The Episcopal Church in Almaden » Sermons
By The Episcopal Church in Almaden
To listen to an audio podcast, mouse over the title and click Play. Open iTunes to download and subscribe to podcasts.
Podcast Description
Here you will find a community of joyful and generous hearts, an extended family of people of all ages and walks of life – all of us seeking and searching after God together. Every week we gather, in worship and out of it, to break bread, to explore God’s Word through Scripture, to share stories of God in our lives, and to be Jesus’ people in the world. Come and join us on our journey! The Episcopal Church in Almaden, San Jose, CA Rev. Kate Flexer
| Name | Description | Released | Price | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
1 |
Clarifying our call | RCL Year B, 5 Epiphany A few weeks ago I preached on vocation and call, about listening for what God wants us to do and keeping tabs on our own attempts to run away from it. Last week I talked about pilgrimage, our pilgrimage together at ECA as we seek out God’s call to us in this time and place. Today’s readings I think again point us in the direction of call and doing what God is asking of us – and they also illustrate the flexibility of how such a call might be answered. In the season of Epiphany we get to hear stories of the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry, as he starts his preaching and teaching and calls disciples and gathers crowds around him. In the gospel of Mark especially we hear how quickly Jesus becomes known as a healer and exorcist, curing people from their diseases and freeing them from the oppression of demons and evil spirits. This ministry is a crowd-pleaser, you could say: everybody loves a miracle worker, and especially one who comes to make things better for you personally. People are thrilled about Jesus and they will do anything to get closer to him, because they hope to gain so much in his presence. There’s a kind of feeding frenzy in the story today: Jesus comes to Capernaum and visits the home of his new disciple Simon Peter. While there he cures Peter’s mother-in-law, and before sundown, the word has spread so far that the whole city is gathered at the door. Jesus does a lot of healing, and he casts out a lot of demons, and at some point he slips away and takes off to be by himself for a while and pray. But before long his new disciples find him. Everyone is searching for you, Jesus! they say. Yes, I’ll bet they are. Because Jesus may have healed a lot of people but there are more, still more, and the crowds are still coming and clamoring for his attention. But instead of going back to do more healings, Jesus tells his friends, Let’s go. I need to go proclaim the kingdom of God. That’s what I came here to do. And off he goes, and he manages to do some more preaching – and, by the way, some more casting out of demons too. I think that time alone in prayer is a turning point for Jesus. I imagine him tired, overwhelmed by the crowds coming to him, trying to understand what this power is that he has and what he is supposed to do with it. And what he does is go away, regroup, and pray. Somewhere in that prayer he understands his mission again, so that when the crowds come calling, he’s able to say, this is what I’m supposed to do – not so much of that. Compare that to the letter from Paul to the Corinthians today. He’s telling them just what he’s done in order to preach the gospel: I’ve made myself a slave to people, doing what they want me to do. I’ve been super-Jewish to Jews who were looking for that; I’ve eaten bacon with Gentiles who wanted that. I’ve hung out in bars to attract the party people, I’ve gone to the library to get the nerdy folks to listen, I’ve tried out for football to get the jocks to hear me, I’ve done everything in order to get other people, whoever they are, to hear my message. It’s all for the sake of the gospel. I’ll do anything, as long as it might win somebody over to the message of Christ. He’s trying to tell the Corinthians to get off their high horses and look out for other people, to stop being so smug and stuck in their ways and to reach out more to others who aren’t just like them. But like Paul often does, he goes to extremes to make his point. So we’re kind of getting two different messages here, aren’t we? In the gospel, Jesus realizes he’s overextending himself in the wrong direction, and pulls back to regroup. He prays and gets in touch again with his true vocation, and starts out anew to spend more of his time that way. But in the epistle, Paul seems to extol the virtues of overextending himself, doing anything and everything he can in order to pursue his vocation and mission. Just what is it we’re suppose | 2/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
2 |
A year of pilgrimage | ECA Annual Meeting: 29 January 2012 Today is our Annual Meeting, a chance for us to look at the last year of our life together. Now that was a compelling gospel reading we just heard. But as much as I’d like to talk to you all about exorcism, I just can’t make it fit well into what I want to say about our last year together at ECA. Instead, I’ve been increasingly tugged by what our Bishop has set as the theme for the diocese for this year, Walking the Way. It’s such an apt metaphor for our life together that I want to adopt it as our theme as well. We’re on a pilgrimage together, and we’ve walked the first several miles together. Now we pause to see where we’ve been – and we get to look at where we go next. Pilgrimage is an ancient metaphor for the Christian faith. The early Christians didn’t call themselves Christians – they called themselves People of the Way. Jesus talks in the gospel of John about how he is the Way, and his whole ministry can be seen as walking along on it – first through Galilee, gathering disciples, preaching and teaching, feeding people and healing them – and then on into Jerusalem and his journey toward the cross. Early on in the life of the church, pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to walk the stones Jesus walked, became a significant part of people’s piety. We have the travelogue from a woman named Egeria who did just that in the late 4th century, and on through the Middle Ages it was not unusual for people with the resources to do so to travel to the Holy Land. For those who could not travel there, and for everyone once it became too dangerous to do so, labyrinths and the Stations of the Cross became easier alternatives. By walking simply from icon to icon, pictures of Jesus’ journey towards death, the believer could be a pilgrim just like those who actually traveled all the way to Jerusalem. And local holy sites became important places to visit also, like Lourdes or Santiago de Compostela. In Britain alone there were numerous places for pilgrimage, places like Lindisfarne, the Holy Island off the English coast near Durham, Walsingham, a shrine to the Virgin Mary in Norfolk, and scores of other places where people had visions of God or experiences of prayer and miracles. By traveling there the Christian experienced God in new ways, returning home with a deeper sense of faith and a new understanding of God. I’ve been to many of these places myself as a pilgrim. I got to go to the Holy Land about 7 years ago on a tour that took us to many of the main holy places connected with Jesus’ life and death. I went to Holy Island, Lindisfarne, many years before that with Harry Temple, whom some of you knew. I went to Walsingham while I was studying at Oxford, and to a cave in Scotland where the 5th century Celtic saint Ninian is said to have gone to pray, and to a holy well in Wales that is said to have healing powers. Some of these places are a little silly or tacky or over-commercialized; some of these places commemorate events or miracles of dubious authenticity; but despite their limitations, each one of these places reeks of prayer. In each one of them people have gathered for centuries, traveling miles and miles and arriving sometimes broken and exhausted, praying to God and experiencing God vividly. The presence of God is strong in places like this – sometimes so strong it took my breath away when I least expected it. It’s not only in what are known of as holy places that God shows up, of course. God can turn up wherever God wants to. There is something about traveling, however, about walking and journeying as a pilgrim, that opens you more to what God might be saying. When I walk, especially when I walk a long ways, like on a backpacking trip, my brain quiets down, I listen more, I’m more aware of the wind in the trees and the thoughts in my own mind. And I’m more aware of and open to the people I travel with, as well – companions who journey together learn about | 2/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
3 |
When we feel like running away | RCL Year B, 3 Epiphany Last week I talked about call, how God speaks to us in ways great and small and invites us to follow, sometimes into unknown and scary places. We learn to hear and recognize God’s voice over time, and we shape our lives into how God would have them be. God calls each of us – and as I’ve said before, the greatest quote about that is the one from Frederick Buechner, that our vocation, where God is calling us, is where our own deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger. Well, all of that is true. But today I want to talk about the opposite entirely – when what we really want to say to God is NO. Because more often than not, our response to God is to run the other way – at least for a while. When I was going through the ordination discernment process as a young adult, I was simultaneously debating whether to return to Europe to live (I’d spent my junior year abroad in France and part of me wished I’d stayed there). When my parish discernment committee would press me too hard on questions I didn’t want to answer, our group code for ‘leave me alone’ was ‘Kate wants to go to Europe now.’ One of my mentors along the way, a successful rector of a large church, told me that his secret escape fantasy, what he would do if he left the priesthood, was to become a greenskeeper for a golf course. Another priest friend on the verge of retirement confided that he wanted to work in a baseball stadium – and indeed, once he retired, he did just that. My escapism shifted away from Europe some time ago, but now I sometimes longingly imagine life as a park ranger. Now, tell me it’s not just clergy who have these kinds of escape fantasies. Are there some of you who know what I’m talking about? ‘If my life had turned out differently, I’d be a…’ or ‘I’d go live in…’ maybe I could still do it! Yes, ok, some of you know. When things aren’t quite how we want them to be, or in those idle hours when we wonder ‘what if?’ then it’s fun to indulge in these visions. It’s one thing to think about it; it’s another thing altogether when we act on them, of course. The readings we have today are all about responding ‘yes’ to call. But they’re also about responding with a ‘no,’ or at least the possibility of that. I’m thinking especially of the first one from Jonah. We heard just a part of Jonah’s story today, but of course Jonah is the one who ends up in the belly of the whale, really the big fish, for three days. God has called him as a prophet to go to the city of Israel’s enemies, the Assyrian city of Nineveh, to tell them that Yahweh the God of Israel will destroy them if they don’t repent. Jonah hears this and immediately takes off in the opposite direction, to Tarshish, ‘away from the presence of the Lord.’ This results in God rousing a great storm, which gets Jonah thrown off his ship and swallowed by the fish, where he prays to God for help. The fish spits him out safe and sound. And then God shows up again and tells him again to go to Nineveh – same call, same message. This time Jonah goes, the people of Nineveh hear and repent, and God changes his mind. Jonah is upset at this, since he was really hoping to see the horrible Assyrians destroyed by God. He and God have another fight along these lines, and God rebukes him. God’s mercy is greater than Jonah can take, and Jonah doesn’t really seem to come to terms with this in the end. So Jonah at first says no to God and tries to escape. When that doesn’t work, he grudgingly says yes, but for the wrong reasons – he goes to Nineveh to watch its downfall, not to help God save its people. As a prophet of Israel, Jonah behaves pretty poorly. It’s the people of Nineveh who are the ones who respond to God, not him – one of those surprise twists the Old Testament throws at us from time to time. The problem for Jonah is his lack of vision – he knows the Assyrians to be the oppressors of Israel, a | 1/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
4 |
Listening for God | RCL Year B, 2 Epiphany Today in our scriptures we got to hear two different stories of people at the very beginning of their relationships with God, two tales of people being called to and drawn by a God they don’t yet know. First, the prophet Samuel, just coming into his own as a young boy; the other, the skeptic Nathanael, who becomes a disciple of Jesus. I want to start with these stories, for both of them tell us something of how God calls us, and how we respond. In the first, Samuel is a boy serving in the ancient place of worship at Shiloh, living out the commitment his mother Hannah has made on his behalf. Samuel comes from a heritage of faith: his mother Hannah had a long relationship with God, praying year after year for a child. When she finally receives word through the priest Eli that her petition will be heard, she promises the child to God. She follows through after Samuel is weaned and brings him to the priests. So Samuel has been living near the altar of God since the very beginning of his life, but he does not yet know all that this might entail for him; the story tells us that ‘he did not know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.’ When God speaks to him and calls him in the wee hours of the morning, Samuel does not recognize his voice – he doesn’t yet know it to recognize it. And yet God is calling him all the same, to be a prophet to all of Israel, and to begin with delivering some hard news to his mentor and father figure Eli. In the gospel, it is Nathanael who hears the call. We don’t know his back-story, but Jesus calls him an Israelite in whom there is no deceit – Nathanael clearly comes out of the Jewish tradition of study of the law and prophets, a strong heritage of faith. And he’s also skeptical about this new guy his friend Philip wants him to meet – can anything good come out of Nazareth? Philip just tells him to come and see, and Nathanael does so – and he is startled to find that this unknown rabbi knows about him already, and seems to be expecting to meet him. From this time on Nathanael becomes one of Jesus’ disciples, a witness to the Messiah. These two people, Samuel and Nathanael, are both ordinary individuals and larger than life characters – Samuel is the great prophet of legendary history, who goes on to anoint first Saul and then David as king of Israel, and is himself the type for all great prophets to come. But in this story, he is just a boy who hears God calling. Likewise, in the gospel of John, some think that Nathanael is the representation of all Jews who come to Jesus as the Messiah. That bit from Jesus about an Israelite with no deceit in him refers to the ancestor Jacob, the one who is given the name Israel but who is a well-known trickster in the old stories. Nathanael has been under the fig tree, Jesus says, the symbol in rabbinical literature for the place where one studies the Torah. But in this story, Nathanael is also simply a Galilean who hears Jesus’ call. Today we can pair these two stories with a third story of call. Today, January 15, is the birthday of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., the great leader of the civil rights movement in this country. He was a powerful figure in the history of this country, a larger than life character whose birthday we mark with a national holiday every year. But in 1955 when he was first called into leadership, he was just a young preacher of 26, fresh out of graduate school and in his first church, an unknown newcomer in the city of Montgomery, Alabama. Son and grandson of preachers, he was asked to do something larger, to lead the Montgomery bus boycott after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. At the beginning, King was an ordinary person who heard a call into something new and very scary – and yet he did so, praying and feeling the presence of God as he began to live into this new level of leadership. It is easy to focus on the larger than life parts of a | 1/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
5 |
You are the beloved | RCL Year B, Baptism of Our Lord Jesus came to John and was baptized by him in the river Jordan. And Jesus came up out of the water and the Spirit descended on him and he heard a voice saying, You are my Son, the beloved – with you I am well pleased. And so he began his ministry in Galilee. So what did you hear when you were baptized? Many of us, I’d guess, were baptized as infants. We probably don’t remember hearing anything at all, unless our family had some story to tell about it. Were any of you baptized when you were older, so that you do remember it? Of course, maybe some of you haven’t been baptized yet – if so, let’s talk. But have you, at your baptism, or at some other time, have you heard that voice, telling you that you are loved? Every night that I put my kids to bed, I trace the sign of the cross on their foreheads and say, you are sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever – words from our baptismal service. Sometimes Frances asks me why I’m doing that. So you’ll remember that God loves you, I say. What does being marked as Christ’s own forever mean? she persists. It means that God always loves you and will never forget you, I tell her. Do you know that? Have you heard that? So many of us stumble along without that sense of God’s love, doing the right thing just because. Or doing more or less the right thing, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience us too much. Maybe sometimes doing the wrong thing. But we may have forgotten why we should even try. Or we may have never really heard it. Our readings today talk a lot about the workings of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and what it’s like to receive that Spirit. We heard from the very beginning of the creation story in Genesis of the Spirit moving over the deep – the breath of God, the wind, the ruach, brooding and hovering over the waters of chaos. God spoke and there was light, and order began to form out of the chaos: day and night, a time of light and a time of darkness. Then we heard in Psalm 29 about the power of God’s voice, mightier than storms and stronger than anything on this earth. In Acts Paul helps the Ephesians know and receive the Holy Spirit with their baptism, and they begin to speak in tongues and prophesy. And Jesus has the Spirit descend on him like a dove as he is baptized, and again the powerful voice of God speaks the news that he is beloved. The Spirit, the part of God that acts in us and upon us and all around us, does many things: it creates out of chaos; it acts with power; it brings out gifts in us we didn’t know we had; it tells us we are God’s beloved. There was an experience some had in the days of the charismatic renewal movement in the Episcopal Church called ‘being baptized by the Holy Spirit.’ The experience was a little different for each person, and yet somehow the same as well. In some moment of readiness and openness, whether because the person directly asked God for the gift or was somehow moved in worship or prayer, a feeling of energy and warmth suddenly came upon them and pervaded them. Sometimes it made them speak in tongues or faint away or show some other outward sign; sometimes it just happened inside. Unfortunately some in the charismatic movement took it as a sign of distinction, an experience that divided you permanently from others who had not had the experience. Those who hadn’t had this baptism of the Holy Spirit wondered why they were left out. And perhaps not everyone understood then or now that this is something people in all times and places have had, though they might call it by different names – religious ecstasy is not unique to a particular form of Christianity. But before all the human misunderstanding, this experience came and comes upon people as a sense of God’s presence, something deeply personal and profound beyond explanation. It is not an experience of the intellect and doesn’t hold up well to systematic theology. But an experience li | 1/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
6 |
