The Hopeful Priest

Advent Paradox

2011-11-27T18:33:00.000-08:00

Sermon preached Nov. 27, 2011
1st Sunday of Advent

We need to begin this morning with a moment of silence for Mark A – a relative newcomer to our parish, a man at the prime of his life who joined the Alleluia choir with his wife Marty this year; a vigorous athlete who at the age of 55 was struck by a major heart attack this week. While the rest of the country was enjoying its Thanksgiving feasts and football extravaganzas, Marty and their children Hillary and Jeffrey have been keeping vigil at the ICU with many friends and family members. Mark suffered severe brain damage as a result of the heart attack and the prognosis is not good. Yesterday they took him off life support. And so we wait, and we pray.

And so Advent begins: the season of waiting and praying.

People who come to the Episcopal Church from other traditions are sometimes surprised by how we celebrate Advent. They come here, expecting a season of joy, and what they find is a season that is more paradoxical than that. Advent is without a doubt our most paradoxical season: we embrace a season of Christmas cheer, even as our readings focus on judgment and apocalypse, like this one from Mark’s Gospel, in which Jesus warns us of the days when “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” (Mark 13: 24-37)

Those of us who are confused by this strange combination of themes might be comforted to know that it was not always thus. In the Roman Church, the season of Advent was, for over a thousand years, celebrated as an unambiguously joyful time. This makes sense, seeing as the Romans appropriated the celebration of Christmas from the pagan celebrations of the sun God, which featured lots of parties and gift-giving and tree decorating and candle lighting. If you were to walk into St. Peter’s in Rome any time before around 1150 AD, you would have found the priests and bishops wearing their most festive vestments, and choirs singing their most joyful songs.

But while the Christians in Rome were throwing their Advent parties and having a good old pagan time of it, the Christians in what is now mostly France held Advent as a season of penitence and prayer. The clergy wore black, which later changed to purple, there were strict rules for fasting, and parties were hard to find. In fact, Advent for the Franks was almost as severe as Lent, and lasted just as long – 40 days, not just 4 weeks.

And so it was that for over a thousand years, these two traditions existed side-by-side, until in the middle of the 12th Century, when the Roman church adopted some of the Frankish traditions of prayer and fasting and penitence, without giving up entirely on its love for parties.

Whether by historical coincidence, then, or mysterious divine plan, this is how Western Christianity developed this odd combination in Advent of both joy and remorse; feast and fast. In other words, it’s paradoxical – which is fitting, since our faith is all about paradox. After all, everything about Christianity is paradoxical: Jesus is fully human and fully divine; the Kingdom of God is fully here, and yet not yet; the last shall be first; we embrace both reason and faith; we find ourselves by losing ourselves; our weakness is our strength; we learn how to live only when we learn how to die; and we know that we will never find happiness when we make happiness our goal.

Ours is a paradoxical faith – and that is the secret of its wisdom and profound truth. Just as people from Santa Cruz carry bumper stickers that say, “Keep Santa Cruz weird,” just so we would be wise to keep Advent paradoxical. Or maybe "weird" really is the better word...

During the hours I spent in the waiting room this week with Marty and her family, with tears of joy and tears of sorrow flowing simultaneously, I was able to witness this truth once again. All of us who have lost a close loved one know this – that in grief we are overwhelmed by simultaneous waves of sweetness and sorrow. Paradox lies at the heart of all reality – which is just another way of saying that God’s reality is bigger than our nice little categories.

Last night, at our annual Advent party, after we made our Advent wreaths and decorated our Christmas ornaments and ate our cookies and drank our hot cider, we gathered outside in the darkness for what has become, for me, one of the most moving rituals of the year. Using pine boughs, the children laid-out a simple spiral labyrinth in the courtyard; at the center of the labyrinth was placed a lone candle – the Christ candle – and it was lit. We all sat in a big circle around the labyrinth, wrapped in blankets or warm coats against the darkness and the cold, and we entered into a watchful kind of prayer. As a Christmas carol from the Renaissance is played, even the most talkative and restless children grow quiet.

This year, it was Katie R who went first. Taking up her unlit candle, she walked carefully around the labyrinth while we prayed. When she got to the center, she touched her candle to the Christ candle, and then, bearing her light, she silently made her way back. At some point she set her candle down by the side of the little trail.

She was followed by all the other children, some walking solo, some accompanied by a mom or a dad, each of them lighting their candle at the Christ candle, and leaving it along the trail, until after a little while the trail along the labyrinth was lit by these flickering lights.

By the time it was my turn to walk around the labyrinth, the trail was lit by 15 or so flickering candles; and I found myself giving thanks for all of those who have gone before me; those who have lit the way; those who have left this world a brighter place. I found myself in communion with my mother and my brother, who have passed over to the other side; and with Mark, as he lay in mortal weakness; and with all our children, who bring such unadulterated joy into our lives. By the end, sitting under the stars, we beheld a flickering little galaxy of lights in the form of a spiral, that most primeval of forms; and I found myself once again in that place of paradox; simultaneously conscious of death and new life, bathed in grief and in joy.

For our children, this simple little ritual has become the essential thing that we must do every year to prepare for Christmas. When, some years ago, the suggestion was made that we skip the labyrinth, it was the children who insisted it be continued; each year, they are the ones who lead the construction of the labyrinth, and they are the ones who teach the younger kids what to do.

And so the tradition of Advent paradox continues: young and old; life and death; light and dark; grief and joy. We lift our hearts to all of it; all of life in all of its exquisite contradiction, and we give thanks for all of it.

AMEN.

Holy, Holy, Holy

2011-10-24T10:29:00.000-07:00

The man from the nursing home was on the phone. “You better come over,” he said; “She’s refusing food. It looks like she’s decided it’s time to die.”
The care-givers had tried everything to get her to eat. They tried coaxing her, bribing her, arguing with her; they brought her favorite foods, her favorite ice cream, her favorite rice pudding – but she just shook her head and kept her mouth closed.

People who work in nursing homes see this all the time. At some point a person just stops eating; they reach a point where they are ready to die and they just settle into their beds and wait. When this particular call came in, I had only been ordained about three years but already I had seen this happen more than a few times.

Which is why it was so surprising when I arrived at the nursing home and the woman looked up at me and immediately pointed to her mouth. She had had a stroke earlier in the year, which deprived her of the ability to speak, but her mind was clear and it was obvious that she was asking for some food. I got kind of excited and I said to the attendant, “I think she’s hungry!”

“Are you hungry?” I asked; “Do you want something to eat?”

She shook her head.

“Oh – you want something to drink?”

Again she shook her head. Then she pointed at me – and again, pointed to her mouth.
I felt pretty stupid that it took me that long to figure it out. “Oh, do you want communion?” She nodded.

The prayer book has a little service called “Communion Under Special Circumstances” for times like these, when a person can’t get to church and so we bring the consecrated bread and wine to the home. It’s a short little service - you can get through the whole thing in about 10 minutes easy, and usually when you are dealing with someone who is very sick, that’s about as long a service as they want.

But this time was different. She was one of the 8 o’clockers – she knew the old service by heart and it had been several months since she had been able to get to church and hear the entire service. I asked her if she would like to do the whole service, soup to nuts, and she nodded eagerly, so I turned to page 323 in the prayer book and we went through the long version together, skipping nothing.

Her eyes were on me during the whole service, her lips moving in unison with mine as we prayed those ancient prayers – the Collect for Purity, the Great Commandments, all the way to the Prayer of Humble Access. It felt like she was savoring every last word as if this were her last meal – which, of course, it was. She crossed herself in all the right places; she bowed her head at every mention of the name Jesus; and when it came time to feed her that little wafer of bread, soaked in a bit of inexpensive port, she closed her eyes and savored it as if she were dining at the Ritz Carlton. For her, this was tastier than the finest steak, the richest chocolate.

She died a few days later.

When I think of the word “holy”, that is what I think about.
The Episcopal Church is by no means a perfect church. We are vague, we are proud, we are as parochial as the next denomination. But one thing that we do well: we know about holiness. We know what it means to honor the holiness of God.
When God says, in the book of Leviticus, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy,” we get it.

The Hebrew word for this is qadosh. It means “set apart, sacred”; it refers to that aspect of God’s being which is completely other, untouchable, pure. God’s holiness is what makes Moses’ face to shine like a lantern after he sees God passing by; his face, they said, was so bright he had to wear a veil to protect those who looked at him. (Exodus 34: 24-34) Like Moses, we absorb some of the holiness of God when we encounter God in our worship. Moses had his mountain top and his burning bush; we have our sanctuary, and our Holy Eucharist.

While other churches have buildings that look like shopping malls, and sanctuaries that look like high-school auditoriums, we gather in buildings that have been set apart for a sacred purpose; we replicate the architecture of the ancient Temple, with its holy of holies; we believe in consecrated elements: we honor the sacred presence of God in the tabernacle; we douse ourselves with holy water when we enter and when we leave; we come to the altar of God with the reverence of the ancient High Priest.

But for all our reverence and all our sacred prayers, we also know that none of it matters if our holiness doesn’t change the way we live our lives. This is the other, central element of the Jewish concept of holiness: holiness is made real when it is translated into right action. When, in the book of Leviticus, God is explaining what this all means, he begins by saying, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.” This is the context for the 10 Commandments; and in fact for all 613 commandments in the Torah. Whenever God gives a commandment, he begins by reminding his people of his holiness, and of their holiness. The commandments are proof of God’s holiness; they are God’s way of helping us understand how to be holy; how to honor God’s holiness.

We don’t honor our father and our mother just because God says we should; we don’t love our neighbor as ourselves because it’s good social policy; we don’t refrain from stealing because we want to curry favor with God or avoid God’s punishment. We follow the commandments because that’s what it means to be holy. We are holy people; we worship a holy God; and that means we conduct ourselves in a certain manner. That means we stand for certain principles. That means we have a particular purpose in this world. In this ancient tradition, is impossible to be holy if we are not following the commandments of God.

No wonder, then, that the ancient Jews took the commandments very seriously.
By the time Jesus came along, then, there was enormous debate as to which, of the 613 commandments, were the most important. 613 commandments is a lot of commandments to keep straight. Somebody needed to simplify things: what’s the bottom line? What’s the most important commandment?

Which is why Jesus, in our Gospel this morning, brings us back to the first principle: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is what we do here, in this sanctuary: we bring ourselves to God, leaving nothing behind; we open ourselves to God, completely. Our love for God is expressed in our devotion to his holiness: in the silence of the sanctuary, in the deepest recesses of our hearts.

In our Collect for Purity we say, “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid…” The holiness of God is found there, in our complete openness – the openness that is made possible when we feel completely safe, as when we are in a sanctuary. We open ourselves to the holiness of God – and that gives us eyes to see the holiness of God’s people. When we encounter the holiness of God, everything else falls into place: how we should live, and who we should live for. We learn to love, because we encounter God’s love; we learn to listen, because we experience God’s listening; we learn to forgive, because we experience God’s forgiveness. We learn to give, because we come to see how everything, already, is a gift from God.

This morning, at the 11:15 service, we are going to baptize a young man named Josh. Josh is a war veteran; he has seen things that no one should have to see. He understands more than most of us how unholy life can be; how far from God we can fall. He has seen the chaos and the destruction that is unleashed when all holiness, all love, all respect for dignity, is lost.

