the budget to replace him. I am hoping to develop a corps of lay leaders for small groups that can enjoy short-term small group commitments to learn and build community. Our Spiritual Practices Small Group Study is a pilot program for this initiative.

The fourth priority I see is this – pastoral care of those inside and outside our church. We have strong, dedicated healing ministries, prayer leaders, LEMs. We also have five people now involved in the Community of Hope International program, which is a one-year training program to help them learn skills of listening and pastoral care. I believe this program gives us the opportunity to reach more people. We will have more people available for visitations, and we will be able to start lay chaplaincy programs with places like assisted living centers and hospitals. David Smith will be leading this effort as administrator of the COHI program.

The fifth priority is stewardship of what we have, ensuring careful fiscal responsibility. I do not want to be in a position of having the financial tail wag the church dog – I want to make sure we have adequate finances to answer God’s call to mission. I don’t have to tell you that building a new church facility is a huge financial commitment. Many, many thanks to all of you who have been such committed supporters of this project. Art Graf, our treasurer, will tell us more in the annual meeting about where we stand financially; we are in solid shape with some challenges ahead. Building is a big commitment, and it is also an act of faith. We will not let ourselves get into an irresponsible position. But we will also not be so timid and cautious that we cannot grow. We need to take the step of building to answer God’s call to reach new people, transforming lives with the love of Jesus Christ.

And the reason to reach new people is not to meet our financial obligations, The reason is that we are called to join God in God’s mission – because God’s mission has a church, and that’s Nativity. We are the church Christ calls to join in God’s mission. And I believe that what we do will truly transform lives.

Because when Jesus shows up, things start happening.

Sermon for 1.15.12

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?