New Year, New Name | In T.S. Eliot’s book of poems about cats, there’s one called ‘The Naming of Cats.’ Eliot says every cat has three names: the everyday name the family uses, like James or George; the particular, dignified name like Quaxo or Coricopat that the cat can be proud of; and one other: But above and beyond there’s still one name left over, And that is the name that you never will guess; The name that no human research can discover– But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess. When you notice a cat in profound meditation, The reason, I tell you, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: His ineffable effable Effanineffable Deep and inscrutable singular Name. Today is the Feast of the Holy Name, of Jesus that is, the feast day that falls on New Year’s Day in the church calendar. It’s 8 days after Christmas, which means it’s 8 days after the day of Jesus’ birth, the traditional day for circumcising a Jewish boy and giving him his name. In some ways we don’t really get the importance of this in our culture. We think a lot about what to name our kids, whether it’s a family name or something from a book or something we make up, and we sometimes comment on how a person’s name suits them, or doesn’t suit them. Some of my Jewish friends made a point of picking a name for their children that began with the same letter as an ancestor’s name – the more traditional way is to name with the same name as the ancestor – but they also were careful not to say the child’s name before she or he was born, just as they refused baby showers before the baby was born. Something about keeping the child a secret from evil spirits. But beyond that, we don’t think a lot about names and naming. There are cultures where your name means who you really are – you don’t tell strangers your name, only family. Your name is secret, because knowing a person’s name gives you power over them, something you don’t want potential enemies to have. In the stories in the Bible, the name of a person is always somehow connected to and descriptive of that person’s essence and personality. That’s why people have their names changed in stories where some radical shift happens to them – like Abram becoming Abraham, or Saul becoming Paul. Something of this is bound up with God’s Name – God tells Abraham in the encounter at the burning bush that his name is I Am, or Yahweh, a name that is written only in consonants (the four letters are called the Tetragrammaton) and never said aloud by an observant Jew. It’s interesting that God is willing to tell us his name, but we’re reluctant to use it. So here we are today learning again the name of Jesus, a name that means ‘God saves.’ The essence of who Jesus is, in other words, is to show us that God saves. The name doesn’t tell us how this happens, but Jesus’ life does. Right from the very start we see how God saves: Ordinary working people, shepherds, are the ones to get the news about Jesus’ coming. They find him in the form of a baby, vulnerable, loving, loyal, forgiving. At the end of his life, this Jesus gives up his life for the world, emptying himself and taking the form of a slave, as our epistle reading today says. And in between we hear of a Jesus who welcomes all to table, who calls the powerful to account, who heals the sick, who blesses children. This is who Jesus is; this is how God saves. God saves through weakness and vulnerability; God saves in gathering in the lost and caring for the unloved; God saves through loving us. It’s very different from the idea that we picked up somewhere that God’s name shouldn’t be spoken, that God is too holy, too other than us to allow us to claim his name for ourselves. I wonder what it is that led us down that path, but I wonder if it isn’t partly to give ourselves an easy out. Because if we claim Jesus’ name – God saves, thr | 1/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
7 |
Witnessing to the light | For my birthday last Sunday, my family took me to the best Christmas pageant ever – well, the best one until ours next week, of course. It’s a Mexican pageant play that is put on every year at the mission church in San Juan Bautista by a theater company called El Teatro Campesino. At Christmastime they do one of two plays, alternating year by year – one about the Virgin of Guadalupe and one, what we saw this year, called La Pastorela. It’s the story of the shepherds trying to go see the Christ child and their struggles in getting there. For the devil and all his minions don’t want them to make it, and try to prevent them every which way; while the angels of heaven try to guide them to Bethlehem and protect them from the devils. It’s full of music and dancing and it’s funny and profound all at the same time, and I absolutely love it. So I have to tell you the story of the play. The shepherds are sleeping when the Christ child is born, but one of them, a shepherd girl named Gila, awakens to hear the angels’ song. She rouses the rest of her friends, and off they start to see the child. Soon they’re met by an old hermit, a monk who has been living alone for 20 years awaiting the coming of the Messiah. He has seen a vision that the holy child has been born, and that Lucifer knows of the birth and is mustering his forces against the child. Terrified and excited, the hermit races out to find someone who can tell him whether the child really is born. The shepherds confirm his vision and so they travel together, following the angels’ light to Bethlehem. But the devil has other plans, and soon they are beset by all kinds of temptations. Booze, pride, gluttony, lust, greed, all are offered to the shepherds in various forms – but with only some success, because the angels appear over and over again to refocus the shepherds and remind them of their destination. So Lucifer sharpens his tactics. The old hermit is assailed with the idea that all his time praying has been in vain, that God never wanted his sacrifice and he’d better just go find a nice girl and settle down. The girl he has in mind very quickly disabuses him of that idea. But worst of all, Lucifer himself appears before them carrying a cross, telling them of the tragic life Jesus will lead when he grows up. Acting out Jesus’ arrest and torture and death, Lucifer cries out at the last, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? ‘Why should you follow him?’ Lucifer asks. ‘His way is the way of suffering. Follow me and you will have all you desire.’ So, despairing and lost, the shepherds finally follow the devils off to hell – until Gila, the shepherd girl who heard the angels’ song, prays for help one more time, and St Michael and all the angels appear to battle Lucifer and his devils for the souls of humankind. The angels beat back the devils with God’s help, and at last the shepherds come to the manger to worship the baby Jesus. So why do I love it – besides the wonderful music and the costumes and the fun of the whole event? Because the story it tells is so true. There are so many things that tempt the shepherds off the path of the angels, just as there are so many ways for us to lose our focus. Think of how many priorities we all have besides, and maybe hold higher than, following Jesus. Other more tangible goals are so attractive – success, the esteem of others, the perfect life our neighbors will envy, so on and so on. And even if we know better, if we try to keep ourselves on track and make our home in God, we are not immune from the ultimate temptation that faced the hermit and the shepherds in the end: the temptation of despair. It’s pretty easy just to let it all go and join the rat race around us instead of fighting against it. What good does it do to live differently, after all? It only brings more suffering, especially if things are going well for us in this world. When we’ve got a good job and secure investments a | 12/10/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
8 |
Prepare the way | RCL Year B, 2 Advent We get to have a couple of weeks of gospel stories about John the Baptist, and I am thrilled. I have an ever-increasing love and respect for John. When I was younger I found him off-putting – I think I just thought he was weird, out there eating locusts and all of that. So I never set out to learn more about him exactly. But over time I picked up a little bit here and there. And I got older and crankier, and grew more disenchanted with the culture around us, and I started going into the wilderness more myself. And more and more, I find John fascinating. We don’t really know that much about John. But we can make guesses about him based on what we read in the gospels and what we know of his times. Luke tells us that John was the long-desired son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, an older righteous couple. Zechariah was a priest of the temple, of the order of Abijah, and Elizabeth was a descendant of Aaron herself, so John came from pretty good stock. As priest, Zechariah’s duty was to take his turn in the house of the Lord fulfilling the rituals proscribed by Aaron – so he was there when he received word from God that John would be born, a prophet to go before the Lord to prepare his way. So John began his life in Jerusalem, a son of the elite priestly class. But Luke tells us that ‘he became strong in spirit and was in the wilderness’ – perhaps in his adolescence he was orphaned, given that his parents were older, and somehow wound up in the wilderness. One theory is that he went to live with the Essenes, the community who created the Dead Sea Scrolls, who had removed themselves from Jerusalem to avoid the spiritual contamination of the Roman occupation. That may be where he picked up the practice of baptism, since the Essenes took purifying baths as part of their rituals. But somewhere along the way, John became the strong, clear-minded figure we meet in today’s gospel and in the other gospels as well – still in the wilderness, but now attracting enormous crowds who heed his call to repentance. As one of my clergy colleagues put it, John was a rock star. Look at how Mark writes it: ‘people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him.’ Wow. This says that John must have been extremely charismatic and attractive, not the weird scary person I used to think he was. But it also says that there was a hunger, a deep intense hunger on the part of the people. They were living under brutal occupation, and they were hungry. The revolt in Jerusalem that brought down the rage of Rome on their city happened in 69-70 AD – not too much longer after this, remember. The people were looking for a leader, they were spiritually needy, and John appeared. He could do anything with this crowd – they would follow him anywhere. But look at what he says: ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.’ He could have taken the power the people gave him, but instead he pointed elsewhere. These are the words of a man of integrity – he knows who he is and who he is not, and he is utterly honest with himself and others about that. He doesn’t know when the Messiah will come or what he will look like – but he believes the Messiah will appear, and he knows he is not it. My colleague’s mention of John as a rock star reminded me of a U2 concert I went to several years ago. It was a great show, I love their music, the whole thing was uplifting and amazing. But what impressed me most of all was the lead singer, Bono himself, out there in front with thousands of screaming fans in front of him. He had us all in his hand – he could have done anything with us. It was near mass hysteria in that arena. But what he did was change the words of one of their greatest songs and sing instead, Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia. It was like in a moment he took all of our | 12/4/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
9 |
What waiting really means | Here’s my warning to you: the season of Advent puts me in an existential frame of mind. The scripture readings, the short days, the insane pace of the world around us, all of it gives me pause. This time of year can be the best of times and the worst of times all at once – and sometimes the worst gets the best of me. And one of the more dispiriting images I saw in the last few days was a photo on the front page of the NY Times of tents, people camping out on Thanksgiving Day in front of BestBuy. They were waiting to be first in line for the Black Friday sales beginning at midnight. Meanwhile at Walmart in Los Angeles, beginning their Black Friday at 10pm on Thanksgiving Day, a woman used pepper spray on her fellow shoppers in order to be first to get the deals. It is amazing, when you think about it, that we have a Thanksgiving Day on our American calendar at all. A day of gratitude for our blessings, a day meant for nothing more than time with family and friends and giving thanks? Why waste time on that when instead we can just kick-start our overdrive into intense consumerism – the consumerism that we pretend is festive and loving, our welcome of the Christ child. These are the days that make me think of Don Quixote tilting at his windmills – what could be is so tarnished and marred by what is, but no one else really seems to care. Welcome to the season of anticipation – and welcome to another attempt to reclaim what that anticipation is really for. For today we begin the season of waiting and preparation – not Christmas yet, but Advent, the time when we focus on preparing ourselves for the coming of Christ. Like all of the great symbols of the church, Advent means many things. We wait and pray along with Mary, expecting the birth of the Christ Child, the incarnation of God among us. We wait and pray for Christ to come again to us, wiping away the darkness and bringing about the ultimate Reign of God on earth. And yes, we wait and prepare for Christmas, for fellowship and feasting and gifts to be shared. There’s even a hint of the old waiting for the winter solstice, waiting for the light to come back into the dark, cold world. All of these things tie up together at this time of year, and bring with them a whole range of emotions. We wait in hope and anticipation, and we wait in dread and fear of disappointment. We hope for joy and loveliness at Christmas, but perhaps we fear that the holidays may not be everything we hoped they would be. Maybe things are different this year, the money’s tighter, or someone is missing. We hope for good things in the coming year, but we might dread what further disasters and economic crises it might bring. Add in the second-coming layer to it all, and we might just acknowledge the more existential fear that we will be found wanting when Christ comes again in judgment. And maybe too, some of us might fear that this Christianity stuff might be terribly deluded, that there really is nothing ultimately that we wait for, that the poor stuff of this world is really all there is. No wonder some decide to opt out and look for something easier – a god that demands less, perhaps, like the artificial pleasures of consumer delight. The good news, in some ways, is that we are not the first to face into the themes of this season with mixed feelings. Our readings are full of mixed feelings today. The reading from Isaiah began it all with dread and hope, the song of a people who have every reason to despair and yet continue to hope. Their nation has been destroyed, they have gone into exile for generations and now they have returned to find nothing the same. Where are you, God? the author writes, We remember what you did for us, all those mighty deeds of old, but you do not do them anymore. And look, see how much we are in need of your help. We are overcome by our enemies, we are drowning in our sins. We have failed you, we know, and you have | 11/27/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
10 |
How to love your neighbor | RCL Year A, Proper 29 And with that gospel reading, we wind up our church year. This is the last Sunday in the year on the church calendar, and the last Sunday of readings from Matthew’s gospel – next week we begin with the gospel of Mark and stay with that more or less for the whole year. In case you didn’t notice, there’s a lot in Matthew’s gospel that ends with something like, ‘do this or else’… a lot about ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ So we finish today with the big ‘or else’: a depiction of the final judgment, with the Son of Man like a king upon his throne – and yet also like a shepherd, separating the sheep from the goats. All who are accursed will be thrown into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, while the righteous will go into eternal life. Just to bring the point home, the Old Testament reading from Ezekiel includes a sorting by the shepherd also – between the fat sheep and the thin sheep. The fat sheep are in trouble, because the only way they’ve gotten fat is by pushing the thin sheep away from the food, and butting at them with their horns. The fat and strong are that way through ill-gotten means, and God the good shepherd is going to serve them with justice – and nourish and care for the lost and weak. So if you’re a fat sheep or a goat, you’ve got problems. If you’re a sheep, especially a thin sheep, you’re ok. Hey, we might say. This isn’t the Good Shepherd I learned about in Sunday School! The good shepherd is supposed to be taking care of all of us, and watching over us. All this sorting and justice and eternal punishment doesn’t seem to fit into that. What do we do with this? I suppose you could say that the shepherd is an image that goes both ways, just as the image of Christ as king, or God as loving parent, goes both ways. God does care for us and love us. But God also allows us to choose how we will live our lives. We’re free to choose to do what Jesus taught us, to love our neighbor as ourselves. We are also free to live as if that doesn’t matter; to mistreat other people and live for ourselves alone. Most of us do some of both at different times in our lives. But as a good shepherd with his sheep, or as a good king with his people, or as a parent with her children, God is too bound up with us not to care about what we do. What we do affects other people, and so what we do affects God, and one way or another, God requires some kind of reckoning from us, an accounting for how we’ve lived and what choices we’ve made. Sometimes we picture this as a dramatic once-for-all ending like today’s gospel, where everyone gets sorted out and some get punished for all eternity; sometimes we picture this as each of us coming face to face with Jesus and reviewing with him how what we did affected other people. C.S. Lewis once described purgatory and judgment as simply having to live our lives over again, seeing what our actions did to other people. We might even picture this reckoning as an immediate one, the consequences of our actions made obvious by the person we’re doing them to. We don’t know exactly what will happen, and we tend not to want to think about it very much. Sometimes, though, the scriptures won’t let us escape it. Look again at today’s gospel. The sorting out is very clear – there are those who are righteous, and those who are not. But the criteria for the sorting is also very clear, and it’s also quite simple. Did you feed the hungry; did you give drink to the thirsty; did you welcome the stranger; did you clothe the naked; did you take care of the sick; did you visit those in prison? If you did, even to one of the least of these, you did it to Jesus also. The righteous seem as surprised to hear it as the accursed are – you can almost hear them asking, what? is that all it takes? There’s nothing, you might notice, about believing a particular doct | 11/20/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
11 |