And he knows what we must do to recover our humanity. It begins with first principles. It begins here, in this holy place, in the presence of our holy God. We enter God’s sanctuary; we worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness; we ask God’s blessing on the element of water; we pour that holy water over his head; we dedicate ourselves, completely and without reservation, to the holiness of God. And the rest follows from there; the purpose of our lives becomes clear.

It’s all spelled out in the words of the Baptismal Covenant: we will continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship; we will persevere in resisting evil; we will proclaim the Good News of god in Christ; we will seek and serve Christ in all persons; we will strive for justice and peace among all people.

We are not the kind of people that go to church so that we can get our little bit of holiness and go home to watch TV. We encounter the holy so that we remember who God is, and in the process we remember who we are: we are holy, because God is holy. And because of that, we bear God’s holiness into the world. Whether we are carrying consecrated elements to the nursing home, or carrying a casserole to Open Table, or carrying an open heart to people who give us heartburn, we are carrying holiness – God’s holiness – to a world that is desperately hungry for it.

I give thanks be to God that we have been given this great vocation, and the means to accomplish it, through the grace of God and his son, Jesus Christ our Lord… AMEN.

The flag in church...

2011-07-06T15:44:00.000-07:00

When I was a seminarian in New York back in 1981, I took the train out to a suburb in New Jersey to meet an Episcopal priest who was thinking of taking me on as his intern. It was a fine, sunny day and as I approached the church, which was built in the glory days of the 1950’s, I noticed how impressive the steeple was, and how proud and bright it looked against the blue sky.

It wasn’t until I stepped inside the church that I saw some storm clouds. The church was empty, as far as I could tell – there was no receptionist to greet me, no one around except this older priest – well, he was probably younger than I am now - who was alone in his rather dark and dreary office. Right away I noticed the rings under his eyes and a tendency to sigh rather deeply, and often.

We were only a few minutes into our interview when he launched into a long story about the battle he had been having with his congregation for the past five years: which was over the fact that he had removed the American flag from the sanctuary.

His view was that there was no place for the flag in church. The battles over the Vietnam War were still fresh in his memory, and that experience had taught him that the mission of the church was to always stand ready to speak prophetically against its nation. He talked about St. Paul, about how in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. He said, “When we enter that sanctuary, we leave our national identity behind. Our only citizenship is in the kingdom of God.”

He spoke with this weary but still passionate conviction about the danger of becoming a cult of the nation, and of slipping into idolatry. He talked about patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel – and apparently there had been more than a few scoundrels in his parish, who, he said, were trying to use patriotism in order to suppress the prophetic voice of the church.

I found that I had great sympathy for his argument, but I also remember walking away from that church deciding two things: first, that I did not want to work for him; and second, that if I ever became a priest, I would try to find a more satisfying method of resolving conflicts in the parish. I just didn’t want to end up looking like him.

But the other thing I learned is just how powerful this issue can be for us – because we feel so strongly about our identities as Christians and as Americans – and because things with symbolic value – like flags – carry such power for us.

Freedom

2011-07-06T15:37:00.000-07:00

Sermon preached July 3, 2011

What with the 4th of July upon us, I've been thinking a lot about this idea of freedom. What does freedom mean to you?

I grew up in the 1960’s, when freedom everywhere I looked, people were risking life and limb for freedom.

My father was flying down to Selma and Birmingham to help out Dr. King and the civil rights workers. He himself didn’t face many dangers, personally, but he came home with incredible stories about ordinary people, no different from you or me, willing to be attacked by police dogs, slammed to the ground by fire hoses, and taken in the middle of the night by men in white hoods just so they could enjoy the simple freedoms we took for granted.

A few years later, my brother was fighting to not be drafted into a war that he considered to be a war crime. Meanwhile, some of his friends – white, middle-class kids like him – were in San Francisco, insisting on the freedom to drop acid and make love in the middle of Golden Gate Park.

These days, “freedom” is still a confusing and deeply charged word.
To some of us, freedom means personal freedom: the freedom to be oneself, do whatever you want to do. If we’re a teenager, chafing under our parents’ rules, freedom means getting to decide for yourself what time you’ll go to bed. We dream of the day when we’ll get to go to college and decide for ourselves when to work, and when to play, and when to sleep.

If we’re a libertarian, freedom means something similar, except on a bigger scale: freedom means the right to be left alone, free from government intrusion. Ron Paul, the leading libertarian voice of our time, says heroin and crack cocaine should be legal, because we don’t need the government telling us how to live our lives.
For others, freedom doesn’t mean freedom from government so much as the freedoms protected by our government: freedom to worship, freedom of speech, freedom to vote, freedom from tyrants and dictators; freedom of the weak to be protected from the strong.

If you’re one of the thousands of political prisoners sitting in jail right now throughout the Middle East, that’s a very real dream right now, something worth dying for. Those of you who fought in World War II risked your lives for that kind of freedom. None of us would be in this room, freely worshiping the god of our choosing, if it weren’t for the sacrifices of that generation, and so many generations that have gone before. For you, freedom means sacrifice.

And freedom in that sense of the word is, for many of us, also a religious idea. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” So there’s a spiritual connection there: somehow these freedoms that we claim are not just the natural rights of man, but rather a right endowed by our Creator.

And there’s yet another kind of freedom; a freedom that also has a spiritual dimension. If you’re an alcoholic or struggle with some other addiction, freedom means freedom from our own personal demons. Our reading from St. Paul expresses this kind of longing. We don’t know what it was that Paul was struggling with, but it sure sounds like some kind of addiction:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

For Paul, this is a deeply spiritual issue – it’s a war going on inside him between the desires of the flesh, which he is a slave to, and the law of God, which leads him into freedom in Christ. “Wretched man that I am!” he cries, “Who will free me from this body of death?”

For Paul, as for the practitioners of 12-step programs, that kind of personal freedom only comes when we admit that we are slaves – Paul says “Slave to sin,” while an alcoholic might say we are powerless over our addiction; and our only hope is to turn our lives over to a Higher Power.

So for Paul, as well as for the alcoholic, we are never completely free. It’s more of a trade-off: we give up our slavery to the bottle, and exchange it, if you will, for what Paul calls a slavery to Christ.

And that’s what trips up so many addicts, and so many Christians, of course – because we think freedom should be without any strings attached. We want perfect free-agency; we want to be beholden to no one; we don’t God telling us what to do any more than we want the bottle telling us what to do.

For Paul, that’s a fantasy. The only way out of this slavery to sin is through slavery to Christ. For those with an addictive personality, there is no such thing as perfect freedom – because as soon as you start choosing purely for yourself, you’re back on the bottle.

For those of us who are not addicts, this is a deeply offensive idea – especially in the United States of America. We are raised on the mother’s milk of freedom, and we’ve taken that to mean complete freedom. We are a nation of individualists; my home is my castle; I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps.

But in Matthew’s gospel, we find Jesus also using the image of bondage. “Take my yoke upon you,” he says. And he’s not just talking to addicts; he’s talking to all of us.

And so it is that we come up against the choice: do we give our lives over to Christ, or do we continue to insist that we are our own masters; that we choose our own destinies.

The Episcopal Church is probably the softest of all the Christian denominations when it comes to this issue. We don’t believe in a coercive church; we don’t center our worship around altar calls, which has the explicit purpose of giving your life over to God. We let each person find their own way toward that choice. For many of us who are not addicts, being our own masters has worked out pretty well; we’ve managed to eke out a living; care for our children… Most of us don’t give up control – even to God – unless we’re really up against a wall, desperate, ready to try anything.

But for all of us, that day eventually comes. We catch a disease; we lose our job; we find ourselves in a foxhole during a mortar attack… and then we’re ready to make a deal. “Okay, God, you got me now. Ok, I’ll give my life to you – I’ll do anything you want. Just get me out of this.”

And for some of us, that formula works out. We make a deal; like General Motors, we accept obedience in exchange for a bail-out.

But for a lot of us, we come to learn, too late, that it doesn’t work like that. God is not Santa Claus, or Monty Hall in “Let’s Make a Deal.” God doesn’t invite us into obedience in exchange for never getting cancer, or never going into bankruptcy. Jesus says, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me.” He offers us a relationship not unlike that between a student and a teacher. In the classroom, there are certain rules; sleeping, chewing gum, throwing spit balls are generally frowned upon. A disciple is a student, literally; and what a student learns is discipline. The Christian way is a way of discipleship; which means that to be a Christian is to enter into a discipline – a discipline that will give you skills, such as how to pray, and how to love, and how to live with a sense of ultimate purpose.

The church is a school, if you will. A lot of times, school is a total drag; it makes us get up in the morning when we’d rather sleep in; it makes us do homework. When we’re adolescents we can’t wait for the day when we don’t have to go.

But at some point, when we’ve put away childish things, we realize that learning is a joy; and that in exchange for the discipline of learning, we gain new freedoms. Students who submit to their teachers gain the freedom to read and write and calculate; the dance students gain the freedom to pirouette; cello students, the freedom to play a Bach Suite for Unaccompanied Cello; and for spiritual students who submit to Christ, we gain freedoms we never imagined: the freedom to love more than we ever thought possible, even our enemies; the freedom to live without fear of death; the freedom to suffer with sober joy; the freedom to praise God in every situation; the freedom to forgive and be released from bitterness and hatred; the freedom, finally, of eternal life.

So, next time you hear someone say they’re spiritual but not religious, tell them, “Yeah, that’s like saying you believe in learning, but not in schools. Or like you believe in healing, but not in hospitals.”

“Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me,” Jesus says. “for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

We take on this obedience with our whole selves; we give ourselves to God completely; and we discover, in the process, a freedom of infinite delight, which is freedom in Christ.

Jesus vs. Gilgamesh

2011-06-05T22:51:00.000-07:00

Sermon preached Sunday June 5, 2011

Some of you may have seen the rather bizarre news story yesterday of the motorcycle police officer who was seriously injured while riding home from the funeral of a motorcycle officer who was killed while riding home from the funeral of another motorcycle officer who died in a tragic accident.

It’s almost as if we can’t escape death.

Last Thursday a friend of mine, not a member of this parish, was with his wife in his backyard, where they were in the process of burying their cat when his wife seemed to slip, and she fell and rolled down this little hill. My friend rushed to her and she was laughing, apparently uninjured, until they realized that she couldn’t get up, and then they realized she was having a stroke. Yesterday I reached him at the ICU where his wife is recovering. He said, with a kind of wonder, “It happened just like that,” and he snapped his finger. “It can happen to any of us, just like that.”

This, of course, is the most ancient of insights – this kind-of funny, quite horrible kind of surprise when we realize how close death can be.

3,000 years ago, writing on stone tablets, a man named Shin-eqi-unninni wrote down what was for him one of the oldest known works of literature, written 1,000 years before his time, known as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Many of you, no doubt, are familiar with the epic, which features the demi-god king of Uruk, Gilgamesh. He was the great hero of the ancient world, kind of the Hercules of his time; he had a sidekick named Enkidu and together they had many heroic adventures until one day Gilgamesh witnessed Enkidu’s death. Then, suddenly, there it was – the great surprise; just like that: the realization of the close proximity of death.

This sends Gilgamesh into a panic around his own mortality: does this mean I’m going to die, too? And so he goes off on an epic journey to the eternal city to find the secret to eternal life; and after many heroic deeds and many set-backs, he finds it! He finds a plant, living at the bottom of the sea, which when eaten bestows eternal life. But instead of eating the plant, he decides to take it home and test it on an old person to see if it works. But on his way home, while he is sleeping, the crafty serpent sneaks into his campsite and eats the plant! Gilgamesh wakes up to the realization that his entire heroic quest for eternal life has led to nothing; which gives birth to one of the most poignant and universal speeches in all of literature:

O woe! What do I do now, where do I go now?
Death has devoured my body,
Death dwells in my body,
Wherever I go, wherever I look, there stands Death!

His words are so similar to the traditional declaration from our prayer book, as we commit our bodies to the earth: “In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for succor….”

And so it is throughout the history of mankind: the heroic quest for the secret to eternal life, inspired by this magnificent surprise of death.

The phrase “eternal life” runs all through John’s gospel, of course; for the community that formed around John’s gospel, the secret to eternal life was not found in a plant growing in the bottom of the sea but rather in the mysterious knowledge of Jesus Christ, the son of God.

This is the message of this long, rather esoteric and difficult speech that Jesus makes to his disciples in John’s gospel. It’s the night in which he was betrayed; Judas has just been revealed as the agent of Christ’s death, and then Jesus launches into what scholars call his “farewell address” – which goes on for five chapters. Jesus knows that his time is short; and so he tries to pack all of his last words in so that the disciples are not left, as he says, as orphans, but have the necessary teaching to carry on the work of the gospel.

Those of us who have tried to read through this farewell speech would, I think, all agree that just getting through it is something of a heroic journey in itself. Of course, it’s not meant to be easy – this is true for all esoteric knowledge: it’s supposed to be difficult. Here we have the answer to the greatest and most ancient question ever asked: how do I find eternal life? Here is the answer for Gilgamesh; here is the answer for us.

“This is eternal life,” Jesus says, “that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

In this context, knowing Jesus, and believing in Jesus, and following Jesus are all one and the same thing. They all lead to a moment of recognition in which the glory of God is revealed. And at the heart of that moment of recognition is this secret knowledge found in verse five: that the glory of God revealed in Jesus is the glory that Jesus had with God before the world existed.

Raymond Brown, the great scholar of John’s gospel, tells us that this is the secret knowledge, knowledge that draws us through the glory of Christ on the cross into relationship with the most primeval of all revelations: which is the name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush: I AM.

When we declare Jesus Christ as God, the 2nd person of the Trinity, that is what we are proclaiming: that through knowledge of Jesus we are drawn to the fire of that burning bush, where the source of all life and the source of all being is revealed.
We don’t need a mythical Gilgamesh to cross the river of death in order to get to the eternal city so that he can receive the secret instruction and dive to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve the magic plant that will make him immortal, only to fail in the end. What we have in Jesus is what we need: Jesus, in his glory, raised up on the cross, humbling himself unto death out of love for us; through this sacred knowledge we find eternal life.

Death, to Jesus, was just as present as it is to us; at the Garden of Gethsemene, when he saw death approach, he was as surprised as the rest of us. But he didn’t run from it; and he didn’t try to defeat it like the mythic warriors of the ancient of days. Instead, he followed where love led; he trusted love over death; and in the process revealed the secret to eternal life.

Last September, I was sitting in a hospital room with my brother Chris. My whole family was there, and for days we were telling stories, remembering the days of our youth with him, the golden boy of the family. And so we were switching back and forth between past tense and present tense: telling stories in the past tense, and asking questions in the present tense: how are you feeling; where does it hurt; what do you want. And the day came when it was time to fly back to California; and I realized that in a very few days, we would no longer be talking about him in the present tense; very soon, we would only be talking about him in the past tense.

That was my little moment of surprise about death.

I was reminded of that the other day, as I was meditating on the Ascension, which we celebrated last Thursday and which is described in our reading from Acts. I realized that when we stand together to affirm the mysteries of our faith in the Nicene Creed, we are talking about Jesus in the past tense: He became incarnate from the Virgin Mary; he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, etc… until we get to the Ascension, when a stunning shift in tense occurs: “he ascended into heaven” (past tense) “and is seated at the right hand of the Father” (present tense) and “he will come again in glory” (future tense).

And then it hit me: when Jesus rose up into the sky, he broke the bounds of the past tense; by defeating death and ascending to the Father, Jesus eternally became present tense. Now and forever more, it’s Jesus IS, not Jesus was; just as the name of God revealed to Moses in the burning bush is I AM – present tense.

And just as my brother, now fully alive in Christ, is, forever more; present tense. I was wrong about that past tense thing; in God we are all brought into glory in the great, ever revealing, ever burning, never consuming presence of God, who lives beyond time in the eternal now.

That is where I will see him again (future tense); in the meantime I believe on Jesus, and give thanks for the love that he reveals, which is the path that I follow as long as I am present to his presence - present tense.

AMEN.

Graduation Dinner at National Press Club

2011-05-21T15:42:00.000-07:00

Divided No More

2011-04-24T12:57:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter!
This is a happy occasion, and I pray this day of resurrection finds you feeling renewed, restored, brimming with new life, and made whole.

It’s been a long rainy Lent –the season has put us through our paces.

Ash Wednesday seems like a very long time ago now. Some of you might remember Ash Wednesday, when we were here imposing ashes on our foreheads. I gave a sermon in which I encouraged you to get ambitious about your Lenten discipline. I said, try giving up something that’s so important to you that you are likely to fail at giving it up. Because Lent, really, is all about failure.

A few years ago I visited a relative of mine who had been diagnosed with emphysema. She said the doctors were really pressuring her to quit smoking. But she said, the thing is, she just loved smoking so much. Sure, she’d tried quitting many times; but you know, that first cigarette in the morning with her coffee just tasted so good; and once she’s had her first one, well, that was it, she’d be smoking through the day.

I asked her if she had tried the nicotine gum – yep, tried that, didn’t work; the patches? yep, tried ‘em; then I said, Well, have you tried praying about it?
And she looked kind of uncomfortable and said, “Nope, can’t say that I have.” I asked, “Why is that?” and she said, “Well, I guess ‘cuz it might just work!”

Last week someone asked me, Well, how is it that Jesus’ death on the cross redeems my suffering? How does that work, exactly?

I’ve been chewing on that question all week; and to answer it well would take a lot more time than we have this morning. But one thing I can say is, we know how it doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work if you really don’t want it to work.

It turns out that if you want to change, it really helps if you’re actually willing to change.

God can’t do that for you.

And it turns out that God has a hard time answering prayers if you’re not actually praying.

I wonder: is there a prayer that, like my relative, you are afraid to pray – because you’re afraid it might actually work?

For a lot of us, I think, we have such a prayer. Maybe you’re not even sure what that prayer is – you just know it’s there, waiting for you to notice it. Maybe as soon as I asked that question, it sprang to mind for you. Maybe, right at this moment, you are telling yourself that actually this whole topic is not such a good one, let’s change the subject, forget it, move on. Maybe there’s something in you that wants to pretend this whole thing isn’t happening.

Well, may I suggest you take a moment and just pay attention to that?

Maybe that prayer is the scariest thing in the world to you. If that’s true, what I need to tell you is that God is like an artist who works in the medium of joy. If your prayer is of God, there is great joy – surprising joy, unimaginable joy, complete joy – waiting for you on the other side of that prayer. In fact, it’s that joy that is calling to you now, asking you to pay attention.

All of us live with a divided self. None of us lives in complete harmony with God. What makes us Christians is not whether or not we succeed at living out that prayer; what makes us Christians is that on a regular basis we pay attention to how God is stirring within us, calling us to new life; every Sunday, and hopefully every day, we come home to ourselves; we commit ourselves to this difficult practice of repentance.

This Lent I took my own advice – I tried giving up something that I love a little too much - and during the entire season of Lent I felt like that guy in the cartoon, with the little devil on one shoulder, tempting him into folly, and that little angel on the other.

Except the truth is that the little voice of the angel – that’s not some cute little cartoony version of me with a halo around my head. That voice is actually Christ within me; who occupies my entire frame; who forms the complete man; the man I was created to be; the One who is me as I am in God’s eyes. The truth is that if we actually give those two beings a chance to compete, there is no competition – God wins, every time.

Which is, of course, what we’re afraid of. Which is, of course, why we don’t pray.
And so it typically takes some kind of crisis to bring us to the point at which we are ready to pray that prayer. Because until we get to that point, we will resist, we will dissemble, we will avoid God, we will skip church, we will do everything we can to keep God at bay lest the Holy Spirit actually wiggle Her way through the chinks in our armor and give us the means to actually turn to God with our complete selves; the courage to live lives of wholeness, divided no more.

The ancient wisdom of the church is that that courage is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes, if we’re too afraid to pray the prayer that we really need to pray, it really helps just to pray for the courage… to pray.

There’s a wonderful Greek word for all of this moment: metanoia. It has to do with this moment that my Greek dictionary calls “turning to God in pious sorrow.” For alcoholics and other addicts, it’s that moment when we have finally reached bottom; when we have given up trying to keep God at bay; when we are ready to admit that we have failed at the task of living our lives on our own terms; that we are helpless over our addiction, and then we turn to God for help.

But you don’t need to be an addict to know about this. In fact, this concept was invented by people who really had almost no idea what addiction even was.
But what they did know about was failure.

People like Peter. He thought he was strong enough and brave enough that nothing would get him to deny Jesus – nothing, except a girl, sitting around a campfire warming her hands, who innocently asks him, “Aren’t you also one of his disciples?”

We hear the cock crow; we see the blood drain from Peter’s face; his eyes go wide; it looks as though he is about to throw up; and he gets up quickly and runs away.
I imagine the others around the fire watching him run away, and the girl asking, “What’s with him?”

What’s with him is that he’s terrified of death. He’s in a panic for fear of pain and imprisonment and torture and death. Well, who wouldn’t be?

And during those three long days, while Jesus lay dead in the tomb, Peter is the most miserable of men. He is a coward; a failure; a completely humiliated disaster of a man. If he hadn’t been so afraid of death he probably would have killed himself along with Judas.

Peter has reached bottom. The absolute bottom.

And then, early on the morning of that third day, he wakes up; he opens his eyes to a quiet, cool morning; the dew on the ground is rising; for a moment, in his sleepy state, he has forgotten all that has happened, all the sadness and failure of his life is held at bay; and then he hears the women’s voices, their shouts of joy, he gets up and sees them running, a mad look on their faces: they have seen the Lord! He is risen! He is risen!

What does this mean? How can it be?

And then it’s all confusion; the women are pouring out their story to anyone who will listen; and now Peter is running, running to the empty tomb, and it seems as if he’s being carried by a spirit not his own, he’s running faster than he ever thought he could run; and now here is the tomb; here is his burial shroud, cast aside; and then: there He is.

Radiant. Whole.

It turns out that everything Peter thought was true - about God, about Jesus, about death, about failure – everything he thought was true turned out to be wrong. There is newness of life. There is forgiveness of sins – complete and total forgiveness even for him, in all his weakness and cowardice. In the light of that risen Christ, radiant, nothing matters but love. Nothing exists but love. Through this love all things come into being. In the sea of this love all of us are swimming. In this love death does not exist!

Peter comes to see, fully, what we can only glimpse on this day: that a life dedicated to love will live forever; and everything he was ever afraid of is nothing – nothing! – in the face of that all-powerful, ever joyful, unstoppable love.

And that's what gives us the courage to stand up and proclaim, Alleluia! Praise God! For He is risen!

He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

AMEN.