Expectations of God | RCL Year A, Proper 28 So, the parable of the talents. A few weeks ago my folks were visiting and my father buttonholed me on this very parable and what in the world it means. Their church had been using Luke’s version of the parable in a stewardship study and Dad found the interpretation they gave problematic. It didn’t help that Luke’s version includes a side story about a king whose people don’t want him to rule over them, and the king responding by slaughtering the people. That kind of thing really complicates the picture of the gospel of love. I didn’t have a very good answer for my dad. The problem is, of course, is that there are two different ways of understanding the parable for today. Well, three. Probably more. I’m only going to explore two, however, because the other one is problematic. What might be the usual interpretation has it that the parable of the talents is about making more of ourselves and our gifts and skills. The landowner is God and we’re the slaves, and God wants us to invest well and turn a profit while he’s away. If we don’t, we’ll lose what we’ve been given and it will be granted to others instead. Be all that you can be, or else. The problem is, that interpretation fits suspiciously into our modern American values, the part of our culture that has a capitalist be-all-you-can-be philosophy. Invest and make more; live up to your full potential and be rewarded. That might be the culture we live in now, but it is pretty different from the one Jesus lived in. And I’m not convinced that earning interest on the investment is God’s intention for us exactly. For one thing, earning interest at all is contrary to Levitical law – it was called usury. And it was against the law because to earn interest meant that you were extracting more money from the poor – the Torah is very careful about issues of wealth disparity. In the thinking of the Law, the poor were poor, and the rich were rich, because the rich were exploiting the poor. Affirming that system, even metaphorically, seems pretty unlikely for a Jewish Messiah. But even if we set that interpretation aside, we still have two more, at least. We tend to automatically think that parables about a landowner and his servants are about God and us. But perhaps in this case, the landowner is not God. Look at how the third servant describes him – a harsh man, reaping where he did not sow. This landowner is rapacious, one who makes a profit wherever he can, off of whomever he can make it. Not my image of God, certainly. And this landowner is wealthy beyond belief: A talent would be about twenty years’ wages for a laborer – so 10 talents, given to the first slave, would be 200 years’ wages…which then is doubled by the slave’s investment. The money in question is astronomical. And the landowner clearly expects to get richer while he’s away, assuming his slaves will continue his ‘legacy’ – continue his business, take risks to make a profit, and follow his example of wheeling & dealing. Perhaps this isn’t a parable about God or God’s ways at all – perhaps it’s about the ways of the world, and how hard it is to be Jesus’ followers – the world reaps where it does not sow, and the rich are rich because they steal from the poor. The first two slaves go along with that system. The third slave is the honorable one because he doesn’t do that, and he pays for it. On the other hand. The parable tells of the landowner going away and then coming back to see what’s happened in his absence. It comes directly after the wise and foolish bridesmaids, which is also a story about someone being away and returning, and that someone, the bridegroom, does seem to mean Jesus. And right afterward Jesus goes on to talk about the coming, or the return, of the Son of Man. So a story about someone going away and what happens when he returns does seem in context | 11/13/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
12 |
All Saints | RCL Year A, Proper 27 Happy Birthday, ECA! On All Saints Day, 1967, ECA founding members formally applied for mission status in the Diocese of California, the diocese we were part of at the time. Today we remember the saints of 44 years ago who founded this congregation – and we celebrate ourselves, the community of saints gathered here, and those yet to come. The Sunday After All Saints is a chance to remember all the saints, all those who have gone before, all the great heroes of the faith, all the people who make the church what it is and what it will be. We could be using the readings for All Saints Day today, but the gospel reading for that is the Beatitudes, something that we’ve had already this year (though it’s tempting to do what our Sunday School is focusing on as well!). So I went with this Sunday’s readings instead, keeping us in the continuity of the story of Jesus and his confrontations with the elders of the people. Now in that story it’s moving closer to Jesus’ arrest and trial, Jesus’ end times, and he is speaking more about the end times for all of us. The end times in question, however, have a great deal to do with how we live now. So today we get another parable. And with parables, we can sometimes wonder which character is meant to be us. So please answer: are you a wise virgin or a foolish virgin? Or are you c) none of the above? Well, you don’t really have to answer here. But this is decidedly one of those parables where you are supposed to locate yourself in one camp or another: are you ready for the bridegroom’s coming, or not; are you wise, or foolish; are you in the in-group, or the out-group; will you be saved, or not. There’s not a lot of Anglican wiggle room in there – you can’t answer ‘both-and’ to this one. It’s either one way or the other, it seems. There are ten bridesmaids, some of whom planned ahead with extra oil for their lamps, and some of whom did not. And those who did not have enough oil to wait for the late-arriving bridegroom ask the others for help, and are refused. And then those foolish bridesmaids are locked out of the party when they return from buying more oil for their lamps. This parable has always reminded me of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper. In that story, the ants work all summer long gathering food and the grasshoppers play all summer long. When winter comes and the grasshoppers are starving, they beg the ants for some food. The ants refuse, sounding self-righteous and snotty, and say, ‘You should have been working over the summer, lazybones. This is your own fault!’ Rather the same response the wise bridesmaids give the foolish ones. The ant and grasshopper story, of course, extols the virtues of hard work, that each one of us needs to pull our own weight and not be lazy and rely on others to take care of us. There are consequences for our behavior. Jesus’ parable gives a picture of consequences as well. The bridesmaids, of course, are the followers of Christ, and Christ is the bridegroom. The bridegroom takes a while in coming to the feast – the first-century Christians realized that Jesus wasn’t coming back immediately like they’d originally understood, but that it might take a while. The oil for the lamps symbolizes our readiness for salvation: sufficient good works, right living, faithfulness. The commentaries take pains to point out that the wise bridesmaids refuse to offer extra oil to their unprepared friends not because of a lack of charity, but simply because readiness for the kingdom isn’t something you can just pass on to another who needs it – we each have our own path to follow and choices to make. All the same, they still sound pretty snotty to me. I think that the story of the ant and grasshopper has infected this parable about the wise and foolish bridesmaids. The American virtues of hard work, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, person | 11/7/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
13 |
God’s fairness | RCL Year A, Proper 26 Well, this is an awkward text for a priest in vestments to preach on. It’s always a little embarrassing to realize that Jesus is talking about you, and not in a flattering kind of way. I was reading this text with other clergy this week and one man noted that he’d had the ‘call no one Father’ text quoted at him several times in his ministry – then he looked at me, and said, ‘but I suppose you haven’t had a problem with that.’ No, it’s true, so perhaps I can take myself out of this picture – after all, the image Jesus’ words conjure up in my head is certainly one of particular self-important male clergy I know of, and thank goodness I’m not like that. And then I read again, ‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled – and all who humble themselves will be exalted.’ Whoops. Perhaps I’d better pay attention after all. Jesus is talking to religious leaders, so we could hear this as a gospel against clericalism – against clergy taking all the power in the church. As those of you taking my Episcopal Basics classes know, the American Episcopal church has never truly been very clericalist – and it is even less so (officially) since the 1979 BCP. The structure of the church is democratic, like the American government, and from the earliest colonial days lay people have had a great deal of authority and leadership in the church. The whole tide of liturgical renewal – what happened in the Catholic Church with Vatican II and in our church with our 1979 Prayer Book – was toward increasing lay participation and leadership in worship as well. This is not to say that there aren’t plenty of bishops and clergy who lord it over others, or plenty of lay people who give those clergy too much power to do so – but as a whole, it’s not bad. So taking Jesus’ words purely literally, the Episcopal Church has done better than some at maintaining some equality and balance of power between its different orders. But the leaders Jesus talks to aren’t just religious – they have power and influence in the political world as well. Looking outside the church at the greater culture around us too, we see things haven’t always worked out equally. As our economy reels closer to collapse, it’s becoming more and more obvious that things have become grossly unequal in our country, in power and in resources. Six weeks ago people began the Occupy Wall Street protest, which has now spread to 1768 cities, according to the organizers. Close to home, that protest got very ugly in Oakland this last week, which has drawn more attention to the protesters and to the cities where they are protesting. There are a wide range of causes all gathered together in this movement, but one common thread is the attempt to give voice to the frustration many feel that things have become grossly unfair in our country. As this has grown, some analysts have noted that the Tea Party supporters have also been outraged about the disparity of wealth and power – each group is very different demographically, and holds different entities accountable for this problem, but there’s at least one common point in their protest. Groups to the right and the left of the mainstream are agreeing that something is not right in this country. On Tuesday the Congressional Budget Office released a report on trends in the distribution of household income from 1979 to 2007. Over those nearly 30 years the top 1% of earners increased their income by 275%, while the middle class increased income by 40% and the poor by 18%. In other words, people’s sense of things isn’t off at all. In clear ways, the exalted have exalted themselves way above the rest of us. There’s a reason a lot of people, people on the extremes of the political spectrum and many of us in the middle, are angry. We know what’s fair, and we were raised with the idea that our democratic system ought to be fair, and thi | 10/31/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
14 |
Let God love through you | RCL Year A, Proper 25 We’re hearing in these few weeks about a series of confrontations between Jesus and the leaders of the Jewish people – Jesus has told scathing parables on the Pharisees and Sadducees and others, pointing out their faults and failings, and they have responded with tests designed to trip him up and undermine his credibility with the people. One commentator called this section of Matthew’s gospel ‘Reality Show Jesus’ – the persistent attempt to humiliate Jesus coupled with his perfect answers back. You can hear the crowd going huh! huh! huh! go Jesus! Today he silences his adversaries so well that no one dares ask him any more questions. Which isn’t necessarily good news for Jesus – now they will start to seek his death instead. But what Jesus says today isn’t just a chance for us to be spectators at the tennis match. He offers a challenge to us as well. Love God and love your neighbor. It sounds so simple. And yet we fail at both so regularly. Jesus is asked to name the one greatest commandment, and he seemingly answers with two. Both are quotes from the Old Testament, one from Deuteronomy and one from Leviticus. Love God with all your heart and mind and strength – and the second is like it – love your neighbor as yourself. Sometimes we like to tack on a third, about loving yourself. But, well, I don’t think that’s part of Jesus’ point – this is not a commandment about our self-esteem. What Jesus is getting at is the idea that these two commandments are really one commandment – you can’t love God without loving your neighbor, and you can’t love your neighbor without loving God. (Parenthesis: Stop worrying about yourself.) The first letter of John makes this same point later: ‘Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars.’ Anyone here ever hated somebody else? OK, if not that, then anybody ever felt uncharitable feelings toward somebody else? Well, whoops. Guess this incriminates all of us, doesn’t it? Well, there’s good news and bad here for us. Jesus isn’t talking about our feelings, per se. His emphasis isn’t on what we think of other people or how warm our hearts are toward them. He’s talking instead about actions, about whether we care for others’ needs. Whether we feed the hungry and give water to the thirsty and look out for each other’s children; whether we maintain relationship and put the wellbeing of the other person as a priority. Whether we tell the truth about other people and insist that others do as well. If we do all those things, then we are loving our neighbor – and we are loving God as well. Good news to realize that we don’t have to adore each other all the time – but tough news to hear that we have to look out for each other all the same. On the other hand, it’s nice to realize that we don’t have to conjure up warm enthusiastic feelings about God all the time either. For some people, God remains a distant idea, not a close companion – maybe because of early teachings we imbibed as a child, or for lots of other reasons. And for many of us, there are times when we feel terribly angry at God for allowing something bad to happen – we might not admit feeling angry, but we do all the same. For others of us, even if we are consistent with our prayer and spiritual practice, sometimes it can start to feel dry and lifeless, even boring. We can feel guilty about this, like we’re not loving God the way we should. Hearing that loving God is really about caring for and serving others, and staying faithful in our intentions and practice with God, can be something of a relief. But it does place an expectation on our behavior, even if not on our feelings: it means we do have to serve and care for and be faithful to others and God – something we’re not always so consistent about. A few years ago, after Mother Teresa died, her spiri | 10/23/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
15 |
Give to God what is due to God | RCL Year A, Proper 24 Things have started to get nasty between Jesus and his adversaries. Today is the first of their attempts to confront Jesus and try to trip him up, but there will be more. He’s in Jerusalem now, teaching in the temple. He is in the last week of his life. And the other sects within Judaism, others who have had power and influence over the people, are getting annoyed with him. He’s been telling parables and giving teachings that make it clear his opinion, that those who have been entrusted with the care of God’s people have misused their responsibility, and that God is bringing the ragtag misfits and outcasts into the kingdom ahead of them. Not a message that’s likely to win him friends in high places. So today the attempt is around money. And it’s a good attempt. The Pharisees come together with the Herodians – a strange combination of groups, first of all, as the Herodians are supporters of the puppet Jewish government put in place by the Roman occupiers, and the Pharisees are purists who despise the Romans. But together they have a good question for Jesus: is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not? On the Pharisees’ side, you could say this is a real question – some Pharisees felt it was impure even to touch a Roman coin, emblazoned with the image of Caesar on it. Others certainly had qualms about paying tribute to a foreign pagan power. The Herodians, however, are in power because of those pagans. So if Jesus answers, no, it’s not lawful, he delights the Pharisees and other zealots in the crowd who want to throw off the Roman occupation – but the Herodians will go report him for treason. If he says yes, it is lawful, he’s supporting the pagan oppressors, and the crowds will hate him. You can feel the elders salivating, waiting for the answer. Jesus doesn’t seem to flinch. Hypocrites, he says. Bring me a coin. And they do. What are they doing carrying this coin? They usually claim not to want to touch it. Jesus, it seems, doesn’t carry those coins with him. But they bring one out anyway. Whose head is this, and whose title? Jesus asks. Well, obviously. It’s Caesar, the Roman emperor, the son of God, and the title says something like ‘Tiberius Caesar son of the divine Augustus, great high priest.’ So give what is due to Caesar, and give to God what is due to God, Jesus says. There they are, in the temple, confronting the son of God with a coin that bears the image of the so-called son of God, and they don’t seem to realize what they’re doing. This is a scripture passage about money. It’s one of many, many times Jesus engages the topic of money. As has often been noted, Jesus talks about and refers to money more often than any other topic, except for the Kingdom of God. 11 out of the 39 total parables Jesus tells in all of the gospels are about money. Strange then that we so recoil from talking about money in church. (And that many churches spend so much time talking about sexuality instead, something that Jesus said, hmm, nothing about.) But this is also about more than money. It is not, however, about the separation of church and state. Jesus was not upholding the American constitution in first century Palestine. We often want to read backward into the Bible, forgetting just how long ago and different that culture and time were. The idea of private morality vs. public citizenship is not one that culture would have espoused. But the larger point Jesus is making very much hits home with us, and with all people in all times and places. It is about who and what we worship, and where we place our allegiance. Do we worship God? Or do we worship other gods instead? That gospel is paired today with the story from Exodus, the conversation Moses has with God. God has told Moses that he will not continue on personally with the Israelites through the desert. Remember the story from last | 10/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
16 |
Accepting the invitation | RCL Year A, Proper 23 Just imagine what it would feel like, giving a big party and having no one show up. Maybe it’s even happened to you once or twice – I hope not. Sometimes church events are just about like that, of course! But we can imagine what it would feel like: humiliating; embarrassing; lonely; all those 7th grade fears made real. We hear of a situation like this in today’s gospel reading. But instead of identifying with the host of the party, it’s a little embarrassing to realize that we’re meant to identify with the callous folks who refuse to come. And to realize that the parable we heard is the story of how we are guilty of humiliating God in this way just about every day. The story is almost the same parable that is told in the gospel of Luke. There is a village feast – a lot of people are invited, and everyone in the village knows the preparation is happening. It’s like a save-the-date card is sent out. Then when all is ready, the invitation comes again: come to the feast. But those invited refuse to come, and give excuses for what they’re doing instead. So the host of the party goes out and invites everyone else in the village, determined to have a party. And all of those people come. All are invited, the good and the bad alike; some refuse to come, but the party happens anyway. It’s a wonderful vision of God’s inclusive kingdom. That’s the way Luke tells it. Matthew doesn’t leave it there, however. He adds two details: when the first guests refuse to come, the host of the party, a king in this version, sends his army and sacks their city. And then Matthew tacks on that last little twist, the one about the wedding guest who’s there without the right clothes on. It’s kind of a fly in the ointment to the grand inclusive vision, isn’t it? Y’all come, but you darn well better come, and come ready and dressed, or else. Yikes! In Jesus’ time the meaning of the parable of the feast would have been clear. God has come and invited Israel to the feast – the people of God, called throughout history to be a blessing, are now called to the banquet of his son the Messiah, Jesus. But Israel refuses to come. So God instead invites the nations, all the good and the bad of the Gentiles, pagans and Godfearers alike, and they come instead. By the time Matthew’s gospel was being put together, Jerusalem had been destroyed in 70 AD – in Matthew’s eyes, this is God’s judgment on Israel’s failure to respond to Jesus. But Matthew’s version doesn’t let everyone else off the hook either: the Gentiles have a responsibility as well – they too must respond to God’s invitation and be ready to be God’s people, or else. Well, today is meant to be a sermon on stewardship. I see a wonderful opportunity here before us with this parable. We are invited, urgently, to the feast. It is a royal banquet, lavish and generous. It’s spread out right in front of us. One form of the feast will be offered here next Saturday with sausages and lederhosen. Will we accept God’s invitation? Here’s a pledge card. You know what will happen if you don’t fill it out and return it. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s really look at this invitation. It is a lavish feast spread out before us. It’s God’s offering to us: all of creation in its goodness, the gift of life, the gift of loving relationship with one another. Stop for a moment and really think of it. We all have a long list of blessings to be thankful for, starting with being alive today. People to love and be loved by. Work to do. Sunshine and rain. We take all of this for granted far too often. Stop and think right now – I mean really do it – think of 5 things you are thankful for. …Was it easy? Or was it hard? Did you know that they’ve done brain scans on people who spent 30 minutes thinking of things they’re grateful | 10/9/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