Letters from Paul

2011-04-07T11:21:00.000-07:00

At our Lenten Series on Wednesday April 6, Anna Eng led us through a study of Paul's first letter to Corinth, and then had us split up into three small groups with the assignment to write a letter to our church from Paul's perspective. Here's what our groups came up with:

Dear Church of the Incarnation,

I praise you for caring for one another when one is hurting or burdened, being open about decisions made, being open and welcoming, being a safe home, providing a beautiful space, having a strong desire to reach out to the needy in the community, and for being faithful in worship and prayer.

However, it has come to my attention that there is fear amongst some that if you serve the needs of people outside of the church that you might get embroiled in controversy, and a fear that this controversy will destroy the church. There is a fear of leaving the boundaries of the church, fear of the church becoming divided, and people are operating based on fear not faith. Also some fear that reaching out will make this an unsafe place to come to. People are resisting change because they are satisfied with the church as it is, and they expect outsiders to conform to the church's way of being. While being open, your diversity could be better, and pledging could be better.

I hear that some people are cutting back on pledging based on rumors without making an effort to verify whether true. [Editor's note: this, also, may be more rumor than fact.]

I challenge you to give to the church in a way that is not based on partiality or personal taste. Ask yourself, "What is the Spirit trying to do with this Church?" This should be the primary question instead of asking what ideas can we come up with ourselves or what works now. So therefore think about how you can serve the church.
What is the Spirit asking the Church of the Incarnation to do in the community and how can you, as an individual, be part of that?

You need to be honest with yourself whether you are not being authentic to the call of the Spirit, whether you are impeding change.

Set aside your judgment. You need to not be afraid to challenge one another; open up the lines of communication. Be proactive in your communication with one another; if you know people are unhappy, speak to them. And if you are unhappy you must take responsibility and go speak to the people you are unhappy with. Do not be afraid to take that first step to communicate with one another. Step out in faith and away from fear.

Blessings to you and to God be the Glory!
Paul

Dear Church of the Incarnation:

I praise you for your wish for diversity, your hospitality, variety of liturgy, concern for the poor (Living Room and Open Table), small groups, and for encouraging differing beliefs and lifestyles.

However, you could be more diverse, especially in terms of the age of your congregation. You have too few younger people. And there seems to be division among the three services: each group is entrenched in their own liturgical style. In addition, you are trying to do too many things with too few resources.

Therefore, I want you to try alternative marketing strategies and innovative liturgy, without losing the essence of what the church stands for. And I encourage you to understand one another and mix it up.

Dear Church of the Incarnation:

This is good: people are feeling welcomed with great vegan foods here. Reaching out to the women at the Living Room and the Open Table is a blessing. St. Andrew's keeps going, thanks to you! The choirs, and Numina, and small groups continue the ministry. Praise God for Father Matt.

However, it's been brought to my attention that people are not greeting with eye contact at the Peace. Others get the Farlander Blues: when they are new, no one talks to them. The number of young people and small children is low here. Where are they? What are we doing to make them feel unwelcome? The 8:00, 9:15, and 11:15 services don't have so many opportunities to meet each other - separate groups.

Therefore you should try to have a 5:00 pm service on Saturday evening or 9:00 pm Sunday - even though this has been tried, I encourage you to alter this and try again. Perhaps, more people would be available to meet up with the new ones in Farlander Hall? More vestry members or volunteers? A greeting at the door is good - but too short.

2012: The Revolution Has Begun... or not...

2011-03-19T15:52:00.000-07:00

Good friends have sent me this video, called "2012: The Revolution Has Begun". You can see it by following this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvoRat-Tl_Q

Thanks for the video link, which I watched today. I love you for sending it, and I love you enough to give you my honest response to it.

I appreciate the attention this video brings to global warming, which is no joke, and to the mass extinction currently underway. I also very much appreciate the video’s challenge to us to choose love over fear. That is probably the most important thing we can all be saying right now, and I’m so glad they targeted Fox News and TV in general – I agree with all that. I also adore the love images in this video – the revelation of the heart of God through meditation is beautifully portrayed here. I could feel myself opening up and smiling when those came on. I’ve been to that place. That part felt like going home.

However, I also have some serious issues with this video, which I regard, overall, to be more mythology than fact. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in mythology as an agent of social change, and that’s a big reason why I’m a priest. I just think it’s important to also keep your facts straight. For example, the startling claim about the GOES satellite and the electromagnetic spike on 9/11 – I notice there is no source for this graph given and I strongly doubt this claim. A quick check on the GOES’s own website says nothing about electromagnetism as something they measure. I think it is highly likely this is a fraudulent claim.

I don’t have time to research the claimed earthquake spike, but despite recent earthquakes, I’m skeptical of the veracity of that chart as well.

I also get a little pesky when people completely misrepresent the Bible, as this video does by referring to Mt 6:22 as having to do with meditation. Sorry, but that’s ridiculous – an example of something that happens all the time – the appropriation of a religious text into terms that fit someone else’s paradigm. A responsible use of Scripture honors the intent of the original author, or at least grapples with the difference between what it actually says and what we want it to say.

But the more substantive issue I have with this video is the notion, which has been around for a long time now, that through meditation the world will be transformed into a heavenly realm. The idea that a revolution in consciousness is just around the corner, and depends on our own individual spiritual practice for it to happen, is, in my opinion, a myth. As myth, it is very powerful, and like other myths it may motivate a lot of people toward life-changing behaviors that would be good for them and for the planet. I just don’t believe it’s true, factually speaking. Christians have been predicting the coming of Christ for a long time, too – that idea comes from the same impulse and the same longing as the one expressed in this video - but all efforts to predict when it will happen have been in vain, and the responsible Christian has to accept the possibility that this is more a statement about our own longing than a statement of fact.

Like I said, I honor and respect the power of myth. I proclaim “Christ will come again” as a mythological statement of ultimate trust, but connecting that to any earthly calendar (including the Mayan) is a very well-documented mistake. What happens when we get attached to those predictions is that we lose sight of the real source of that prediction, which is our own inner longing for it to be true, despite all (actual) evidence to the contrary; and then we open ourselves up to manipulation by people who want to exploit our longing.

That longing is a real thing, though, and over the centuries it has sparked all sorts of visions and proclamations, including violent and non-violent uprisings against an oppressor (Jesus was, in my opinion, caught up in, and also struggling against, the dark side of such a movement). People have been manipulated by this longing for a long time.

Which leads me to my last comment, which is that I don’t like the manipulation in this video. Even as it decries TV for its sensational fear-mongering, it uses that very same medium to make us afraid, and then exploits that fear to choose a more satisfying spiritual resolution. This then feeds a meditation workshop industry which employs many people who benefit from videos like this.

Now please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they are intentionally committing fraud or anything like that. I do think there’s some naivete going on here though. And for all the complaints that are made against Christians and organized religion among many of the folks who would love this video, this video is not much different from how priests and pastors have used fear of hellfire to emotionally manipulate their congregations, and then offering, as a satisfying alternative, the saving love of Jesus. Out of sheer relief that they are not going to burn in eternal hellfire, they readily accept the alternative, without employing the healthy skepticism they would otherwise bring to the conversation. And, how convenient that this also builds up their churches and makes the preachers fat and happy! Again, naivete plays a role here: most of them, I’m sure, sincerely believe in hellfire – but nonetheless they exploit that fear so that people will uncritically accept the very attractive alternative they offer.

This video is nowhere near that on the evilness scale – in fact, as mythology I think it’s powerful in a good way, and may well motivate people to seek inner peace and work for the good of the planet. That’s all good. I just think the idea that meditation will spark a global revolution in consciousness and bring about an era of social justice is little more than magical thinking; and I really don’t trust that guy with the hair, talking about electromagnetic fields.

I would love to be wrong on that one, by the way. What an amazing thing, if true!
So it’s not all bad. I choose a different mythology, however – a mythology that has many compatibilities with this one – but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

Thanks for listening, ML+

Innocent Killing

2011-03-14T11:20:00.000-07:00

We are all praying for the victims of the terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan. I’m sure we’re looking for ways to help; if you have a checkbook on you, or can find an envelope in which to put some cash, just write “Japan” on the memo line of your check or on the envelope and we will make sure that it gets to Episcopal Relief and Development, which is rushing assistance to the Diocese of Tohoku, which has been hit hard by the disaster.

When I heard about the tsunami on Friday, I turned the TV on and watched the stunning footage with disbelief, as I’m sure many of you did. The bit of video I still can’t get over was the sight of a fairly large ship, swept onto its side and rolling around, carried by this massive influx of water like a plastic toy in a bathtub, and you could see it headed toward a building. It looked to me like there were people, bobbing up and down, also caught in the same current, between the boat and the building, and I thought about the lives that were hanging in the balance, completely at the mercy of the random action of the water. I could see that if the boat revolved slowly it would hit the building broadside and crush those people; but if the boat turned just a little more quickly it might not hit the building at all and maybe the people would survive. Then the frame shifted and I couldn’t see what happened next.

As I was watching that massive, unrelenting destruction I found a voice within me rising in protest: This isn’t right, it was saying. I found myself begging the wave to have mercy on those caught in its grip – as if the wave could hear me; as if it cared. And then it hit me with renewed force just how brutal this world can be.

It sounds stupid now even to say something so obvious, but what the video captured for me was just how unthinking this killing was: that wave was not conscious of the people in its path; it was dumb, silent, unfeeling; the worst kind of monster – one with no reason, no mercy or pity.

The wave moved along in blissful ignorance of the destruction it brought. The wave, like the rest of the natural world, was in that way innocent, even as it killed.

This state of innocence is the elemental truth found this morning in the ancient story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden (Genesis 2:15-3:7). Sometimes we might find ourselves thinking that this is a story about a non-violent paradise – but it’s really a story about the innocence of a world that has no self-consciousness. It’s a story about the eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – which is the difference between us humans, and that tsunami.

Unlike that wave, we can see the destruction that we cause, and we know it’s a bad thing. We have eaten of that fruit of the knowledge of good and evil; for us, unlike that wave, killing can never be innocent.

When I was a child I saw my adorable standard poodle tear across an open field, chasing down a rabbit, and kill it cleanly with a snap of the neck. Then she came trotting back to me, the bloody rabbit between its teeth, and she was as happy and as proud of herself as a child coming home from school with straight A’s.

I never looked at her quite the same after that.

In the wild – the Garden of Eden, where there is no self-consciousness, no knowledge of good and evil – there is no remorse, no guilt. Until we came along, the world spun about on its axis for millions and millions of years, species evolving and going extinct on the principle of kill or be killed, and all of it as un-self-consciously innocent as that wave that hit Japan.

And then we come along, with our knowledge of good and evil, and with this gift we are categorically separated from the rest of creation. We are cast out of the garden of innocence: the Garden of blissful ignorance, the Garden of simple animal existence, the Garden in which death and life is all the same, and poodles chase down rabbits in perfect bliss.

So then: what do we do with our guilt? How do we release ourselves from it?

Well, we begin by inventing the law; we make distinctions between good and bad; and we try to enforce the law as best we can. But we discover to our dismay that the law does not restore us to the Garden of innocence; that as much as we try to live our lives in obedience to what we believe to be good, we are still animals, but guiltily; we are still killers; and there is no paradise, no place that will restore our innocence. In Paul’s terms, with the law there is always, also, condemnation.

So what do we do?

Well, along comes Jesus, who creates for us, if you will, a third stage in our evolution. If the first stage is the Garden of Eden, and the second stage is this guilt and this sense of alienation from the rest of creation, the third stage is what Jesus brings.

Consider: when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11) he was offered all the elements of evolutionary advantage: abundant food; physical invulnerability; limitless power. If he had been an ordinary alpha-male, just another strong man seeking advantage, he would have seized upon those advantages. He would have become the ultimate Muammar el-Qaddafi.

But instead he saw a new path.

As the world all around him was fulfilling its evolutionary destiny, seeking more strength; more power; more resources; seizing the advantages and opportunities offered to them, Jesus answered a call to a new way of being. Not a return to the old Garden of innocent violence, but a new place – a new creation that he called the Kingdom of God.

Jesus invited us into an evolution toward compassion and peace, rather than ruthless competition. Jesus would rather have fasted for the sake of mercy and compassion than to have eaten like an animal whatever food was offered to him. He would rather have served humanity than dominate it.

If there is a tsunami here, it is a tsunami of love, accessible to us through our relationship to God through Christ and the Holy Spirit. Ironically, it is the very consciousness that separates us from creation, the very same capacity for choice that cast us out of the Garden, that is our pathway to this new creation.

Because unlike the rest of the natural world, we have the capacity to choose love.

When Jesus rejects the advantages that are offered to him by the devil, he is not making choices that any self-respecting animal would make. No, these are the choices that a god would make. The same choices available to us, through Christ who lives in us.

As we are called to follow Jesus, we are called into the perfection of our humanity. We are called into a new paradise: made real through him; a paradise in which the sum total of all our vain striving, the sum total of all our evolutionary struggle, is brought to fulfillment and perfection in love.

Now our purpose is no longer merely to survive. Our purpose is to love. Our purpose is to serve. And to that purpose we dedicate our lives, our hearts, our souls; even, perhaps, our genetic heritage.

Now, more than ever, we are called to choose love over evolutionary advantage.

Because it is our evolutionary advantage that is leading us to extinction. Our ability to dominate and to kill is now so advanced that we threaten the very survival of our own species.

Now, more than ever, we need to follow the example of Jesus in the desert. Calling upon the power of God, made manifest in compassion and reason, we need to learn how to renounce resources, not seize them; we need to learn how to let go of our power, not impose it; so that we might live in greater balance with the earth. We need to develop our capacity for compassion for all species, because they are the key to our own survival.

And so like Jesus in the desert, we stand before God and we say yes to our humanity.
We declare that in Christ, the new creation is fulfilled. The new Adam has arrived. And in defiance of millions of years of self-serving behavior we declare, with Paul, that in Christ we live no longer for ourselves, but for him who died and rose for us, that we may find our perfection in him, who lives and reigns, now and forever.
… Amen.

Enduring Judgment

2011-02-27T12:55:00.000-08:00

Sermon February 27, 2011
8th Sunday after Epiphany

For the last few weeks we’ve been hearing from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, where he tries to help his brothers and sisters in Christ hold together despite a deep and growing rift in their community.

In fact, the schism in his church has become so intense that in today’s reading Paul addresses the topic of being judged by the members of his church:

But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me.
(1 Cor 4:3-4)

Kinda makes you wonder: what the heck did Paul do to get everyone so mad at him?

When Paul arrived in Corinth, probably around 52 AD, he found one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the Roman Empire; a city placed right in the middle of the global trade routes between Europe and Asia and so a city teeming with commerce.

And because it was in the middle of this global crossroads, Corinth was incredibly diverse. There was an enormous variety of ethnicities: Romans, Greeks, Asians, Jews; and it had a stunning religious diversity too: followers of every sort of cult, from worshipers of Apollo and Aphrodite and all the other Graeco-Roman gods, to devotees of the Egyptian gods like Isis. Poseidon was a very popular god there, thanks to the town’s shipping and fishing industries. Shrines for these different gods lined the streets of the city, populated the harbors and ran along the roads leading to and from town.

Then along comes Paul, who for the first time in human history tries to build a religious community that embraces everyone, Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, rich and poor. We have to remember how unheard of this was, this attempt to have all these different people from all over the world speaking the same language of the Spirit.

As far as we know, this is one of the first efforts at “finding unity in diversity” ever made.

It’s not surprising, then, that divisions and conflicts would have erupted. Paul stayed in Corinth for a year and a half and by the end of that time he had developed a solid, thriving Christian community. He planted the seeds; and this other guy, Apollos, stayed to water the seeds. And then, because they were still infants in Christ, the people started choosing sides – I’m for Paul; or I’m for Apollos.

Factions developed; whatever minor differences there were between them were exploited and exaggerated; people were made to choose sides and before long the community was in danger of splitting.

That’s why Paul was hearing about all kinds of judgments being made against him – nasty rumors, lies, and innuendo spread by people who just couldn’t resist the temptation of spreading the latest dirt, whether it had any basis in truth or not – not out of malice, of course, but, well, they were just so engaged and passionate and mad!

In the previous chapter, Paul addresses this conflict head on:

For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations? For when one says, "I belong to Paul," and another, "I belong to Apollos," are you not merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. (1 Cor 3:3-7)

In other words, Paul is saying to those who were splitting the community, You seem to be under the delusion that you are in charge. But none of us are in charge – it is Christ who lives in us who is in charge.

Now, on one level, this is one of those things that we hear all the time from the pulpit – yeah yeah, Christ is the head of the church, we’ve heard it before – but what Paul is saying is not just that Christ is the head of the church but that Christ is the head of each of us – each of us, individually. The unity or disunity of our church begins and ends with the unity or disunity within our own souls. Paul is not just talking about how a community works – he’s talking about how each of us work – about what’s going on at the level of our minds and hearts and souls.

We can’t begin to understand what Paul is saying about the unity of the church until we first come to understand this unity with the divine that exists within ourselves – that’s the first and most important question.

One of the great scholars of Paul’s letters puts this in modern terms by calling it “the egocentric delusion” – this delusion that we all carry within us that makes us think we are our own masters. This delusion that comes from the very structure of our minds; because we have this gift of self-consciousness; we can hear ourselves think; we watch ourselves making decisions and exercising choices and having preferences for this thing or that person and it all combines to make us feel like we are in charge of ourselves.

But we’re not - when we're living in Christ.

Consider, for example, the simple question, “Who am I?” Ask yourself that. “You are you?” And of course the answer seems obvious: “I’m me! I’m Joe Jones; I live in a little blue house at 4th and Elm; I’m the son of George Jones and Sally Smith; I love the Giants and the Raiders and my favorite color is blue. What? That’s who I am.”

That kind of answer is what Paul is talking about when he says in today’s reading that the Corinthians are being “merely human.” They are accepting who they are on face value. As one writer puts it, “They are living for themselves; seeking their own pleasures, regarding others as a means of satisfying their own desires.”

“You going to watch the Oscars tonight? What you cooking for dinner? I’m thinking of making a stew. I like stew. Can I borrow some potatoes? Yeah, I’m thinking of using Cindy’s recipe – do you like that? Did you see her hair today? I really think she’s dying it.”

And so it goes, on and on, this incessant chattering monkey mind, day in and day out... until we keel over dead.

What Paul is saying is that the people in Corinth hadn’t yet figured out the depth of who they are – that God lives in them. The Spirit of God – moving beneath the surface of their consciousness, flowing into them like an eternal stream – that Spirit – the same Spirit that searches out the very mind of God – that Spirit is alive in us.

And if that Spirit is alive in us, then it is impossible not to submit to it.

As Jesus says in today’s Gospel, “No one can serve two masters.”

And that changes everything.

In fact it changes things so radically that the question is no longer, “Who are you,” rather it becomes “What are you?” Which is how Paul puts the question: “What is Apollos?” he asks; “What is Paul?”

What are you, then?

Either you’re a servant of that Spirit of God, living inside you, or you’re dead already and you don’t even know it. Either you are rising to new life in Christ or you’re just marking time until the grave comes.

And if you’re a servant of that Spirit, if Christ is living in you and you’re living for Christ, you are no longer in charge.

And when these Spirit-filled people come together to worship their God, the Spirit speaks through them and moves among them and all of their divisions and all of their petty cultural differences fall away because they have joined the household of God.
Which is why, in today’s reading, Paul says we are “stewards of God’s mysteries.”

The stewards are put in charge of managing the estate – they are not the owner themselves. The work we do on behalf of God does not belong to us.

This church does not belong to us. The pew that you’re sitting on is not “your pew.” The fact that any of us even exist is utterly and entirely an expression of the glory of God.

To those who are judging him, then, Paul says, “We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute.”

In human terms, Paul says, this is nothing but foolishness. In fact, by the world’s standards, by the standards of all those who would judge him or Apollos, they have become “a spectacle to the world.” A laughingstock; an object of contempt and ridicule. Yes, Paul says, “We are fools for the sake of Christ.”

It’s this foolishness in Christ – this complete submission to the Spirit of God living within him – that gives Paul, then, the ability to endure the judgments laid against him:

When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we speak kindly.

This is the same unity with the Spirit of God that inspired Jesus, in last week’s gospel, to say, “You have heard that it was said, `You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

It’s important to understand this: Paul’s advice to them was not just “play nice.” He didn’t say, “C’mon everyone, can’t we all just get along?” Instead, he challenged them to look more deeply into who they were, or more accurately, into what they were serving. By pitting Paul against Apollos, they were that they were still infants; still acting like children; and they had a lot of growing up to do.

It wasn’t Paul that changed their lives, it was God, working through Paul; it wasn’t Apollos whose spirit rang through them when he prayed with them, it was God, working through Apollos.

My prayer for us, as we all grow up in Christ, is that we will focus ever more deeply on the source of our joy. It is not me; it is not Melissa or Carol; it is not Harold or Leslie; it is not the organ; it is not this building; it is not this prayer book; it is not this hymnal. Tomorrow, in the blink of an eye, all this can be gone.

I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.

I say this to you in the name of the one who lives and moves and has its being within us, Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

The Geographical Solution

2011-01-31T11:01:00.000-08:00

Sermon: January 30, 2011
Epiphany 4, Year A

Text: 1 Corinthians 1: 22-25
Matthew 5: 1-12

A lot of people have been very good about asking me how I’m doing in the wake of P. K.’s suicide. You know that P. was a friend as well as a member of the parish, and I am grateful for your words of support.

The very first thing we need to keep in mind, of course, is how our friend S. is doing, and her son, D., and P.s’s two children, G. and J. We need to be supporting them, sending them our love, praying for them. We can only imagine what they are going through.

Speaking for myself – and I do so only because I suspect I am not alone with these feelings – I have felt the presence of God throughout this time of terrible grace.

P’s memorial service was as healing for me as I hear it was for many of you. And I want you to know that I have taken my own advice – I have been spending more than the usual amount of time in retreat and prayer; I have been talking to friends and opening myself to the consolations of God’s healing love.

But I also want you to know that I am not “fine.” This is hard for me. I know that I will get to the point when I’m not thinking about P. pretty much every 30 seconds, but that seems a long way off for me right now. I have been opening myself to God’s gift of acceptance but I’m not there yet.

I found myself the other day dreaming about an exotic vacation – getting away to someplace else, someplace nice; someplace where it doesn’t hurt so much. Like anyone who is in pain I want the pain to go away. But I realized I could go to the other side of the moon and this pain would follow me there.

As a preacher once said, “There’s no geographical solution for the human condition.” There is no amusement park or shopping center or movie theater that lets you check your old coat of grief at the door and just leave it there. There’s no drug, no TV show, no job that is powerful enough to make us forget our pain for good.