17 |
Our gladness meets their hunger | This is the third in a series of three sermons on our vision for ECA RCL Year A, Proper 22 This is the third of our three weeks of vineyard parables. Each time the message has gotten sharper. From the expansive mercy of the first parable – the story of the laborers in the vineyard – we moved to the idea that we need to make the choice whether to go work or not – the parable of the two sons. Today, however, we’ve shifted to the imperative tense. Do the work that is there to be done, or else. Like I said last week, if we haven’t been feeling motivated up to now, today ought to do it. If we don’t take care of the vineyard the way we’re supposed to, it will be taken away from us and given to someone else. End of story. I feel a little bit like my son Benjamin does on Friday morning. Friday is garbage pickup day, and when you’re a 2-year old boy, that makes it a very exciting day indeed. The usual scramble of getting all of us out of the house takes on overwhelming levels of stress, because every 20 minutes or so, another large truck comes lumbering down the street. We have to drop everything we’re doing and race outside to look. Quick! Benji yells, lifting up his arms to be carried. Quick! And woe betide us if we don’t get him out there in time. His urgency is excruciating for all of us. Quick! I’m feeling. There’s work to be done! Let’s get out of here and do it! But first, let’s look at this parable. There are a number of characters in it. There’s the landowner, who does all the work at the beginning: plants the vineyard, builds the fence, digs the wine press, and builds the watchtower. There are the tenants, who are hired to come care for the vineyard. There are the slaves of the landowner, who are sent as messengers to the tenants. There is the son of the landowner, the final messenger. And then there are the ‘other tenants,’ the ones to whom the landowner will lease the vineyard to when the first tenants don’t do their job. In the middle of them all is the vineyard itself, with fruits ripe for the harvest. But those fruits never seem to get harvested. No one ever seems to enjoy them and make them into the wine they are intended for. Instead, every character pursues his or her own agenda, whether it be in conflict with the others or not. The landowner wants the produce of the harvest but needs others to do the work. The first set of tenants either don’t want to do the work or want to keep the produce for themselves. The slaves just do the bidding of the landowner, as does the son, and meet with terrible ends as a result. The new set of tenants – well, we don’t know yet what their agenda will be, but it is hoped that they will give the produce to the landowner, as originally intended. But in this mix of agendas, it’s not clear that the harvest ever does get collected – the purpose of the vineyard is lost. I’ve been talking these last two weeks about what I see as my vision for ECA. We come from a tradition from the Church of England where the church’s role is in part to serve the needs of its parish, the geographical area around the church. My vision is that ECA live into that model, and truly seek out what are the needs of the neighborhood around us. I’ve talked about who lives around us now, what I imagine their needs might be, and what I think some of our strengths are. I think it’s quite possible that the two intersect pretty well. But as I said last week, we don’t really know what the needs are around us until we ask. And we might need to explore further to really see what our strengths are – and what of those strengths we truly want and feel called to use. A well-known Christian writer named Frederick Buechner gives a wonderful definition of vocation. He writes that our vocation, that is, what God is calling us to do, is ‘where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger. | 10/2/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
18 |
Our strengths can meet the needs around us | Last week I talked in my sermon about my vision for ECA, that we can become a parish church. By that I mean that we would see ourselves as responsible for and connected to the welfare of the community around us, those who do not come to our church and those who do. I talked about our neighborhood and who the 2010 census figures tell us live around us, and raised a question for us all to consider. What can we do to serve those near us? How can we spread God’s mercy in our community? I hope you’ve been thinking about this this week. Today is the second part of my three sermons on what I think our vision could be here. I originally planned to start this series a week earlier, but the 10th anniversary of September 11 felt too important not to mention. Besides, the gospel for that day was about forgiveness, which paired so well with that anniversary. What I didn’t fully realize was that by shifting this series a week later, I would be preaching on the three weeks our gospel focuses on parables about working in the vineyard. It’s thrilling! I can’t think of a better metaphor for God to hand us than this one. (Although maybe an orchard would have been even cooler.) This is the second of three sermons on my vision for our community. RCL Year A, Proper 21 Last week we heard the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, the call God has to all to go and work and the greatness of God’s mercy for all who participate in it. Today we have another vineyard parable, this time about two sons and their choices around going to work. Next week we’ll hear a third parable about what God does to the people who are supposed to be caring for the vineyard but who aren’t doing their job. That one will give us the impetus to move, if we haven’t felt it already! But more on that next week. Today we still have a choice presented to us. Will you go and work in the vineyard? Yes, or no? Whether we go or not, this parable says, will be the sign of whether we have fully entered God’s kingdom or not. Jesus was pretty clear in what he said: the good intentions and pure living of the Pharisees and chief priests wasn’t enough to get them in if they refused to follow Jesus and his call to mission. Our good intentions and past records won’t help us either. People who live their lives in the kingdom of God live the ways of Jesus. It’s not so much about rewards in the afterlife. It’s about what our lives look like here and now. I talked last week about how good ECA is at the fundamentals, of loving, of welcoming, of growing in Christ. Those are the basics, and we know, you know, they’re the essential components of being a church of people who do Jesus’ work. I think I can list some other strengths this community has as well – strengths we all have together, even if not every one of us can claim every one of them. We have history. This church has a few folks who remember the founding of ECA in 1967, and many more who came along in the next 20 years or so. That kind of rootedness is a gift. The culture around us is increasingly transient. But collectively as a church culture, we know the history of the land here, what was here before all the houses, what will grow in the gardens. We know how to be in friendships that last decades and carry us through life changes and tragedies. We know how to maintain marriages that last 45 or 50 years or longer. We know how to raise children and love the children they have. We have educated people. By and large, everyone else in our neighborhood is well educated too. But the children around us aren’t yet. We have a lot of learning under our belts, in schooling, in work experience, and in life experience. Some of the guys at the men’s breakfast call themselves the repository of obsolete knowledge – yes, maybe with the constant change in technology we’re not up on every last thing, but most of you know and u | 9/25/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
19 |
Vision: ECA is a parish church | This is the first of three sermons on my vision for our community. RCL Year A, Proper 20 Here’s the history of this parish as I understand it. In the late ‘60s new housing developments were being built in this area, what used to be orchards. Companies were beginning to locate here and people needed housing. So young families moved into the area, with dads who worked for GE or Lockheed or IBM and kids who went to the new good schools in the area. The Episcopal Diocese of California said, we need a church out there. So the Rev. John Buenz and others planted this church, as a new ecumenical venture with a UCC congregation, and so it began. And for many years, ECA was a church of families, of people who worked in the tech industry and who wanted good schools and the comforts of suburban living. In other words, ECA reflected its neighborhood. It was built for the people who were here at the time, and it served the needs of those people well. Which is part of what a neighborhood parish church is all about. In our country, especially in the West, not that many people go to church. But for those who do, it’s the norm to shop around before picking which church to go to. Sometimes folks were raised in a particular denomination and they go looking for a church of that denomination when they move to a new area. Others may feel less denominational affiliation, and they look at a wide range of churches. But either way, people look for a church that suits them in some way, even if they drive past several other churches on their way there on Sunday morning. So churches are in the marketplace in a way, competing with other churches to attract folks to come to them. You can’t just sit there and expect people to come. This has led churches into all kinds of attempts to get people to come, from better signage to jazzier worship music to cooler Sunday Schools. Some of it has worked and some of it hasn’t. Underlying it all is the anxiety of the marketplace, the anxiety of scarcity. Somebody else is winning. Somebody else is getting the people. Why aren’t they coming here? What are we doing wrong? When I studied in England I saw a different model of church. There the Church of England is still the established church, and as such it is the default for people who want to go to church. Many do not go to church at all; some choose to go to another denomination, or to a Catholic church; increasingly, many are of another faith and worship elsewhere. But for most folks, church means the neighborhood Anglican church. And the churches see themselves as the church of the neighborhood. A parish is not a congregation of people who worship on Sunday; it’s the geographical boundaries of an area. St Michael’s in Summertown, Oxford, where I did my field placement, is a geographical location. People who live within the boundaries of the parish may or may not come to church there on a Sunday – most do not. But the church understands its role there to be the cure of all souls in its parish – old language that means it has responsibility for the welfare and well-being of people around it, whether they come to worship or not. And in times of crisis, people in the parish know they have the church to turn to – even if they rarely think of it on a Sunday morning, they go there when their mother has died, or when they are in financial desperation, or when they have nowhere else to turn. Churches still fret over Sunday attendance, and the overall health of the Church of England, but at some basic level, parishes do not exist to get people to church on Sunday. Their mission is more than that. It’s been nine months since I began with you at ECA. Since then I’ve gotten to know and love all of you and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the past, the present and the future of this congregation. One thing I have noticed is that there tends to be a lot of anxiety about the future, | 9/18/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
20 |
Forgiveness and 9/11 | RCL Year A, Proper 19 It’s a challenging day for preaching. It’s our fall kickoff day, the day we’re back to our usual service schedule, when Sunday School and youth group get started, when we commission teachers and think ahead for the new year. A happy see-your-friends-and-family kind of day. A day for a barbecue and party. And it’s also the 10th anniversary of September 11. The attacks already seem so long ago – and yet for some of us the feelings of horror and sadness and anger are still fresh. It’s a day when we remember again those terrible events. A stop-and-reflect day. I don’t know whether any of you were personally affected by the attacks on September 11. I have close friends who were, but I wasn’t there at the time. By the time we moved to New York in 2005 it was distant enough memory that the parish I was at decided to stop holding yearly commemorations of it. Ground Zero was more of a construction squabble than a place of tragedy. Even events as traumatic as 9/11 fade eventually, and it’s ok to let them go. But 10 years is a marker, enough so that many churches and civic organizations even here in the South Bay, far away from where the attacks happened, are offering services and commemorations. And there have been a lot of references in the media as this day has approached. So it’s up in our minds today no matter what. It is by pure happenstance, I suppose, that the gospel reading for this day is all about forgiveness – uncanny, said one commentator. Peter asks Jesus about forgiveness, and in answer, Jesus tells a parable. It’s one of the few parables that is crystal-clear in its meaning. A slave who owes his king an absurdly huge amount of money is forgiven his debt when the king takes pity on him. That same slave turns around and refuses to forgive the much smaller debt a fellow slave owes him. He’s thrown into prison and tortured for his hardheartedness. The message: We’re supposed to forgive. Just to make it extra crystal clear, it helps to know the amounts in question. The first slave owes his king 10,000 talents. A “talent” is a measure of weight, close to about 130 lbs., which could be used for gold and silver. In monetary terms the talent had to do with a weight of (most likely) silver, and was roughly equal to about 15 years worth of wages for the typical worker. 10,000 talents, then, is about 150,000 years worth of income. How on earth a slave could come to owe this much is not explained. Meanwhile, a denarius is a small silver coin that was roughly the daily wage for the typical worker. 100 denarii, then, is 100 days’ wages – still a significant debt, but one that’s more reasonable. One talent is equal to 5,475 denarii. So the comparison is, a debt of 100 denarii is not forgiven; a debt of 54,750,000 denarii is. The first slave would rather throw his fellow slave in jail than forgive him 100 coins; the king – or in the meaning of the parable, God – holds the slave’s life as more precious than 54,750,000 coins. The point is: We are forgiven so much – we must ourselves forgive also. Forgiveness was not in the air after the events of 9/11. There was a brief period of confusion and loss, and then very quickly the desire for revenge took over, with a lot of nationalistic patriotism and eagerness for military action. Suggestions of forgiveness and self-analysis were labeled unpatriotic, and the national argument got pretty bitter for a while. But again, that seemed to fade over time. When bin Laden was finally killed earlier this year, the response was subdued. Did we forgive? Or did we just kind of move on and lose interest? One of the most amazing stories of forgiveness happened after the period of apartheid in South Africa came to an end. The government formed a Truth & Reconciliation Commission as a way of healing the nation – providing a forum in which perpetrators could tell th | 9/10/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
21 |
The Labor Day Sabbath | RCL Year A, Proper 18 I spent most of last week backpacking with Jim in the Sierras, up near Sonora Pass. We got up at 4am Monday and drove up the road, stopping only to pick up our permit at the ranger station. We were on the trail by 10:30, and spent that day walking, finally stopping, exhausted, around 4:30 or 5:00 at a campsite some 10 miles up. The next day we were walking again by 8:30, and after 6 miles of trail, we headed cross country 5 miles up over a 10,000 foot saddle and then back down the loose scree on the other side to a lake, arriving exhausted at a campsite. The next morning we started off again at 9:00 and headed down a scrappy little trail going steeply downhill, planning to head out to our car some 14 miles away to escape the swarming mosquitoes that were driving us crazy. Sometime shortly after lunch, I lost it. Did I mention I had huge blisters on my feet from boot problems? Jim suggested we stop and camp and finish the next day like we’d originally planned. I resisted. We’re tough. I’m tough. I can do long days. This is nothing. Go, go, go. IF we stop now, at only 2pm, what will we do with the afternoon? But then I wondered: what would it be like to take it easy in the outdoors? Other people do it. They call it ‘layover days.’ I’ve never taken a layover day. What do you do out there? Do you pack in a book? Just sit and stare at the view? Slap mosquitoes? There was a time a few years ago when I was reading something about running, and how people who run are often Type A. I said to Jim, ‘That’s funny, I run, and I’m not really Type A. Well, maybe a little bit. What do you think?’ Jim just started laughing. ‘Of course you’re Type A!’ he said. I was shocked. I come by it honestly. My mom is one who was always controlled by things to be done. If I sat and read a book, she would be sure to walk by and say something about ‘shouldn’t you be getting your homework done/cleaning your room/doing your chores first?’ as she carried another load of laundry downstairs. For her, leisure and rest were things you had after everything on your list was crossed off. And everyone else had to wait too – if we were all ready to leave for a family day out and she hadn’t yet unloaded the dishwasher, then everyone had to wait till she unloaded the dishwasher. Because who else was going to do it? she would say. So there I was, Type A Takes on the Wilderness. This is not the way I want to be. I used to be more contemplative. I used to love sitting and doing nothing and staring at the view in silence. Somewhere along the way I’ve lost this. Not to blame everything on my kids, but I think parenting has been a part of it. Every day is a long list of chores and tasks, from the moment we get up till the moment we fall into bed at the end of the day. It takes a lot of work to push small children through the day and do our own work as well. And then we go backpacking and it’s the same – get the stuff packed into the pack, hoist it on, walk walk walk, pick a campsite, set up the tent, filter the water, cook the dinner, fall into bed exhausted. I’m telling this on myself, but I bet some of you know what I’m talking about. This is our way now. Go, go, go. For those of you who are retired, you may have happily escaped this – but I’ve heard from more than one retired person that they feel busier than they did when they were working. For those of you working, or with kids still at home, you’re stuck in it. There’s a long list of stuff to be done, and you’re the one who has to do it. There’s no time to stop. Keep going, because you’ve got to get all the way to the end. This weekend is Labor Day weekend – traditionally the last bit of leisure before kicking back into high gear for the fall. There’s a pro-union bumper sticker that says: Support Labor – the folks who brought you the | 9/3/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
22 |
Deny yourself, and love | RCL Year A, Proper 21 Matthew 16:21-28 Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” So you might recall that in last week’s gospel reading, Peter got it right. Jesus asked his disciples what people were saying about him, and then he asked them, who do you say that I am? Peter answered right off the bat, You’re the Messiah, the Son of the living God! And Jesus said, Yes! You get it! Blessed are you, Peter – the whole community of God’s people will be built on the faith you profess. But this week, everything changes. It’s only one paragraph later in Matthew’s gospel, but this week, Peter gets it wrong. Jesus says, I will suffer and be killed, and then be raised. And Peter immediately says, God forbid it! The Messiah can’t be killed! And Jesus answers, No – you don’t get it. You’re a stumbling block to others, Peter, someone who guides people wrong in their faith. Get out of the way. You need to go the way I’m going – not your own way. That’s the thing about Jesus. We might think we understand who he is, and who God is. But it’s hard for us to get what being God’s people really means. It’s not just about giving the right answer and knowing the correct things to say about God and Jesus. It’s not just about doing the right thing and following the rules most of the time. It’s about giving ourselves up completely to following Jesus. Which implies a certain – let’s say total – lack of control. In today’s gospel, Jesus outlines what it’s like to be his followers. You follow me by denying yourself and by taking up your cross. You follow me by losing your life. Which is not the same as saying, go find something to crucify yourself on: after all, Jesus didn’t set out to die on a cross – he lived in a way that the cross is what happened to him. He lived for others, and in so doing, he died, and was raised. As one commentary put it, crosses will always be provided for the one who follows Jesus. You don’t have to go looking for it. Live for others and not for yourself, and you will lose something along the way. Parts of your self – the parts that are not your true God-given self, the parts that you and the world around you made up and said were important – those parts will die. And in the process, you will find new life, as your true self, grounded in God. It can all get a little abstract, since to really make it concrete it has to be lived out in each one of our lives. And in each one of our lives it looks a little different to deny ourselves and let go. But the Romans reading we had today describes what it looks like when a community lives this way. The verbs Paul uses are all in the plural form, meaning that he’s telling the whole church community how to be: Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor…be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. | 8/28/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
23 |
Are you welcome? or not? | Many months ago in Lent, I challenged everyone in our congregation to each think of one way we could welcome new people to ECA. I said that in Easter season, we would bring our ideas together. And then Easter season came and went, and I never followed up on it. I couldn’t figure out the right form for gathering the ideas in, and other things took up my time instead. It’s a measure of how little it captured your attention that no one asked me about it, either! But welcoming new people is a large part of our task as a community – and a large focus for many of you as you have talked to me about your hopes and dreams for this church. As the fall begins, I’ll be talking more about ideas for how we can put our welcome into practice. But today we have this golden opportunity of a gospel reading before us, a story that has a lot to say about welcome. So I want to take some time today to delve a little bit into what welcoming is really about. Jesus and the disciples are on a trip to Tyre and Sidon, regions along the coastline of Palestine that were largely Gentile, not Jewish. While they are there, a Canaanite woman accosts Jesus, asking for healing for her daughter. She’s a Gentile, not one of the people of Israel, a Palestinian Arab in today’s terms. But she comes to Jesus and asks him for help, calling out to him, Lord, have mercy – Son of David, have mercy. A non-Jew in a non-Jewish land, and yet she calls out to Jesus by his Jewish title, and seems to have faith that he can help her. The disciples, however, have other ideas. They want to send her away. She’s not one of them and she has nothing to do with them, and they don’t want her hanging around and shouting after them. And Jesus, at first, seems to agree with them. Without turning to her, he says, I’m here for the lost sheep of Israel. I’m not here for you. She kneels before him and pleads with him. Still he seems to resist, saying, It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs. The children are the people of Israel – you Canaanites are dogs. The woman won’t back down. Even the dogs get the crumbs, she says. And then suddenly Jesus relents, praising her for her great faith and healing her daughter instantly. Well. There’s a problem here, in case you didn’t notice. We’re used to the idea of the disciples not understanding what Jesus is about, of them shoving people aside and rudely barring their way to the Savior. They do this with children and families, they do this with the hungry thousands, they do this with people who are trying to act in Jesus’ name and anoint Jesus’ feet without joining their group. But in every one of those cases Jesus rebukes the disciples and welcomes the ones trying to come to him. In this story, he doesn’t. He refuses to engage with the woman. He calls her a dog. Until finally she persuades him, and then he embraces her completely. Does Jesus not realize himself who he’s come for? Has he himself misunderstood his vocation up to this point? Or does he do this all as show, a way of teaching the disciples around him that his mission extends beyond the people of Israel? I think that how you interpret this has to do with what you believe about Jesus. If you see more of his human side, it makes sense that he too would have to learn what he’s here for, that he might have his mind changed by this woman. Born into the culture of a 1st century Palestinian Jew, he might not have realized that Gentiles could be part of God’s dream as well. On the other hand, if you believe Jesus is completely in touch with his divinity from the very start, that explanation is problematic – he must already be intending to welcome this woman, and this exchange with her is simply a teaching tool for his listeners. We don’t really know. There’s a long narrative in scripture about who is and who is not part of God’s people – | 8/14/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
24 |
What’s God like? | Matthew 14:22-33 Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.” Well, this is certainly an exciting story: a storm at sea – Jesus walks on the water – Peter tries to and fails. In thinking about this text, I read a great commentary this week about this gospel story. It pointed out that many times when we hear this reading the message we take from it is that we should have more faith. Peter steps out on the water at Jesus’ invitation, but then he gets scared, loses his faith, and starts to drown. Jesus says, how come you have such little faith? And so the moral is, have more faith. And if you don’t, or if you have problems mustering that feeling of confidence, then…try harder, and have more faith. And so off we go, feeling like a failure again. The good news of the gospel. But, the commentary pointed out, that’s not the only way to interpret this story. Jesus doesn’t stand there on the waves watching Peter drown, saying, you should have had more faith. He reaches out and catches Peter. Jesus does for Peter what Peter can’t do for himself. It’s a very different way of reading the message. Instead of being about us, just maybe this gospel is about God. The Christian faith believes that Jesus is the full revelation of God to humanity. What is true about Jesus is also true about God. And so stories about Jesus are stories about God. And there’s actually something pretty wonderful being said about God’s nature with us in this story. Jesus has just fed the crowds with the five loaves and two fish – the story we heard last week, and a story that itself seems pretty key to who Jesus is and what he is revealing about God. The message there is, God feeds us, and there is always more than enough. That crowd, you might recall, came and found Jesus at a time when he was trying to be alone. He had just heard the news of John the Baptist’s death, and had gone away to a deserted place – to grieve, maybe, to deal with his own fears for what fate he might meet, maybe – but everyone had followed him and crowded around him anyway. Instead of sending them away, Jesus had taught them and fed them. And now he’s gone off by himself again, sending the disciples off in a boat and going to pray alone. The disciples have met with some trouble, however, with a storm rising and waves battering the boat, so Jesus comes to them – to be with them in their trouble, perhaps, to save them from the storm, perhaps. The disciples are scared when they see him on the water, so Jesus immediately tells them, don’t be afraid, it’s me. His first response is to calm them and comfort them, even while doing something completely freaky right in front of them. And Peter’s question to Jesus shows that Peter knows something about him already: If it is you, command me to walk on the | 8/7/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
25 |
What’s the Eucharist about? | Note: This sermon is from the second of a two-week instructed Eucharist. I said last week that we share communion together every Sunday, obeying Jesus’ commandments in the Last Supper: do this in remembrance of me. That was the practice of the early church and it is still the practice of most liturgical churches today. There was a time when in the Episcopal Church it was not the custom to do communion every week, when we were more like our UCC brethren in only having it once a month. It was seen as too special, too complicated, too time-consuming, etc. – for a wide range of reasons many Episcopal churches did a choral Morning Prayer on Sundays most weeks, and saved the Eucharist for special times. But the liturgical renewal of the 1960s and 1970s, the era that gave us our current BCP, brought back the Eucharist as the most important thing, the main thing, the main reason we gather. So I guess we’d better talk about why it’s so important. It’s important because the early church did it, and it connects us with a long line of tradition. It’s a powerful experience of taking God into our very beings. It puts us in mind again and again of Jesus’ love and sacrifice for us. All of that – and more besides. What happens in the Eucharist is like what happens in the feeding of the 5000 that we heard about today. There are four main actions Jesus does in feeding the crowds (after he tells them what posture is appropriate: in this case, sit): Jesus takes the bread and the fish, he gives thanks and blesses it, he breaks it, and he shares it. It’s the same sequence in the Eucharist: the priest takes the bread and the wine – in some churches these are brought forward from the congregation as an offering, but here we simply set the table with what we have. Then the priest offers the Eucharistic prayer, which is a prayer of thanksgiving, called the Great Thanksgiving in fact (the word Eucharist simply means thanksgiving). In the prayer we thank God for all God does for us and we ask God’s blessing on the bread and wine and on us. Then the priest breaks the bread, remembering Christ’s body broken on the cross. And then we all share the food. Here I need to talk a little bit about sacraments. The official church definition of sacrament is an outward and physical sign of an inward and spiritual grace. As such, the physical experience is basically a pointer toward the spiritual experience. And for many reasons, much of what we do physically has been scaled down a lot in church practice: the most obvious example is that most churches don’t baptize with full immersion into water, but with a little sprinkle of water on the head – even though it began with stepping into the River Jordan, it’s become just a few drops of water. For logistical and practical reasons, as well as the comfort level of many people, things have changed from the way the early church did them. But the fact remains that we are incarnate people, here in our physical bodies. What we do physically does have connection to what we experience spiritually. And some of the ways church practice has lessened the physical experience have also lessened the spiritual experience. Eucharist is one of those places where sometimes the ritual part gets in the way. It’s a ritual meal – but sometimes it can get so ritual that we fail to make any connection between it and an actual meal. Wafers don’t seem much like bread, and a tiny taste of wine from a dipped wafer isn’t much like enjoying a glass. We can get a little magical thinking about the whole experience, as if the little wafer has mystical powers beyond its small size and cardboard taste. And yes, sometimes it does have such power – sometimes despite how small our physical experience is, we can have an overwhelming spiritual experience. But sometimes it takes extra effort to get there. In my last congregation we experimented with some s | 7/31/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
26 |
Why we worship | The following is the first part of a two-week series on worship, part of two instructed Eucharist services at ECA. Why do we worship? Sunday: day of resurrection – 1st day of the week, after the Sabbath (Saturday) Come together to share the Lord’s Supper – because Jesus told us to Being Christian is a community thing – you can’t be a Christian all by yourself at home We show up to nourish ourselves for ministry; we show up for other people The idea is that we pray all the time; we have prayer practices of our own; this day is for public worship together, which is different than private prayer (This may or may not be true, but it is the ideal of public worship! The reality is many find little quiet time elsewhere, or take the time to pray, and so depend on the church service to do it all for them. It can’t.) Elements of our service: Gathering Hearing & reflecting on scripture Responding with affirming our faith, prayer Sharing the bread & wine Sending us out to do our ministry in the world That’s the basics. Everything else is frosting and tradition. Our worship tradition mirrors what we know of the early church, with customs and practices layered on from the church in Europe and particularly in England. It looks kind of like the liturgical materials we have from the early church – we have a Eucharistic prayer from the 3rd century, and it’s like ours – and it looks kind of like what other liturgical churches do (Roman Catholics, Lutherans, etc.). And it has taken on elements and customs of this particular community of ECA and its history as well. But one good principle of worship is that if we don’t know why we’re doing what we’re doing, then we shouldn’t do it. So here we go, learning. And as we learn, we‘ll find that there are a few things we do need to let go of. As well as things we should embrace! Worship should energize and inspire us. To do this, there are a number of things to hold in balance: It should be familiar enough that we aren’t constantly wondering what’s coming next, and different and fresh enough that we come away with new understandings of God in the world, and so we don’t settle into a meaningless rut. So we have a set liturgical form, but it changes by season, with different prayers and words, different music, to reflect the theme of the liturgical season: penitential for Lent, joyful for Eastertide, growing and learning in the season after Pentecost, waiting and preparing in Advent, and joyful again in Christmas. There should be time for quiet and contemplation balanced with joyful praise and song. It’s public worship, yes, but that means also being quiet together. Some of the most astounding worship I’ve experienced happened at Taizé in France: a church with 5000 people sitting on the floor, sitting in silence for 10 minutes together before breaking into chant and song. It made me realize how wordy our worship usually is, and how powerful it is with few words. We need to recapture some of that quiet together in our worship – one way I’d suggest is that we refrain from chatting during the time before the service begins, or during the offertory music. We also might incorporate periods of actual silence from time to time. And we’re hoping that with our new music director, our music, and particularly our singing as a congregation, can start getting a little more joyful and robust. Learning should be balanced with worshiping. We’ve started using the word formation in the church instead of education, realizing that everything we do in church is forming us as Christians. Not just classes and Bible study, but worship and song and fellowship and service, all form us and shape us, shape our faith and how we show our faith to others. We all have things to learn – we listen to scriptures we might not be familiar with every week, and the sermon should help us understand them better – as well as how we can live out those | 7/24/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
27 |
RCL Year A, Proper 11 | So it’s summertime, the gardens are growing, and we’ve got a string of parables in our Sunday gospels that are all about soil and seed and crops. The metaphor works well for the spiritual life, doesn’t it – things take time to ripen and grow in our lives and in our hearts, seeds sown in what someone once said or some book we read bear fruit later in unexpected ways, things are often happening and shifting in us without our even realizing it, just like seeds grow in the ground without our seeing it. It was an apt set of symbols for the farming folk Jesus was preaching to, but it suits us pretty well too, even as far away as most of us are from growing our own food. It helps some that our culture has started shifting back towards knowing where our food comes from – we’re a little more aware of the world of planting and growing than we used to be. The parable we just heard, the parable of the wheat and the tares, is a little like the one we heard last week, the Parable of the Sower. It’s intended to answer one nagging question faced by the community of Jesus’ followers then and now: If Jesus is the Messiah, and his message is good news for all, then why isn’t everyone on board with it? Why are there some who refuse to join this movement? Last week’s parable gave the answer that it all depends on our human nature, that just as not all soil is good for growing, not everyone is ready to take in the gospel and let it bear fruit in them. That we can understand. But this week’s parable has a slightly different tack: the implication of the parable of the wheat and the tares is that those who are not part of the Jesus movement are bad seeds, bad from the very beginning. Bad seeds can’t turn into good ones and weeds can’t turn into wheat. So there’s nothing we can do about it until God comes and sorts it all out. You can see where John Calvin got some of his ideas about predestination – the idea that God has chosen only some of humankind for salvation by pure grace. (It’s not an idea that was only Calvin’s, but he’s the biggest name behind it all.) The problems with that bit of doctrine, and that interpretation of this parable, are sort of hard to miss. There are two obvious temptations: one is to say that well, if evil is simply bad seed sowed by the devil, then there’s not much we can do about it, and we might as well live with it. No reason to bother making the world a better place or work on making ourselves better people. That’s all God’s work, not ours, and nothing we do can make anything different. When this life is all over, I’ll fly away, and then things will be better. The other temptation is a little nastier. There are children of the kingdom and there are children of the evil one, and we’re pretty sure we know which is which. The bad seed people are obvious. They’re the ones we disagree with, of course. They’re the ones who cause the problems and commit the crimes. They’re the ones who don’t pull their weight in society or in our community. They’re the ones who took my parking place. Whoever they are, we’re pretty sure we can spot them. Because of course, we must be the good seeds, not them. So them, we can go ahead and judge ourselves, because they’re so clearly not us. Here’s a little explanation of Jesus’ image, things that would have been clear to his listeners but that have gotten lost for us in the translation. The weeds in the parable are actually a specific plant, what is called darnel, or false wheat. It’s a plant that looks very much like wheat, and if it were sown among real wheat, the roots underground would be all tangled up together with the wheat. It would be hard to distinguish it from the wheat, and harder still to pull it up without disturbing the wheat. At the harvest, however, darnel looks different than real wheat – real wheat’s head grows heavy and droops, while darnel kee | 7/17/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