Since the beginning of time we humans have been trying to run away from our pain. If we could just make more money; if we could just get that new house; if we could just move to the south of France….

Well, who can blame us for trying?

So where do we go with our pain?

There’s something to be said for the Buddhist approach – if life is suffering, and suffering is inevitable, then cultivating a capacity for detachment makes sense. Christians could all learn a thing or two from the Buddhists about how this is accomplished – and of course, learning to let go is at the heart of all Christian prayer. So that’s one place to go: detachment.

But then we have St. Paul – mad, whimsical, difficult Paul – who dares suggest another route. A different kind of geographical solution, if you will. He suggests we travel to the lovely vacation spot of Golgotha. The place of the skull. In the depths of our suffering, he says, travel to the cross.

“For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified…”

Foolishness – no?

Some scholars believe the place where Jesus was killed not only served as a place for executions; it was also a place for dumping your trash. It was a place outside the walls of the city; a place of filth and devastation; packs of stray dogs on the loose, birds picking at the corpses.

Why would anyone want to go there?

Paul had one of the finest educations of his time. He had studied the Greeks; he had been a star pupil in his studies as a Pharisee; he had traveled widely, enough to meet plenty of rich, well-educated, well-fed people who were also despondent. He saw that their learning had not solved the uneasiness of their hearts.

When I was a young man, searching for God and the meaning of life, hitch-hiking all over the United States, living in communes and ashrams and homeless shelters, sleeping on beaches and under freeways, I kept thinking there must be some religion out there that had the key. I imagined a place somewhere – somewhere, perhaps, over the rainbow - a community of enlightened souls; a place where Wisdom was cherished and nurtured. I would find a guru who had found the right meditation, the right technique, the right teaching, and I could go there and be with him, and find the Truth that would set me free.

But everywhere I went, I kept running into the human condition. Gurus who slept with their disciples; disciples who were just as petty, and shallow, and anxious for status, just as manipulative and dishonest as anyone outside the ashram.
In other words, I kept running into the human condition.

But the alarming thing was how everyone in the ashram would practice a careful kind of blindness with respect to this condition; they kept nurturing the fantasy that someday they, too, would lift themselves by their karmic bootstraps and slip the bonds of the human condition, like Harry Houdini escaping from a straight jacket.

And so it seemed to me there was a kind of state of denial about the fact that, at least as far as I could see, they were still pretty normal, flawed people. One minute they would be describing their latest ecstatic epiphany, and the next minute they’d be bitterly complaining, or furiously gossiping, or sneaking off to the 7-11 for a Hostess Twinkie.

And then I met some Christians. I was suspicious; I didn’t want to get too close to them; I disagreed with some of them about their interpretation of Scripture and it seemed to me that many of them were in the thrall of a homophobic panic; I saw that they, too, were no better or worse than the disciples in the ashram; there was just as much pettiness and hypocrisy among the Christians as anywhere else; but the only difference was they freely admitted that they were just as full of it as the next person.

Someone once said that the only thing that distinguishes Christians from everyone else is that they know they are sinners.

Nobody is better than anyone else.

The homeless folks who show up here on Sunday morning for food and hot coffee – the thing about that ministry is not that we feed hungry people. Anyone can put food out for hungry people. What makes it Christian is that we all know that not one of us is any better than any of them.

We are all equally full of it.

On one level, that’s not very encouraging. But you know what? As a starting point, it’s not a bad one. When I saw that in my Christian friends, I could see some wisdom there.

The cross, raised high for everyone to see – set in the middle of a dump.

I heard a preacher, admired and celebrated, who spoke openly about his struggles with depression. I had never heard a guru admit to any such failing. That impressed me. He said that a lifetime of prayer and meditation hadn’t achieved what six months with good therapy had. He said that if we didn’t pay attention to the simple basic rules of mental and physical health, we would only be chasing our tails. He talked about paying attention to the body – and not some impressive athlete’s body; not the body we think we should have, or will have as soon as we get around to going back to the gym and losing those 10 or 20 pounds – but our bodies as they are: flab and wrinkles and all. He talked about how facing down our shame about our bodies and honoring the blessing of our bodies was the beginning of wisdom.

That impressed me.

I read the writings of Martin Luther and how he wrote his sermons while sitting in the outhouse.

What kind of religion is this, I wondered?

Well, it seems to be a religion without illusions. It seems to be a religion without pretense; a religion that has come to terms with the human condition. A religion where I could begin to just be… myself. With all my insecurities and failings; all of my anger and all of my shame and all of my selfishness – I could take it to the town dump; I could take it to the cross. And there, at the heart of this religion, there, at the very beginning of it all, I would find all of it –the worst of the human condition – all the crap of the world: lust for power; violence against the innocent; persecution of the poor; public humiliation; judgment and shame in every shape and form; abject failure; including the ultimate failure - death itself – there it all was.

All of my pain. All of my suffering. All of my bruised ideals and crushed hopes. Everything that I had ever been ashamed of. Every bit of myself that was death to me.

Blessed. Forgiven. Made whole.

What happens when the worst thing in the world takes place: Christ has died. And worse, we’re the ones who betrayed him. What happens when even that crime is forgiven, and blessed?

What happens when everything you’ve been ashamed of is suddenly made whole?

What happens when everything you’ve been trying to let go of is suddenly ...gone?

What’s left?

Maybe what’s left is the only thing that ever existed in the first place: love.

And blessing:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit.
"Blessed are those who mourn.
"Blessed are the meek.
"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
"Blessed are the merciful
"Blessed are the pure in heart.”

That’s the starting point: blessing.

Where we go from there – well, that’s the great adventure.

All I know is that we’ll get there together.

Somebody say, AMEN.

Prayer for the Despondent

2011-01-23T23:43:00.000-08:00

Holy One, comforter to the broken-hearted: bless all those who struggle with depression or despair. Inspire them to reach out for support; give them strength and courage to endure their pain; console those who love them and feel helpless in their love; guide the minds and hearts of all their counselors, therapists and physicians. See to it that their burdens are laid down, and that their families are brought together, in the Spirit of that Love which lives and moves and has its being within all of us. Amen.

Prayed at Peter Kingston's Memorial Service, 1/23/11
ML+, author

Peter Kingston, RIP

2011-01-23T22:40:00.000-08:00

Homily for Peter Kingston's memorial service, January 23, 2011.
The Rev. Matthew Lawrence, Rector
The Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, Santa Rosa, CA

Shirlee asked that we read this familiar story of the Good Samaritan because it was, for Peter, something of a defining text. Peter, growing up within the cold stone walls of a British boarding school, heard this story preached with regularity during mandatory chapel services, and took it to heart. He became devoted to a path of service; a true believer in the old-fashioned ideals of chivalry and honor; love for God and love for neighbor.

Peter sincerely felt the obligations of his class - but far more than that, he felt a deep empathy and compassion for everyone who suffered.

Jamie told me this week that the only person Peter didn’t like was a bully; as a good-sized athlete, Peter never had a problem with bullies himself, but he often witnessed bullying behavior in the sometimes brutal atmosphere of the boarding school, and he always rose to the defense of the weaker boys. Once, we are told, he held a bully by the ankles out a window.

The Good Samaritan goes out of his way to help those in need. We only wish he had practiced the same compassion on himself; that he had found a way to defeat the nagging, bullying voice inside his own head.

The word “compassion” literally means “to suffer with.” In acts of compassion we enter into another person’s suffering; sometimes, like the Good Samaritan, compassion can lead us to literally take on the weight of another’s suffering.

As I imagine this story from Luke’s Gospel I see Peter coming across that man lying half dead by the side of the road, and lifting him into his rower’s arms, effortlessly, without a second thought.

It was not the suffering of others that ever weighed him down; it was his own. Peter would be the one who ignores the advice of the flight attendant about the oxygen masks, making sure everyone else had theirs on before securing his own.

The Samaritans were the most despised members of Jesus’ society; they were considered morally impure; idolaters; even subhuman. The Samaritans knew suffering on a profound level. Which was how they learned about compassion.

Like Peter, the Samaritans came to learn one of life’s hardest lessons and deepest consolations – that suffering opens us to love.

It’s a good thing that some good comes from suffering – because look how we’re suffering now. Perhaps Peter’s death will inspire us all to have more compassion for those who suffer, often in silence, with the deep and lonely pain of clinical depression.

It is a sad testimony to the devastating effects of depression that someone as loving and kind as Peter – the last person on the earth to ever want to hurt anyone – would find himself doing something that hurt us this much.

In his final days, Peter spoke - quite lucidly - about feeling incoherent. It struck us as odd because to us he always seemed so reasonable, so well-assembled. But now we know just how incoherent he was. We have caught a glimpse into the unreasoning depth of his despair – that he would do something so senseless and so completely out of character.

Since those first, horrible moments when we heard of his suicide, we’ve all been looking for answers. That night, the first thing we did was search his house, his computer, his phone, looking for a note, a text, an email, anything that could help us understand this senseless thing.

But that’s just it. There is no sense to this. This is literally the act of a man whose illness drove him from his senses.

There is no reason that explains his desperate act – the only reason is not a reason: that he died from a terrible illness.

Survivors of suicide all have this in common – we all feel guilty; we all feel we should have known; we blame ourselves for not having read the signs. And every single person who has ever lost a loved one to suicide feels this way. We're all in this club, now.

But this is what we know. Peter died of an illness. There was not a single challenge in his life that a healthy person could not have survived. A healthy person can survive the closing of a school, the loss of a job. But Peter’s very severe and very private illness weakened him too much to hold on any longer. Like a house whose foundation has crumbled and whose timbers have been eaten away, he blew over in a wind storm.

So if there is one thing that each and every person here needs to take home today it is this: This was not your fault. Don’t give his depression that victory.

Today, in your deep sorrow: maybe you might feel like this death is a withering blow. Maybe you feel like the one left by the side of the road, beaten, robbed of sense, alone. And maybe you are the one that’s been beating yourself up.

If that’s true, let this story of the Good Samaritan speak to you. Even now, at this very moment, your rescuer is approaching. He sees that you are in pain. He comes down from his horse and kneels beside you. Let him left you into his arms. Let him bind up your wounds. Let him take you someplace safe.

This is no time to refuse his help; this is no time to pretend you are fine; this is no time to try to be the good Samaritan to the Good Samaritan himself. Allow yourself be cared for, and looked after, and loved.

If you’re anything like Peter; if you, too, walk this earth with a heart that’s a little too open, and a little too broken; if you, like Peter, are a little bit too eager to care for others while your own wounds go untreated; if the only time you let yourself sit still is when you’ve been beaten-up by life’s many challenges; do us all a favor: sit with this story. Make friends with the Good Shepherd. And let yourself be loved.

Amen.

Given, to the Glory of God...

2011-01-18T11:44:00.000-08:00

It feels like I’ve been away for awhile. I would like to take this opportunity to put to rest any rumors you might have heard that I was taken away by men in white coats after the Christmas Eve service. There is no truth to that rumor. But I did go into hiding after Christmas - to finish my doctoral thesis, which I’m happy to report was accomplished – and then I took a few days of vacation to catch my breath and prepare for the New Year.

As some of you know, I rather needed the break. During the Christmas services, a couple members of our congregation expressed concern for me – one said, “I recognize the signs of depression in you.” I was a little bit surprised by this – because actually, I really haven’t been feeling all that depressed. It’s a little more complicated than that, actually - and also not very complicated at all.