28 |
RCL Year A, Proper 9 | ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.’ Doesn’t some part of you just go ‘ahhhh’ when you hear those words? I know I do. I’m always longing for rest, I’m always wishing I could sleep in or take a nap or just lie around. It’s never possible with small children, of course, something I didn’t fully understand before I became a parent. There’s lots of ways they trick you into it. But I suspect it’s not just me that longs for rest of one kind or another, even on this long holiday weekend in summer. Which one of us couldn’t use more rest, wouldn’t rather lay down some burden or another that we have been carrying? Burdens of all kinds, in our relationships, in our to-do lists, in our hearts. Not to mention in our daily schedules. We all know how it is. All of the great labor-saving devices of the last century, heralded as the technology that would bring us all leisure time, somehow only made us busier. The dishwasher was supposed to change our lives – remember the advertisements with the smiling happy housewife? Why do we still fall for this with the latest gadget from Apple? Instead of ending up with more open time, our life has only gotten more fast-paced – we’ve filled in the gaps. We may spend less time shuffling paper and writing longhand, but we spend even more time in emails and online. Even our children have too much scheduling in their lives now, busy going from lessons to practice to lessons again, rarely getting the chance to just play outdoors. ‘Family time’ or ‘date night’ becomes something we have to schedule on the calendar in advance, or it doesn’t happen at all. Coming to church on a Sunday becomes one more morning we have to get up early – unless a sports tournament or other commitments call us elsewhere, of course. Prayer becomes something we mutter quickly on our way out the door, if at all. We are all overscheduled, overhurried, too busy to get to know our neighbors, just too busy all around. We need rest. And yet there are reasons for all of this busyness. We’re trying to do a good job at the work we do, and so we spend long hours at it. We’re trying to stay involved in the life of our communities – and church – and that means meetings and volunteer hours on the calendar. We’re trying to give our kids good educations, forming them as well-rounded people, and that means lots of activities on their calendars as well. Somehow all of these good intentions result in us feeling fatigued and stretched too thin. What should have been a good idea just is not good for us in the end. This experience of good intentions going awry is one the apostle Paul was familiar with – the reading from Romans today expresses his frustration with himself. He writes, ‘I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.’ Trying to live a life of devotion to God, following the law as a good Jew, Paul finds nevertheless that his whole effort gets warped. The authentic relationship he seeks with God gets perverted into something else, and right where he sought to find life and energy, he finds only fatigue and death. We all know what it’s like to try to do what is right when the temptation to do otherwise is so alluring. But Paul goes beyond even that, saying that the power of sin is so great that it can take our best intentions, our greatest efforts to find life and truth, and turn them against us. Sin for Paul is a power unto itself, leading us away from God, and it uses any means possible to do so. I’m reminded of an image from the Harry Potter books, the moving staircases at Hogwarts School: even as you climb up them towards one place, they move and redirect you towards another. And there you suddenly are in the place you didn’t want to get to at all. Paul is talking about something like that: You wanted to find rest, | 7/3/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
29 |
RCL Year A, Proper 8 | With the summer solstice this last week, I think we can officially say that summer has begun. Happy summer! Among other things, summer is a time of both traveling and welcoming travelers to our homes, time when the guest room gets used more often. As many of you know, I’ve just been traveling, staying in three different homes (and one tent) over the last two weeks. There is nothing quite like the gift of arriving late after long travel to a home where you are offered a glass of cool water or a cup of tea, a meal, a comfortable bed, a front door key and the freedom to come and go. Hospitality done well is good for the body, giving us the rest and the nourishment we need, but it is even more so good for the soul – allaying our anxieties about being in a strange place, about imposing on others, about doing the right thing. It is a wonderful thing when practiced well. Genuine hospitality builds relationships and friendships and smoothes social connections. But it can also be a spiritual discipline. During Lent I offered a series of adult forums on spiritual disciplines, and we talked about hospitality as one of them. I asked those in the group to share examples of giving or receiving hospitality. People had wonderful stories of traveling in foreign countries or cities and being welcomed by strangers, of large Thanksgiving dinners with everyone invited, of visiting churches and being greeted with genuine welcome. Opening our home or our dinner table to another is a way of allowing others into our lives. Come in, we say – make yourself at home here. And the idea of hospitality can extend beyond our homes: opening our hearts and souls to God is hospitality too, allowing God to come in and make himself at home. And we can receive that hospitality from God as well, making our home in God, trusting the welcome that is there. There’s a vulnerability in all of this, a willingness to give and to receive without worrying about the balance sheet. It’s not a bargaining move – I’ll trade you this for that – but simply a gift. Which is perhaps why it is so hard to do sometimes. You have to go out of your way to be hospitable. You have to drop what you’re doing and your plans for things and provide for the other. And you have to do the same as a guest, allowing the rules of the house you stay in to be the rules you live by. In order to practice genuine hospitality, you have to let go a little. And when that hospitality extends to God, you sometimes have to let go a lot. Jesus talks about hospitality in that bit of the gospel we heard, telling us to welcome others in his name. His was a culture where hospitality mattered a great deal – social life revolved around giving and receiving hospitality, a remnant from the desert days when hospitality meant survival in a harsh, tribal land. But hospitality wasn’t simply an exchange between individuals. When you welcomed someone into your home, you welcomed the group they belonged to as well. You welcomed them in the name of that larger family or tribe they were a part of, honoring that whole group by honoring the one. And your welcoming symbolized the welcoming given by your whole tribe. And likewise, the way your guests received your hospitality symbolized their tribe’s graciousness to yours. So Jesus was saying, whoever welcomes these little ones – his followers and disciples, perhaps especially those new to the faith – in the name of Jesus, were honoring Jesus himself. And to the little ones – the followers of Jesus, which includes us, those new to the faith and those more seasoned – Jesus is saying, be good guests – receive what you are given. It is given in my name. Now hold onto that thought for a moment, because now we have to talk about that Genesis reading. The story of Abraham and Isaac, the sacrifice of Isaac, isn’t a story we can just let float by. I always shudder a little inside when someo | 6/26/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
30 |
RCL Year A, Trinity Sunday | Icon of the Martyrs painted by Awer Bul Today we celebrate the feast of the Martyrs of Sudan whose icon is before us. You are closely connected with these martyrs because most of the children which you sponsor through the Sudanese Youth Opportunity fund are the children and grandchildren of the martyrs. In the first letter of Peter we hear, The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner…once your were not a people, but now you are God’s people; (I Peter 2) In many ways this phrase describes the reality of the Church of Sudan. When European missionaries came to Sudan in the mid-1800s they came as appendages to imperial economic interests, primarily of Italy and England. In 1899 Egypt formed a condominium with Great Brittan in order to jointly rule this vast territory. The Arab-Egyptian interest of course was driven by Muslims imperialism whose mission since the 7th century had been Islamization of all of Africa. The Kingdom of Nubia, located in what is now Sudan, had become Christian in the 4th century, had eighteen dioceses, and survived waves of attacks by Arab Muslims begun in 642. Their Christian kingdom finally collapsed in the 15th century. The Christian missionaries, including our own Anglican missionaries from Scotland, carried all of the European prejudices against people of color. In their eyes the native population of south Sudan was inferior, culturally, not possessing the intellectual capacity to be educated beyond being servants and field hands. Certainly they were not capable of self-governance. The “White man’s burden” was in full play. These imperial representatives looked to the politically connected Arabs of Northern Sudan as having the intellectual capacity and sophistication to benefit from formal learning and the developmental skills of self- governance. Consequently, in the nearly sixty years of Anglo-Egyptian rule the North saw the flourishing of schools and universities, of medical institutes and the establishment of western forms of government and commerce. The South was marked by neglect. A handful of schools could be found by the 1940s with only one high school for a region larger than Texas…all the schools were for boys. There were several regional hospitals but virtually no roads – only river travel on the White and Blue Niles and their tributaries. Hundreds of villages, scattered for hundreds of miles, did not benefit from most of these resources. The inheritors of Anglo-Egyptian rule, the Government of Sudan in Khartoum, continued this prejudice. Virtually no schools were built in the majority of areas after 1956 when Sudan won its independence. Where schools did exist only Muslim could attend. In the context of Sudan, the stone that was rejected were the southern tribes. The rejecters were the Muslim Arab and Christian European. Remember what I said about the imperial perceptions that these people were not capable of self-governance? Last February 98.5% of all registered voters in South Sudan and over a half million living in the Diaspora, or in exiled – including in the US – voted in the Referendum with 99% overwhelmingly choosing to create a new nation. Our own highly “sophisticate” country has never gotten close to that record of turning out to vote. A rejected people is the context in which the Church of Sudan was born in 1906. Today, against great odds, it is among the fastest growing parts of the Anglican Communion. At the heart of their faith is the knowledge that they, the stone which the Arab and European builders rejected, has, in fact become the very head of the cornerstone: the pivotal element of a new building – a new society and a new Church. The words of First Letter of Peter resonate within them: Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people. In 2006 I was invited by the Church of Sudan to join in the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Episcopal C | 6/19/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
31 |
RCL Year A, Pentecost | [Sermon by Melanie Weiner] | 6/12/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
32 |
RCL Year A, 7 Easter | You might have heard of a series of novels called the Left Behind series, dealing with what happens in the world after the rapture takes the few away, leaving the rest behind. You could say that the Sunday after the Ascension, the day in the church year we’re on now, is the Left Behind Sunday – Jesus has been taken up into heaven, the Holy Spirit won’t be here till Pentecost, and in the meantime, we’re left behind. No, that’s not really true of where we are – but it seems to play out that way in the story, at least. So it seems like the logical question in the story is, what now? There’s this long prayer towards the end of John’s gospel, the last words from Jesus before his arrest and crucifixion. John means for us to hear in this prayer a kind of summing-up of Jesus, everything he was here to show and say spoken aloud in prayer for his followers. What we just heard in the gospel reading was part of that, and Jesus prays specifically for his followers – his disciples, and all those who would be his followers in time to come, which includes us – that God might protect them, us, so that we may be one, as God and Jesus are one. It’s a prayer we still need. This line from scripture has spawned all kinds of activity in the church throughout the ages. Elizabeth I brought an end to the bloody fighting between Catholics and Protestants in England by insisting on unity in worship and tolerance in other areas – people can believe what they like, she said, that is none of my business – I do not wish to have a window onto their souls – but we will worship according to one rite, and so be in unity. Richard Hooker, a theologian of the early English church, continued the theme by arguing that there were things essential and things inessential to the faith, and that tolerance of differences in things inessential – like church structure and minor doctrinal matters – would preserve unity in the important things. The ecumenical movement in modern times, especially the last half-century or so, sought to find the ways that different Christian denominations could agree and unite, setting aside historical arguments over differences. And the plea for unity has been a lively part of the debate in the Anglican Communion over the last decade, as those worried over the increasing conflicts of culture have begged that no churches make any moves that will compromise our unity. Of course, what all this activity is really about is the fact that despite Jesus’ fervent prayer for us, Christians have not done a terrifically good job of being one as God and Jesus are one. Before the canonical scriptures were even finished, while John’s gospel itself was being written, Christians were already arguing with one another in councils and letters about who was a real follower of Jesus and what Jesus really meant. And so it has gone, through the centuries. I rather wonder that Jesus hasn’t given up on us yet. When I was preparing for our conflict and reconciliation gathering this last week, I was looking at liturgies and rituals for forgiveness. I came across a blog that described the Russian Orthodox practice that begins their season of Lent. At the end of a penitential vespers service, with many prayers and scriptures stressing our own sinfulness and need for God’s forgiveness, the Orthodox do this amazing thing. Everyone stands in a circle, and beginning with the priest, each person turns to another person there individually, and asks their forgiveness. Each person in turn offers forgiveness to the other, and then the two embrace. Each then turns to another person and repeats the process. With a good-sized congregation, this can take an hour or more to do. At the end of it, every person has both asked for and received forgiveness from every other person present, and every person has embraced every other person present. (I thought of doing this on Wednesday night, but we all seemed a li | 6/5/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
33 |
RCL Year A, 6 Easter | One of the first churches I worked in after I was ordained was a church in Berkeley, St Clement’s. While I was in seminary in Berkeley, we had known of it as ‘that weird church that only uses the 1928 prayer book and doesn’t like women clergy.’ But we hadn’t quite had the full picture, and besides, things had shifted – so the rector hired me as the first woman priest for that congregation. I was amazed that I had the chance to be ‘the first’ so long after women’s ordination became the norm. And mostly the novelty went over with little comment from the congregation, which showed that they had been pretty ready for this change. There were a few, however, who were still opposed to women’s ordination, and who let it be known that my coming did not change that. If I presided at the Eucharist, they would not come up for communion; if my male rector presided, they would. But I tried to consider them my parishioners like all the others, chatting with them at coffee hour and the like. After I’d been there a few years, one day when I had celebrated the Eucharist, one of the men quietly slipped up to the communion rail and stretched out his hands. I gave him the bread and moved on down the rail. I didn’t mention it and neither did he, but from then on, he took communion from me. It does seem to be that when someone gets to know another person, they’re less inclined to exclude them – that is, when people are against a category of people, like women priests or gays, and then they get to know a person in that category, they tend to change their mind. Not always, but usually. Because it’s different when you know somebody. It’s harder to keep your prejudices. Jesus told his friends, I will send you another Advocate, the Spirit of truth. The world can’t receive the Spirit of truth, because it doesn’t see or know this Spirit. But you, my friends, can, because you know me, and the Spirit of truth is already in you. In other words, Jesus’ disciples had spent time with him. They knew him. They didn’t always understand him and what he was about, but they were in relationship with him. And in that relationship, they could receive the truth of him – they could begin to hear what he was there to say, and know God in him, hearing God’s voice through him. But without that kind of relationship, hearing is hard to do; it’s hard to trust what a stranger is up to. Sometimes we forget that. Our cultural climate now is pretty loaded against getting to know and listening to people we don’t agree with. There was a time when people tended to live more or less where they were brought up, so that the kids you disliked in school were still around as adults that you had to interact with. If you went to church, you just went to your neighborhood church, and consorted with whoever came. You sent your kids to the neighborhood school, where they learned to be with different kinds of people that they would have to know all their lives. You read the town’s newspaper, with articles and opinions on a range of topics, and so you heard about different things. Of course, unless you lived in the urban centers, you usually lived in places surrounded by people of the same color and class, people who were likeminded in some way, and you didn’t let your Protestant daughter date a Catholic. But there were ways built into society that you had to come up against people and ideas that were different than you, and you had to think about them and relate to them, like it or not. We have the luxury of avoiding that more now. We don’t have to get the newspaper for our news – we can go online and look at particular websites, or listen to particular radio stations, that accord with our political views. We can go church-shopping for the place that suits us just right, and put our kids in exactly the right school with the right kind of people. We can move around to different ci | 5/29/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
34 |
RCL Year A, Easter | Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! All around the world people are greeting each other with these words – particularly our Orthodox brothers and sisters, who this year are celebrating Easter on the same day as we are. Khristos anesti! Alithos anesti! It replaces Hello, how are you? for a few days in some countries. A great way to remind ourselves in everyday ordinary moments that things have changed – that something has happened. Because we need reminding. We just heard the story of two women, Mary Magdalene and ‘the other Mary.’ They were the some of the same women who stayed at the cross when Jesus was crucified. And now they’ve come to the tomb. They were at the cross; the disciples, you remember, weren’t there at the cross – they had fled in fear. And now the disciples aren’t there at the tomb. They’re somewhere else, disillusioned and afraid. But here come the women, at dawn. And there’s an earthquake and the stone rolls away and an angel appears, and the guards at the tomb faint. But not the women. They listen to the angel, who says to them, Don’t be afraid! Jesus is risen. Come and see the tomb. And then go and tell his disciples to get to Galilee, where he’s meeting them. The guards are still lying there unconscious and comatose, but the women run to do as the angel tells them. And on their way, they meet Jesus, risen just like the angel said. And he tells them the same thing, Don’t be afraid – go tell my brothers to meet me in Galilee. And off they go. Here’s one thing that’s amazing about Easter in church. Even though most of the year when we read stories from the gospels we hear about a lot of guys – Jesus and his disciples, Pharisees and scribes, tax collectors and paralytics, nearly every character is male – on Easter morning, the focus suddenly swings over to the women. In every story of the empty tomb in the four gospels, women take center stage – even when, like in Matthew’s gospel, we’ve only heard these women mentioned as a kind of afterthought: in his story of the crucifixion, Matthew says, ‘Many women were also there…they had followed Jesus from Galilee and had provided for him.’ No mention of why we hadn’t we heard about them in the preceding 26 chapters. At any rate, even though the stories about what happens at the tomb differ in each of the four gospels, all four accounts agree that women were the first ones there, and the first ones to see that it is empty. But women weren’t legally able to be witnesses – they wouldn’t be believed. They weren’t fully their own people. Any status they had came from the men they were attached to – the wife of so-and-so, the daughter of so-and-so. But these two women in our story today are just named Mary, one of them from Magdala, and the other one from somewhere else – not apparently attached to any man at all. Interesting. The women come to the tomb for reasons that aren’t entirely clear – to grieve, to see if something will happen like Jesus said it would, who knows. Since we haven’t heard of them through the rest of the gospel, we don’t know why they followed Jesus in the first place, or why they provided for him. Something compelled them, it seems. So they show up. And they are told three things: Don’t be afraid. There is nothing to fear – God has won. Come and see. See the empty tomb – he is risen just like he said. So go and tell, tell the disciples that Jesus is risen. Don’t be afraid – Come and see – Go and tell. And they do. They have the same experience as the guards at the tomb, you’ll notice – the guards felt the earthquake, saw the stone rolled away, saw the angel – but instead of fainting, the women act. They believe from these signs that Jesus really is risen – or at least, they know something really amazing has happened – and they start acting accordingl[...] | 4/24/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
35 |
RCL Year A, Palm Sunday | It’s a dramatic day today, with two very different scenes: in one, the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, with the crowds shouting Hosanna! and spreading palm branches before him; and in the other, the long night of Jesus’ arrest and trial and his torture and death. In the first story I imagine bright sunshine and birds singing along with the people, lots of hubbub and excitement – the hustle and bustle of the city and of a great parade, all the rowdiness of crowds outdoors. And Jesus is poised in the midst of it all, giving somewhat mystical orders to his disciples to procure a donkey and colt, confidently claiming the symbolism of the old prophecies of the Messiah king. And we celebrate it ourselves by singing one of our loudest and most confident hymns, ‘All glory, laud, and honor,’ and we march along with our palm branches in a way completely different from any other Sunday. In a very public, right out there in the neighborhood kind of way – this is a story to be proud of, it looks like. But we don’t get to relish that scene for very long, for before we’ve gone too far into the service we hear about the other scene instead. Isaiah talks about one who is beaten and despised; the psalm cries out, ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord, for I am in trouble.’ And then we heard the other part of Jesus’ story, what happens just a few chapters later in Matthew’s gospel: Jesus’ betrayal and arrest, and being put on trial before the religious leaders and then the Roman governor, and his best friend deserting him, and all those crowds of people who had just been shouting for joy now shouting for him to be killed. And Jesus is mostly silent in the midst of it all, allowing all of this to happen to him. And he is tortured and mocked by the soldiers, and is crucified, and dies, and strange events happen, an earthquake and people being raised from the dead and the temple curtain being torn, and a Roman centurion, a soldier, says that this must have been God’s Son – but realizing it too late to do anything about it. It’s a lot of story to take in in a short space of time – and it’s a lot of emotional ground to cover, too. Jesus looks very different from the first scene to the second – in the first, he is telling his disciples exactly what to do and looking very authoritative; in the second, he is completely silent except for two confusing and enigmatic answers to the high priest and to Pilate the governor, answers that mostly amount to no answer at all. And yet in both scenes Jesus seems to be actively choosing to act as he does. He chooses quite deliberately how and when he will enter Jerusalem, and does so even though anyone can see that this public display will only antagonize those in power. And when he is arrested as expected, Jesus seems to choose to go willingly, and not to give an answer to the questions asked of him, not to defend himself against their accusations. In one scene he chooses action, and the crowds like that: Jesus being the powerful ruler, coming in to be their new king, flying in the face of the forces aligned against him. In the other scene, he chooses not to act – and the crowds don’t like that at all. When given the option, they shout out that they want the criminal Jesus Barabbas to be released instead of Jesus called the Messiah. And as Jesus hangs on the cross, he is mocked by three different groups of people, all of whom say something like, You could save yourself and you don’t – why not? obviously you’re a fraud after all. What fools we were to think you were powerful. Every time we read a story from the gospel, we’re invited to imagine ourselves into the story – what would it be like to be healed, or to be called as a disciple, or to be there when Jesus fed the 5000? But Palm Sunday is the one day when we make that completely explicit, by reading the long gospel story in parts, [...] | 4/17/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
36 |
RCL Year A, 14 Epiphany | Have you ever come to a place where you have given up all hope? Has it ever felt like God waited just too long to help? That’s what I’ve been thinking about from the gospel we just heard. The last of our long Lenten gospel readings. And what a powerful one. Mostly it’s a story we think of as the raising of Lazarus. But really, that part only happens at the end. And so the story is even more about Mary and Martha, Lazarus’ sisters – and about the long wait before the miracle comes. All three of them, it seems, were close friends of Jesus, a family with whom he was deeply intimate. Judging by the order in which they are named, Martha was the oldest and Lazarus was the baby brother. And Lazarus, their beloved brother, and Jesus’ dear friend, falls terribly ill, so they send for Jesus. And Jesus does not come. And Lazarus dies. And the next day, Jesus does not come. Nor does he come the following day. It is only when four days have passed, when all hope has been abandoned, that Jesus shows up. The belief at the time was that the life force of the body stayed nearby for three days – but by four, it was gone. And by four days, the body would be beginning to decompose. And only on the fourth day does Jesus come. And it is not as though he were unavoidably held up, or far away, unable to get there in time. The story says he tarries – he stays where he is two more days on purpose. When he finally does come, before he’s even got to the house, Martha comes out to see him. We don’t know the way she greeted him. But I would imagine that she is confused, outraged, bewildered. Lord, she says, if you had been here, Lazarus would not have died. The question beneath it I hear is: where the hell were you? Later when Jesus comes nearer to the house, her sister Mary comes to him and asks the same question. What must they have been suffering and thinking in those dark days after their baby brother died? A few weeks ago I received a box from Nancy Jacobs, a former member of this church who has been a longtime member now of the church I grew up in, St Margaret’s in Bellevue, WA. Among other things, she included a few copies of a journal from 1988 called Sharing, a small magazine that was devoted to stories of Christian healing. That issue had the story my mother wrote about our family – certainly a story I’m aware of at some level all the time, but one I hadn’t recently reflected on. I read the story again in a whole new way this time. It’s the story of my sister, who was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 12, and our family’s suffering with that through her teenage years. Now that I have children of my own, it struck me very differently – I felt more keenly what it must have been like for my mom. My family was part of St Margaret’s during that time as well, and the year my sister was diagnosed, 1970, they had a healing service for her at church. It was the time in the church when healing prayer was especially popular, the so-called charismatic renewal, and many people came. Everyone there talked about how my sister was glowing that night. The cancer was in remission and coincidentally, the doctors in charge of her care decided the next day by a drawing of straws to try no treatment at all. My parents took this as a sign of God’s action: my sister had been miraculously healed. But a few months later, things started to go downhill again. In fact, after that healing service happened, over the next five years, my sister relapsed four times. In the early 1970s, there weren’t a lot of options yet for what to do for leukemia. My sister said, what’s the point of a healing service if you’re not healed, and I’m sure my parents thought the same thing. Meanwhile, I had been born – an unwelcome turn of events from most people’s perspective. But after a few years they checked the family again, and checked m[...] | 4/9/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
37 |
RCL Year A, 13 Epiphany | In the New York Times this last week there was a story about a private school in Manhattan called Friends Seminary, a school that was founded in the 18th century by Quakers. The Quaker meeting that began the school is now having doubts about staying connected with the school. It’s not uncommon for churches and their schools to part ways, usually because of liability issues or the school getting too big for the church to manage. But in this situation, the meeting is concerned that the school has become un-Quaker. Tuition is over $32,000 a year, and so only a fairly elite tier of students attend. Since Quakers have simplicity and equality as core principles, this rubs many of the meeting members the wrong way, you could say. The Quaker process, however, does not allow for taking a vote about such things – you sit in silence together when debates heat up and wait for consensus. So there have been a lot of discussion, with a lot of sitting in silence, and no clear decision yet. It happens that I’ve been reading about Quakers this last week, in particular about their views on money as I prepared the adult ed forum for this week. Their practice is to be very intentional about money, always conscious of who is affected when they think about buying something or taking a new job – which is partly why they were historically such good businesspeople, very frugal and conscientious in their management of things. And it struck me in my reading, and in this current situation, that being a Quaker is very, very difficult. No question is simple and straightforward – their principles are unyielding and their commitment to integrity is absolute. But just how to apply those principles in any given situation, always within the counsel of their community, never as lone ranger individuals – it’s a complicated process. They struggle to see the way God sees, listening to each other for the Spirit’s guidance. No wonder there are now only 520 Quakers worshiping in Manhattan these days. I was thinking about this because we have a few stories today about seeing the way God sees, and in both cases, it’s clear that it takes work. In the first story, the prophet Samuel is told by God to go and anoint a new king, since Saul has not turned out well. Samuel goes to the home of Jesse and watches his sons, waiting to see which one of them God has chosen. But it’s not the one he thinks. Samuel is impressed by Eliab, but God says, don’t judge by appearances or height – I look at what is within. So Samuel looks at every other son, but none of them are the one. Finally Samuel insists that they call the youngest, who is out watching the sheep, and lo and behold, David turns out to be the one, and Samuel anoints him. Samuel has to ask for what he is not seeing before he sees the one God desires. And, curiously, David also gets the seal of approval for his appearance – ruddy and handsome, with beautiful eyes. But this seems to be a bonus, not the main point. The John story is about this same tension of seeing and not seeing. It’s a healing story, but the majority of this long passage is about what comes after the healing. One of things that’s unusual about the story is that it’ s an instance where the person healed doesn’t ask for the healing at all – the man born blind is more of a teachable moment at first, as Jesus answers his disciples’ question about whether sin had something to do with his blindness. Jesus heals the man, it seems, to prove a point, tells the man to go wash in the pool, and then walks on. He sort of leaves this guy to his fate – and with what happens afterward, you almost wonder whether he would want to thank Jesus or not. Because first his neighbors start on him: Is this the same guy? He used to sit here begging, and now he’s walking around able to see. What is this? How can this be? And so the man tells them about what happened, how Je[...] | 4/2/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
38 |
RCL Year A, 11 Epiphany | This week the news has been particularly horrible to read. At the beginning of the week we saw pictures of the devastation by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Then we began hearing about the problems with the nuclear reactors, and about how paralyzed the leadership in Japan seems to be at addressing the crisis. We’re familiar with the pattern of tragedy in the news – a terrible calamity happens, the death toll is calculated, survivors are found, the story recedes from the headlines. But this is a tragedy that seems to be getting worse and worse, rather than better with time. And as the fears about the reactors have risen, WWII survivors have relived the horror of Hiroshima; more recent memories of Chernobyl or even just Three Mile Island have replayed in many minds. I’ve remembered the nuclear fear of my childhood, when it seemed possible that Russia could decide to bomb us at any time. The already staggering tragedy going on Japan has now touched all of us, and it has stoked all of our fears. And when we’re not reading about Japan, we’re reading about Libya – the brutality there, and now the possibility of our involvement in stopping it. Heartbreaking and scary all at once. This week also happened to be the week that Jim and I had an appointment to meet with an attorney to begin drawing up our wills, something we have put off for far too long. It meant that Monday evening we spent pulling things together and talking about who should be guardians to our children if we both died. And since our attorney also recommended considering advance directives for health care, our drive to Berkeley to the appointment on Wednesday was filled with discussion about what kind of end-of-life decisions we wanted to make. How do we want to die, in other words. Perhaps picking up on all of this, Frances asked me as she went to bed Wednesday night, ‘Mama, when am I going to die?’ I said none of us know that – but that I hoped it wouldn’t be for a very, very long time. She wanted to know how it was she would get to heaven, and I said that since I haven’t been there I don’t know, but that I believe that God will hold us and take care of us when we die. So I have been thinking a great deal about death this week – as perhaps have many of you. First of all, a question: how many of you have made out your wills? How many have done advance directives about health care? You may not know that even our Book of Common Prayer notes that it is the duty of every Christian to make out a will – it’s there at the end of the prayers for thanksgiving for a child, that we should put our affairs in order to care for those we will leave. It is well worth the spiritual energy and time to do so, to focus on our own mortality and what will be left when we die. But even if we don’t do that, events like the catastrophe in Japan bring home our mortality to us in a big way. Scenes of such devastation, such vast numbers killed in seconds, are so hard to comprehend. We struggle to take it all in. It just goes on and on. And perhaps we wonder, how can God let something so horrible happen? How can so many lives be snuffed out so quickly? Doesn’t God have anything to say about such tragedy? Couldn’t God stop it? I’ll admit, when I began to try to see how these questions fit with the readings presented to us for this Sunday, I wasn’t sure how they did. That conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus in the gospel is all about birth, not death. But then I began to imagine the scene, what Jesus and Nicodemus thought of each other as they talked. There’s Nicodemus, a Pharisee, scholar and teacher, sneaking in to see Jesus at night when no one is looking. He says, ‘We can tell – I can tell – that you must be from God, because you’re doing amazing things.’ Jesus responds, ‘Ah, you can see that because you have been born from above.[...] | 3/19/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
39 |
RCL Year A, 10 Epiphany | When I was a young girl I went through a period of playing with horses – not real horses, but the model Breyer horses with the beautiful flowing manes and raised hoofs all sculpted out of plastic. I coveted new ones, and whenever I could save up my allowance I would go buy one, looking over all the models and planning which one I wanted to buy next. With the horses I would act out various imaginary adventures for hours. My great-aunt Edna, then in her 80s, would come occasionally to stay with us, and she came to visit while I was in the grip of this particular enthusiasm. One day while she was out of her room, I wandered in. There on the bed was her handbag, and before I even quite realized what I was doing, I reached in and pulled out a $20 bill – and pocketed it. Later that same day I went to the toy store with a friend – and with that $20, I bought a beautiful Breyer horse. Well, it didn’t take long for my aunt to notice the missing money, and she mentioned it to my dad, who then sat me down and got me to admit the ugly truth. Since by then the money was spent, he paid my aunt back himself – I had to apologize – but I got to keep the horse, which seems amazing to me as I look back on it. But maybe my dad realized what would happen – I never could play with that horse without feeling kind of sick about it, and ashamed. And I certainly never, ever again took something that wasn’t mine. Temptation – and its consequences. Today we hear two different stories of temptation – the archetypal one of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the story we call simply, The Fall. And the one of Jesus in the wilderness, confronting the devil. Similar temptations in each story. But vastly different responses. Adam and Eve live happily in the garden of the Lord, a beautiful, lush place where all they need is provided. All is well. They have only one rule they must obey. And before long, they are tempted to break it. In comes the serpent, craftier than any other animal, and engages the woman in conversation. He simply asks a question. He’s perfectly reasonable. And he promises that they will be like God – you don’t have to be ignorant and limited like you are right now, you could be like God. You don’t have to depend on God – eat the fruit of this tree and you’ll know what he knows. You’ll know good and evil. The woman thinks, well, the fruit does look tasty. And it’s sure pretty. And hey, I want to be like God. So she eats it, and the man eats it with her. And the first thing they experience is shame – their eyes are opened, just like the serpent says, but they don’t like what they see. Suddenly being naked is no longer ok – what is good and natural and created by God now looks tainted and shameful to them. So they make clothes and cover themselves up. They know good and evil – or perhaps more accurately, although before they knew only good, now they know evil. And nothing is ever the same for them again. At the beginning of all the stories of Hebrew Scripture, temptation wins, and ruins everything. And then we hear in the gospel of Jesus, at the very beginning of his story. Right after his baptism, he heads off into the wilderness to prepare himself. He fasts and prays for 40 days – part of why our season of Lent is 40 days, echoing his experience – and at the end, the devil appears, and offers Jesus three temptations. He’s perfectly reasonable. He even speaks in the language of scripture. You’re hungry, Jesus – and you will come into contact with many who are hungry in your ministry. Why don’t you use your power to make these stones into bread? You’re something really special, Jesus, you can do things others can’t. Try it out, jump off this cliff – you’ll be able to get them to listen to you this way. You want to get people doing things your way? You could have all the power you want over them. All you have[...] | 3/12/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