The not-complicated part simply has to do with the stress of finishing my doctoral thesis. It’s not easy doing that while also working full time through Advent and Christmas. So if I seemed a little distant or pre-occupied during that time, that’s a big reason.

But the more complicated part, coincidentally, has to do with some of the themes we’re dealing with this morning, as we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus, and dedicate our new stained glass windows to the glory of God and in memory of Don McIntyre and Diane Williams.

I know this is going to sound kind of strange, but in a way I’ve been kind of envying those stained glass windows.

Let me explain.

There was a preacher once who was giving a children’s homily and he asked the kids if they knew what a saint was, and a little girl raised her hand and pointed at a stained-glass window and said, “The saints are the ones that the light shines through.”

Which is just about the best definition of a saint I’ve heard.

People who have had religious or mystical epiphanies often describe their experience in terms of light, a superabundant light that illumines everything, including their own minds and hearts and souls. People who meet them during these times say that they seem to be lit from within.

They say this is what it’s like to experience the glory of God - the Greek word for “glory” that’s found in the Scriptures – “doxa” – means (among other things) the brightness of God, shining like the sun – the angels are said to manifest God’s glory in the magnificent, uncreated light they give off.

Some of us have had a taste of this glory when we’ve dedicated ourselves to God. Just like when we dedicate a stained glass window, we say that the window is “dedicated, to the glory of God, in memory of so-and-so.”

During the season of Advent and Christmas, with all the talk about the light coming into the world and lighting of the candles and the following of the star, and then with the new year and the dedication of Jesus and all the to-do about New Years’ Resolutions, I was feeling like that was what was missing in me; I needed to find a new way of dedicating myself to the glory of God – and I wasn’t sure how that would happen.

In today’s Gospel Jesus dedicates himself to the glory of God by submitting to baptism. Everyone is mystified by this: Why would Jesus need to be baptized? John the Baptist tries to talk him out of it. But Jesus knows what he has to do. Maybe he was feeling a little bit like me, I don’t know.

But he kneels down in the river; he bows his head; he lifts his heart and opens himself up… and in response, the heavens open up; and they are flooded with the uncreated light of God’s glory - and a voice is heard: This is my son, the beloved; with whom I am well pleased.

This is why I was kind-of been envying those windows. I wanted to be like that image of Jesus back there in the “artichoke window” – I wanted to feel God’s light shining through me. I wanted to be “Given, to the Glory of God…”
…but the more I craved that light and that Glory, the more aware I became of the shadow side of all this brilliance.

A few weeks ago we had a lunar eclipse on the same night as the Winter Solstice; a very rare event, apparently; so Rose and I stayed up and watched the shadow of our earth, with all our busyness and striving and consuming, overwhelm that round full moon; until the moon turned into a red ball, like a hot coal, covered in a layer of ash, glowing in the darkness.

It took about an hour for the moon to be completely covered; Rose had to get up early the next morning so she went to bed and I stayed up for another hour or so, staring at that moon, meditating on light and shadow. It was kind of confusing, spiritually, in the midst of all our bright Christmas celebrations, in the middle of my own existential yearning for light and for Glory - to shift my focus a little bit - to pay a little attention to shadow… but it felt that God was encouraging me to let go of all my striving after light for a little bit…

This was not easy for me.

Maybe I’m not the only one who feels the presence of that shadow side a little more keenly than we’d like; and the more it seems to overwhelm us, the more urgently we run the other way.

So I just stopped running. And I found myself in a pretty dark place. And I was there for a while.

And then, one day, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to talk about it. And so I did – to my best friend; to my men’s group; and then, finally, when she got home after being away for a week, with my wife. For a couple hours I poured it all out for her – my grief, my anger, my sorrow, my doubt – and she just listened, and listened…

That’s when I realized it’s one thing to be wallowing in your own darkness; it’s another thing entirely to take someone’s hand, and step into that territory together. It’s as if the friend brings a light with her; just having someone with you makes a huge difference.

And when we were done, I felt like we had gone into the heart of my darkness together; and it felt like, in the middle of all that muck and shadow, a door opened just a crack; and the light came streaming in.

The words from John's Gospel come to mind: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overwhelm it."

Since then, some amazing things have been happening – too many things to talk about today – but amazing moments when the Spirit broke into my life in fresh ways; when the heavens opened up and a dove, so to speak, descended.

Since that time, I’ve been doing the work of dedicating myself, all over again, to the glory of God. As I think about and plan for the coming year of ministry and service, I feel a fresh energy to dedicate this year to God.

These moments of glory have reminded me, all over again, of some fundamental rules for the spiritual life:

1. We are not meant to do this work alone. Jesus could have baptized himself; but he went instead to John, and to his community. We all need spiritual companions, people who are not afraid of the dark; who can hold our hands and explore the depth of our lives together. The person doesn’t need to be a professional listener – they just need to listen. Sometimes we need to say, “I’ve got to talk to somebody – would you mind just listening for a little while?” or “Thanks, but I’m really not looking for advice right now. I just need to talk. Is that okay?”

2. Some of us, on the other hand, do need a professional listener, and when we do, we should get one. If you ever feel like you could use one, and you don’t know where to start, consider making a call to your friendly neighborhood priest.

3. The more we run away from our shadow, the more quickly it will overwhelm us.

4. Artificial light – man made light – is no substitute for the light of God; all the urgent , all busyness, all our striving, doesn’t begin to penetrate the shroud.

5. There are no shortcuts.

6. Finally, some things about God. God is playful, and joyful, and fun. God is surprising; God doesn’t give up on us. And the more we dedicate ourselves to God, the more light will shine through us.

This is a time of dedication; as we affirm our Baptismal vows, let’s take a moment to rededicate ourselves to Christ; that we might be given, to the Glory of God.

Somebody say... AMEN.

Irony, Ambivalence and Christmas

2010-12-13T13:21:00.000-08:00

Sermon preached December 12, 2010
Advent 3 Year A

Good Morning.

So here we are, once again, with Christmas hurtling toward us like a snowball headed for our face; we are caught up in the excitement of the season even as we anticipate the pain it is sure to also bring us…

Whether that pain is felt in the emptiness of our pocketbooks or the emptiness we feel in the massive, glittering rush toward consumerism, we feel it. Even as we see the joy on the faces of the children; even as we remember our own excitement when as children we knew that Santa Claus was on his way – even in the midst of all of that, Christmas can also feel like a time of loss, as we remember loved ones and better times.

Which means it is time, once again, for my annual sermon on ambivalence and irony, and the fact that it’s perfectly okay to hold onto two completely inconsistent and incompatible truths simultaneously; how it is perfectly acceptable to mutter Bah Humbug even as we shout Merry Christmas…

They say that it’s a mark of intelligence and emotional maturity if you can hold two contradictory positions at the same time.

Albert Einstein, for example, made his great breakthrough in physics when he realized that an object can, in fact, be both at rest and in motion. Apparently this insight led him to the theory of relativity.

And so it is about Christmas: Within the giant gift bag of Christmas there are so many contradictory elements and feelings that it’s a wonder the whole thing doesn’t explode.

In one simple holiday we find boatloads of generosity and also of greed; hackneyed sentimentalism and thrilling new insights; indecent waste and profound simplicity.
This is a time, in other words, for a healthy appreciation of ambivalence and irony.

Consider, for example, this wonderful irony: that Christians have historically been the biggest opponents of Christmas.

It started, of course, long before the birth of Jesus, with our suspicion of paganism. 600 years before Jesus was born, pagans would cut down small trees this time of year, bring them into their homes, and decorate them with silver and gold.

It looked like a nice thing to do and pretty soon the Jews at the time of King Josiah started to do it, too; that is, until the prophet Jeremiah found out about this and condemned the practice as a dangerous flirtation with paganism. (Jer. 10: 2-4). If Jeremiah had had his way, all this decoration of trees would have ended way before Jesus came along.

800 years later, in Roman culture, the same issue comes up. The festival of the winter solstice lasted a full week, during which time the birth of the god-man savior was celebrated, and many of the traditions that we associate with Christmas – the giving of gifts, lots of decorations and parties and general revelry – were practiced. Depending on the customs of your local household or village, you had your choice of divine-human savior gods, including Appolo, Baal, Dionysus, Helios, Hercules, Osiris, Theseus, and half a dozen others. At some point a little consistency was needed, so in the year 270 or so AD the Emperor Aurelian blended all of these Pagan solstice celebrations of the god-man into a single festival called the "Birthday of the Unconquered Sun" and established the date for these celebrations as December 25.

So of course, many of the early Christians simply declared December 25 as the birthday of Jesus Christ’s birth and adopted all of these parties as birthday parties for Jesus, and everyone was happy.

Except Tertullian, the great church father, who warned his flock in the strongest of terms not to imitate the pagan traditions. Apparently his voice was not heard over the singing of Christmas carols.

14 centuries after Tertullian, the debate still raged, in the form of Oliver Cromwell campaigning against the “the heathen traditions" of Christmas carols and decorated trees – just as the Puritan founders of our country fulminated against the “pagan mockery” of Christmas traditions.

And so we should not be surprised when we hear about Christians today making the same ancient arguments against Christmas – and we suspect they will get about as far with their arguments as Tertullian did.

It does make you wonder, though, whether Bill O’Reilly and all the other righteous defenders of Christmas have studied this issue as carefully as they might. At any rate, they certainly don’t seem to appreciate irony very much, which is proof, perhaps, of Emerson’s saying, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

We know, of course, that Christmas did not really take over as the massive marketing bonanza it is today until just over a century ago. In the 19th Century “schools and businesses remained open, [and] Congress met in session...” during Christmas. “Major American denominations – Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, Methodists and Congregationalists – either ignored the holiday or actively discouraged it...”

As for the Episcopalians… well, let’s just say that we have never been very good Puritans, just as we have always cherished a healthy sense of irony. The Puritans came to this land to get away from people like us, and were dismayed when we followed them to the New World, what with our fondness for spiked eggnog and suspiciously pagan party favors.

All of which leads us to the scripture this morning – which I’m sure you were wondering about – which is simply to point out the wild disparity between Christmas as it is practiced, and Christmas as it is intended by the historical heart of our faith. Because, while the rest of the Western world gorges itself in an orgy of consumerism, we are asked by our Bible to stop for a moment and reflect on the true meaning of all of this, which has to do with the irrepressible hope for justice for the poor. It has to do with the unquenchable longing for a godly revolution; the overturning of this corrupt present order; the final establishment of God’s reign over a world that has sold its soul for a few shiny trinkets.

While the rest of the world rushes headlong into the never-ending quest for the year’s hottest new iPhone, we are asked by Isaiah to turn our thoughts to those who have nothing.

Isaiah’s people have been defeated by the iron boots of Babylon; they have been removed from their homes and forced to live in a foreign land; for fifty years they have been living in exile; the very memory of what they have lost is beginning to fade; Isaiah, the great prophet of God, has been dead for many years; people are wondering how they could ever have thought of themselves as God’s chosen people; their once proud and great religion is a fading memory.

That’s when one of Isaiah’s old disciples, whom we call 2nd Isaiah, catches a whiff of hope, and stands up in the midst of the people and dares to proclaim these words:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus; it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing…. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, "Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God.

Our God is a God of hope... for those who have nothing left but hope.