40 |
RCL Year A, 9 Epiphany | Have any of you ever had a mountaintop experience? By that I mean, an experience that was spiritually thrilling beyond anything else you’d felt, a time when you felt close to God and everyone around you, at peace with yourself, in love? Sometimes feelings like that come when we’re on a retreat or a weekend like Cursillo, or on a trip into the wilderness, or when we have our first child. I remember as a teenager going to spiritual renewal weekends, what a high I would be on for a few days when I returned. Or the thrill of backpacking up above treeline, how deeply settled I feel when I’m up there. But however wonderful, that feeling of exaltation doesn’t last, does it? Sometimes it’s only a little while, sometimes a few days – but eventually, we have to go back to work, we have to balance the checkbook and clean the bathrooms, we have to sit in traffic as we drive back across the Central Valley, and it all fades away. It’s the nature of mountaintop experiences that they don’t last. But that doesn’t mean they don’t change us. I think we use the term ‘mountaintop experience’ because of the very story we heard today, the story we call the Transfiguration. It’s a story that comes in each of the synoptic gospels, and we always wrap up the church season of Epiphany, this season we’ve been in since Christmas, with this story. Before we go into Lent – the valley of Lent, you could say – we hear about the mountaintop. It’s an amazing story. Jesus takes his best friends and closest followers up the mountain and something incredible happens – he becomes dazzling with light, his clothes shining white, and Moses and Elijah, two pillars of the Hebrew tradition, appear with him. Peter and James and John have been wandering around with Jesus and hearing him speak and watching him heal and seeing him do amazing things, but this tops everything. And Peter, dear Peter, is absolutely beside himself. He just doesn’t know what to think or what to do, it seems, and so he starts babbling: ‘Hey, it’s a good thing we’re here, Lord, because you and Moses and Elijah should have some places to stay in up here! Wow, we could really do something great for you here! We could –’… but then there comes a voice, interrupting and silencing Peter, saying, ‘This is my beloved Son…listen to him!’ And Peter shuts up and falls to the ground, and so do James and John – and then the vision ends and just Jesus is there, looking normal again. And he says, get up, and don’t be afraid. And they go down from the mountain, and Jesus begins his journey toward Jerusalem and death. Poor Peter. Of course he babbles and doesn’t know what to do. Maybe he wants to prolong the experience – maybe even in the midst of having it he already fears it slipping away. Maybe he really is frightened – his best friend shining like the sun and a voice from heaven booming out. It’s terrifying. You don’t have a close encounter with the living God without being terrified. That’s what it seems like, at least – every time an angel of God appears in the Bible, the first thing they say is, do not be afraid. Jesus says it too – get up, and do not be afraid. And Peter does seem to calm down – at least, he’s able to walk down the mountain with Jesus and continue following him. But his first instinct is frantic action, this idea of building some kind of booth or tabernacle – maybe it’s trying to provide some ritual religious context for what he’s seeing, or maybe it’s less coherent than that. Either way, Peter’s instinct is to put parameters around this wild and uncontrollable experience. What he is seeing is utterly beyond his ken, utterly incomprehensible – it freaks him out, and he wants to regain his equilibrium and sense of control. And he wants to sustain the experience, the moment of total intimacy with Jesu[...] | 3/5/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
41 |
RCL Year A, 7 Epiphany | So the word gospel means good news – when we read the gospel we’re meant to hear in it good news for us and the world. Which is why in the Episcopal tradition we end the reading of the gospel with, ‘The Gospel of the Lord…Praise to you, O Christ.’ But there are some days when the gospel reading may not leave us feeling quite like we heard good news. My preaching professor in seminary said that in preaching, we always needed to bring the good news – in other words, a good sermon shouldn’t just be a harangue from start to finish. You can have some haranguing in it, but you have to wind it up with the good news. Well, today’s clip from the sermon on the mount seems to be more harangue than good news – to be fair, it’s still just the middle of the whole sermon. But we get several commandments from Jesus in that reading today, and then if you weren’t yet feeling overwhelmed, it’s wound up with one ultimate commandment: be perfect. Now before you run screaming from the room, let’s explore this a bit more. How many of you here would call yourself a perfectionist? How many of you don’t call yourself that but…you can’t stand it when you make mistakes, you get irritated with other people when they make mistakes, and you work more than you should? Or if that’s not you, then how many of you were raised by a perfectionist? Did you always feel loved, even if you got dirt on your dad’s shorts or crashed the car or got a B in biology? Yeah, none of perfectionism is good, is it? But looking at the gospel reading today, it looks like God is a perfectionist too. ‘Be perfect, just like God is perfect.’ No. Let’s sweep that one out of the way right off the bat. Time for a little Greek lesson: The word translated ‘perfect’ is ‘teleios,’ which comes from the root word ‘telos.’ Telos means purpose, end, or goal. Teleios is variously translated perfect, whole, grown-up, complete, mature, full-grown. It does not mean perfect in the sense of never being wrong, or without flaw. Lesson here: When you read scripture, always, always remember that you are reading it in translation. So our passage could also read, ‘be a grown-up, just like God is a grown-up – be the fulfillment of God’s purposes, just as God is always fulfilling God’s purposes.’ Which is maybe less scary, but if we think about it, no less daunting. And what Jesus said just before it – love your enemy, turn the other cheek, pray for people when they attack you, go the extra mile – none of that is easy stuff either. Easy to get back on the perfectionistic bandwagon – if I don’t do all these things, I’m failing. Well, yes and no. You know that old debate about nature vs. nurture? Whether people have innate tendencies toward particular temperaments, or whether everything is learned from their environment? It seems like mostly these days experts say it’s a mix of the two: children do seem to come into the world with the beginnings of personality already intact, somehow inherited from the genetic pool they’re descended from. Two kids raised in the exact same environment don’t turn out the same – sometimes they turn out radically different. This has amazed me with my two kids – I don’t know yet how they’re going to turn out, but they’re definitely two different people, and they were personalities from the start. It’s an amazing thing, raising a kid – where on earth do they come from? I mean, really come from? But also, how kids are raised – the home they’re part of, the schools they attend, the culture that surrounds them – shapes them as well, highlighting or downplaying elemental parts of their personality. I just watched the 2010 documentary ‘Babies,’ which films 4 different babies from radically different cultures around the world: [...] | 2/19/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
42 |
RCL Year A, 6 Epiphany | Our 4 year old, Frances, loves hearing stories – and somewhere along the way it became enshrined in ritual that Mom or Dad telling her a story can get her through anything: long walks home, teeth brushing, and so on. After several months – years – now of ‘tell me a story,’ it’s easy to run out of ideas. But happily, Frances has started offering suggestions. So she and I are now embarked on a series of Frances and Aidan stories, about a brother and sister who are almost but not quite like a future version of Frances and Benjamin. A regular occurrence in their relationship is arguing and putting each other down, sometimes escalating into yelling – until Mom or Grandpa or someone intervenes and they apologize and remember they love each other. It’s a pretty obvious theme, and one I not so subtly hope will offer a way forward for Frances when her own brother grows up enough to be a pest. Siblings have a way of bickering and fighting – but hopefully, also a way of reconciling and loving each other fiercely. Something like what we can do in community. I talked some last week about how Jesus wasn’t always nice – how he didn’t always say things that made people feel comfortable. Today’s gospel would be a good example of that. This is sort of the ‘if you thought you were doing well, think again’ text. It’s not enough not to murder – don’t even get angry and insult people. It’s not enough to steer clear of adultery – don’t even think about it. And if you divorce, it’s even worse. By these standards, every single one of us has broken God’s law. With standards like these, how can we not? So what do we do? Well, we can throw up our hands and not even try…or we can get hyper-critical and judge everyone around us… both of those are tempting – but I think by these we’re missing the point. This language about ‘the law’ can steer us in all kinds of wrong directions. There’s a kind of Christian thinking that says, the law has nothing to do with us, it was just the old covenant: Jesus set us free from it altogether; there’s another related kind of thinking that says, the fact that the standards of the law are so high and we can’t meet them is God’s way of steering us toward Jesus as our savior; there’s yet another kind of thinking that says, Christians are still supposed to follow all the rules, and otherwise, we won’t get to heaven. All of these theologies can co-exist in anyone of us without us realizing it – that’s why we can end up secretly comparing ourselves favorably with others when we’re living righteously, while tossing it all out and saying, ‘well, God doesn’t care, I’m forgiven!’ when we’re not. And then worrying about whether we’ll get to heaven or not in the end. I think part of the problem is our understanding of what the law is for – tangled up maybe with what we think civil laws are for, or the kinds of rules we teach our children. In those cases, laws are about rules: do this, don’t do that, and you’ll stay within the bounds. Break those laws or rules, and you’re out of bounds, and punishment will follow. But God’s law isn’t that. It’s about relationship. Commandments and rules in Hebrew scriptures are meant to guide us to right relationship. Look at the 10 Commandments, the most basic set of rules in scripture: rabbinical writings in Judaism point out that the first four of the commandments are about being in right relationship with God: you shall have no other Gods before me, do not make idols, do not swear falsely by God, honor the Sabbath day; while the next six are about being in right relationship with each other: honor your parents, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness, do not covet what belongs to your neighbor. They[...] | 2/12/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
43 |
RCL Year A, 4 Epiphany | One January several years ago, I went on a pilgrimage to Israel. It was one of those tours set up for clergy, in the hopes that we would be inspired to one day take a group of parishioners on a similar pilgrimage (with the same company, of course). It was a whirlwind 8 days of driving around in a bus and jumping in and out of various holy places – not my preferred method of seeing a place, but ok enough for a first experience. One of the places we visited was the Mt. of Beatitudes, the site revered as the place where Jesus preached his Sermon on the Mount, what we just heard from today in the gospel. The site of that sermon is on a slope high up above the Sea of Galilee, with a wide-open vista to the south over the sea and the surrounding mountains and hills. It was very green this time of year – like California, the rains bring green to what is usually a dryer place – and the morning we were there, the sun was shining warm and the sea was perfectly calm. It was an amazingly beautiful day to be outside. And God surprised me there. It was only the second full day of our travels, and we had already visited numerous holy sites in Nazareth and Cana and Mt. Tabor (the site associated with the Transfiguration). I was one of the few non-English clergy in the group, and we were led by two English priests who had prepared a liturgy for us in each holy place. One of those priests is a friend of mine, but we differ somewhat on how we approach worship. And by the second morning I was already sick of the worship. Every holy site had a church on it, many of them, to my taste, ugly, overly ornate buildings. And in every site we heard a scripture reading related to the site – that part was ok – and said a prayer, and sang a hymn…a six-verse English hymn, sung at full volume, in a tempo that began slow and became even slower as we went. Clergy, especially male clergy, especially English male clergy, tend to sing really loud and really slowly. I was not liking it. And I was also encountering what was for me at the time a fairly typical set of doubts, which run something like, I’m a priest, I should like this, but man, this is SO churchy, maybe I’m in the wrong profession, etc. So in this state I arrived at the Mt. of Beatitudes, filed in along with the others to the very ugly little church, endured the hymn, and fled outside, down to the garden where I could see out over the lake and feel the sun. I thought, that’s it, I must be a pagan. Get out of the church and go outside, stop the hymn and be still in the silence – clearly the response of a pagan. I should write the bishop immediately. But as I sat out there in the warmth of the sun, hearing the birds and seeing the sea sparkling below, I remembered suddenly where we were. This was the place where people think Jesus preached. Gathered around him on the grass, or maybe up above him on the slope for the purposes of acoustics, were crowds of people, sitting outside and listening to this man. People who spent their days outside, farming these hills and fishing on this sea, listening to this person who spent most of his time also outside, wandering, teaching, healing, feeding people. Whenever Jesus had a crowd, he took them to some place outside where they could all spread out and hear him. And all of this he did in the region where he grew up and came into adulthood, in the beautiful area around the Sea of Galilee, a place he must have loved for its beauty something like how I was loving it, how I love places like Sierra peaks or California hills or the green fields of Oxfordshire. This Jesus lived much of his life outside and, apparently, loved being there. It was a Jesus I had never really connected to until that moment. Now, lest you think that my great epiphany of this pilgrimage was that we should just tear down the churches and go outside (and we should do some of this), let me hasten to add that I had a few more mome | 1/30/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
44 |
RCL Christmas 2 | We have the gift of an extra Sunday in our Christmas season – extra time to settle into the feast of the Incarnation, which of course does last for 12 days, whether you’ve still got your tree up or not. And what a gift for us here, as we start together on the incarnation of our life together. I wasn’t able to be with you on Christmas Eve, but I do get to celebrate the last part of Christmas with you. It’s the perfect season for starting out together. We’ve known about each other for a long time – I knew about you and a few of you knew about me way back in July, and then over the months, more and more of you have come to know more and more about me, and I about you. But only today are we putting flesh on it, so to speak, all of us meeting each other and starting the long adventure of getting to really know each other. We’re incarnate to each other starting today – not just as a set of hearsay or ideas, but real people, starting real relationship together. It’s rather like getting married, actually. After a period of courtship – writing letters, phone calls, progressing to visits across the country – we decided to get engaged. We planned our marriage, set up the house, got our parent’s permission (Bishop Mary), and now here we are, married. I suppose the wedding ceremony will be the installation later this month, but legally now, we’re a done deal. And so now we start learning about each other in earnest, learning what it’s like to live together. We’ll learn all kinds of things to love about one another, things to cherish and delight in together. And probably we’ll learn things about each other that annoy us a little too, things we’ll have to learn to live with or work through together, just like in any marriage. It’s the nitty-gritty of life together, real incarnate life, that we’re starting today. We had three options for our gospel reading today, you probably noticed – there are several stories about the infant and child Jesus and not a lot of time to tell them in church, since starting next Sunday we start telling the stories of the adult Jesus and his ministry. So today we could have heard the story about the 12-year-old Jesus going to the Temple, seeking out the wisdom of the elders there and worrying his human parents. Or we could have told the story of the visit of the wise men, the story of Epiphany, which is this Thursday. I’m confident that you all will be here for the 7:30 Eucharist on Thursday to hear that one, so I took the risk of saving it till then. Instead, I picked our first option, the story of the flight to Egypt. It’s the scary story in the Christmas series – the dark reaction of worldly power to the beautiful story of the Nativity. Joseph is told in a dream to take the baby Jesus to Egypt, out of harm’s way, because Herod the King is seeking to destroy him. While they are in Egypt – in the part left out of today’s reading – Herod orders the death of all baby boys in Jerusalem. Only when Herod dies does Joseph get the word that it is safe to return, and even then, he has to settle in another town to feel safe. Love comes down at Christmas, and finds the world to be a dangerous place. It’s a story that makes a point: in other words, incarnation is not all rosy. There are a lot of sweet images around Christmastime, the pretty crèche scenes many of us have in our homes showing Mary all lovely and the gathered animals around the manger so peaceful. We dress up the children as angels for the pageant, we light candles and sing gentle hymns like Silent Night, we make and eat too many sugar cookies and treats. All of that is wonderful, and all of it is right, for there is a lot of sweetness in the story of God coming to be with us in the person of a little baby. But of course it’s only a piece of the story, for we know what comes to pass when that baby grows up – how he will anger people and say and do | 1/2/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 44 Episodes |
- Free
- Category: Christianity
- Language: English
- Copyright © 2012, by the Episcopal Church in Almaden, San Jose, CA