And so it is that, 500 years later, in the darkness of a brutal occupation, in a time when any reasonable person would give up on hope, Jesus suggests that we adjust our perspective; and pay attention to what is happening among the poor:

The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.

When will we know that Christmas has arrived? Not when the calendar hits the arbitrary date of Dec. 25; but when a family in Haiti is able to move out of a tent into a house. When will Christmas arrive? When girls in Afghanistan are allowed to go to school without fear of being shot by the Taliban. When will Christmas arrive? When perhaps the flood waters stop rising because we have found a solution to global warming.

In the midst of our dread and anxiety, we proclaim a Christmas hope. It has come to us to bear this hope into the world; that is our job. We proclaim our hope, not just for ourselves, but especially for the poor and the dispossessed. This is not a hope in our own strength, but in the grace and mercy of God, who even now is coming into the world to save us.

This is Christmas – to stand, despite our weak hands and feeble knees; to sing out, despite our fear; to proclaim our hope, despite our ambivalence; to stake our lives on God, despite our healthy sense of irony. And so we stand with 2nd Isaiah as we proclaim his words:

Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, "Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God.”

May it be so. Amen.

"A Good Day" With Brother David Steindl-Rast

2010-11-09T11:10:00.000-08:00

The Afterlife? Really?

2010-11-08T23:35:00.000-08:00

The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
November 7, 2010
Proper 27: Job 19: 23-27a; Luke 20: 27-38

The Afterlife? Really?

As most of you know, I’ve been away to attend the funeral of my brother, Chris. First, I flew to Taiwan to represent my family at his funeral there. It was held on a dreary, rainy Saturday last week, in a little chapel at the top of a mountain overlooking Taipei. There was a jazz band, and an organ, and the pastor spoke his words of comfort, and some others told their stories of affection, and we all sang our songs of love.

Then it was off to Minneapolis, where my family gathered with dear old friends in the Episcopal cathedral there; and again there was a jazz band, and an organ, and the pastor spoke his words of comfort, and some others told their stories of affection, and we all sang our songs of love.

But one thing that was different between the two services was that in Minnesota the priest began the service with the traditional words from our burial liturgy, which happen also to be the words assigned to us this morning from the book of Job:

I know that my Redeemer liveth
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;
and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God;
whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.
-Job 19: 25-27a

These words have been ringing in my heart ever since.

One of the many favors that my family did for me on this trip was that they gave me permission to not be a priest. I wanted to speak about my brother, but just as a brother, not as a priest. I wanted someone else to be on the job; I wanted someone else to do the work of making sense of all this; because I wasn’t sure that I could.

The Dean of the Cathedral in Minneapolis started his remarks by saying, “How do you say Alleluia and Goodbye at the same time?” I thought that was a wonderfully poignant line, and I made a mental note to steal it.

How do we celebrate with joy and thanksgiving the life of our loved ones, and at the same time express our grief and heartbreak in an authentic way?

A great question. And both of the pastors, in their own way, answered that question with their words of comfort. He will be waiting for us, they said, on the other side. He is with us, even now, in our hearts, just as he is fully alive in heaven.
As I sat in my pew, I felt my heart leaping to embrace these words of comfort, even as I felt my mind doubting them.

“Really,” I wondered? Is my brother really out there, waiting for me on the other side? Even as I felt comforted by those words, I felt suspicious of them. How do we know we aren’t telling ourselves these words of comfort just because we need that comfort so much?

And for a mad, schizophrenic moment I found myself both believing, and disbelieving, at the same time. What my heart was embracing as truth, my rational mind was holding me back, doubting, skeptical, removed.

Is there an afterlife, or not? After all, the Bible is notoriously fuzzy on this point. With the exception of Job’s poetic declaration, and some pretty ambiguous references in the Psalms and maybe Isaiah, the case for an afterlife in the Old Testament is not terribly compelling. The realm of the dead, when it’s mentioned at all, is described as a shadowy, subterranean place. The overwhelming emphasis in the Hebrew Bible is on this life, not the next one; God’s judgment, and God’s kingdom, are most definitely described as happening on this earth, in this existence, not in some heaven up in the clouds. Definite ideas about an afterlife only began to take hold after the Babylonian exile, and then later under the influence of the Persians and the Greeks, when the Jews were exposed to more dualistic ideas about a spiritual reality beyond the physical body.

So, needless to say, I was feeling somewhat conflicted about all this.
And it seems that the Holy Spirit noticed this conflict in me because ever since that service in Taipei, the universe has been conspiring to get me to deal with it: Friday night in our hotel room, Clint Eastwood appears on TV to talk about his new movie, The Hereafter, (a wonderful film, by the way) which is all about the afterlife. In the interview, Eastwood says that, even though he made the movie, he isn’t sure himself what he believes about it. On the flight home from Minnesota, a TV show features a doctor and a patient arguing about the existence of heaven. And then I come home to this Sunday, in which we not only have this direct quote from my brother’s funeral, but also a gospel reading in which Jesus debates the existence of the afterlife with the Saducees.

Even Garrison Keillor gets in on the act, yesterday, by telling the story of the men’s club up there in Lake Wobegon called the Sons of Bernie, or SOBs for short. The SOBs get together every Tuesday night in somebody’s basement, where they sit around and debate the great philosophical questions of the day like Is there an afterlife, and then after 15 minutes somebody rings a bell and they all stop talking, go outside in the snow, and sing songs while jumping up and down.

Which seems like probably the best advice. At times like these, the ancients advise, intellectual arguments only get you so far; and then the best thing to do is to get outside, jump up and down, and sing some old songs.

It pains me to admit this, but it’s true.

We didn’t do a lot of jumping up and down at my brother’s funeral, but Episcopalians have our own version of that: we stand and sit and kneel…

So I should probably just quit right now then; except you don’t pay me to sing and I still have a couple minutes on the clock, so I should probably say a little something about Jesus.

Hmmm: Maybe Jesus can even answer my question.

This story in Luke’s gospel comes toward the end of his life – when Jesus is in Jerusalem; which makes sense because that’s where the Sadducees used to hang out. The Sadducees were a big part of the Temple cult system; they got their name from Zadok, who was a Temple priest in the 10th Century BC; Zadok was one of King David’s most loyal priests; his descendants – the Saddouk - were appointed to officiate at the Temple after the return from exile. The Sadducees were a very conservative line of priests; they only used the first 5 books of the Bible, and since they could find no evidence for an afterlife in the Torah, they refused to believe in the resurrection.

And this is what made them sad, you see…

But what’s interesting about this gospel story is this. As I mentioned, we’re getting toward the end here: Jesus is in the Temple and talking about his death and resurrection quite openly; and the Sadducees don’t much like this guy coming into their house and teaching some doctrine that they think goes against the first five books of the Bible. So when they come to Jesus and start to argue with him, Jesus uses a story from the book of Exodus:

"And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob."

In other words, God didn’t say, “I WAS the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob;” God says, “I AM” their God – in other words, they are still alive; that relationship still continues; I am the God of the living, not the dead; and to God, “all of them are alive.”

The first time I read this story, I have to say I didn’t find it very convincing. I thought, well Jesus is just using a technical point of grammar to make his argument. It reminded me of Bill Clinton saying, “It depends on what your definition of the word ‘is’ is.” I mean, here we are debating one of the great questions of mankind – what happens after we die – and the entire weight of this question, this mountain of a question, this question that every human being has been asking since the very beginning of consciousness – is answered by this tiny point of grammar?

Really?

But then I thought, of course. This is exactly the kind of argument the Sadducees would have appreciated. Jesus is in their house so he is speaking their language, and beating them at their own game. Jesus is showing his brilliance, his complete mastery, in terms that only they could appreciate.

Which is what gives this story its ring of truth.

And now Jesus is speaking my language, because the more you study this story, the more it looks like Jesus’ own words, singing off the page; and as I dig into it more deeply it feels like Jesus is speaking directly to me.

And then it occurs to me, maybe Jesus actually knows what he’s talking about.
Maybe I could give Jesus a little bit of credit for knowing a thing or two about the afterlife. Of those who have died, he says,

"Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection."

One thing we know about Jesus, he wasn’t much interested in saying things just to make people feel comfortable. To Jesus, these are not just words of comfort spoken to grieving mortals desperate to see their loved ones again. No, these are words of challenge, to people in power who are out to get him. It would have been far easier for Jesus to have spoken agreeable words, to have gone along with the program – in fact, it could well have saved his life. But Jesus had a truth that was burning inside him; Jesus was carrying a truth that needed to be spoken, a song that needed to be sung, even if it killed him.

And so he spoke his truth – because he knew it to be true. And that knowledge eliminated his fear of death, and gave him the courage to sing his song of faith.

So I guess if Jesus knew it to be true, that’s good enough for me. And that’s how these other words, from the book of Job, come alive as well:

I know that my Redeemer liveth
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;
and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God;
whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger.

So now, like the Sons of Bernie, let’s ring the bell, and stop talking, and jump up to sing this ancient song of our faith, the mysterious words of the Nicene Creed….

Skiing the black diamond moguls

2010-10-25T00:46:00.000-07:00

Sermon: October 24, 2010
The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Incarnation Episcopal Church, Santa Rosa
Text: 2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18; Luke 18: 9-14 (Year C Proper 25)

It’s good to see you. I was out of town last week, at a conference in Indiana; and so I missed being with you as I began to come to terms with my brother’s death, which happened last Monday the 11th.

My brother, Chris, was the number 3 child in our family of 5 kids; I was number 4; we were two years apart. He was a healthy, confident boy and a graceful athlete; he had bright blond hair and a big smile and an irrepressible, goofy sense of humor. I adored him as only a little brother can; I followed him everywhere. I watched everything he did and tried my hardest to be just like him.

Chris was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of brain cancer just over a year ago. From the moment of diagnosis it was clear that it was just a matter of months, not years; so the fact that he had a full year of life was a blessing; it was a year of grace; a year for him to prepare for death. It was a year that few of us ever get: to live with the sure and certain knowledge that death is coming sooner rather than later; coming like a freight train that will not be stopped, so there is nothing to do about it except get ready.

Most of us are never so sure that our end is coming; even some of those among us who are fighting cancer have good reasons to believe they could go into remission and live for many more years. Even the guys sitting on death row have the mercies of the governor to hope for, up to the last minute.

Not so much my brother. It’s a rare thing; and it was a great mercy, in its own way; because all the layers of denial were stripped away; he was undistracted by false hopes; he could focus on living each day as fully as he could, preparing for the end and never letting a moment go by without words of love being spoken.

I mentioned that Chris was a graceful athlete; this was most true on the ski slopes. He would slip down a black diamond chute of moguls with equal parts courage and poise and laughter. And he faced his death with the same elegance that he faced the mountain; he made it look easy, moving straight down the fall line; so graceful you didn’t realize how fast he was going - until he zoomed right past, always first to the finish line.

Like my brother, Paul also knew when his time was up. In this, his second letter to Timothy, Paul is writing from prison, and he knows it won’t be long now. “I am being poured out as a libation,” he says, “and the time of my departure has come.”
This is like Dr. King’s “mountain top” speech; these are Paul’s last words of hope. He is hopeful, but he isn’t suffering under the weight of false hope. He knows the end has come, and he has shifted his attention from this world to the next.
He reflects on his legacy, and he testifies on his own behalf: “I have fought the good fight,” he says. “I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
And like my brother, Paul is fearless in the face of death. He knows that when he is called to account, he will be greeted with the crown of righteousness – and, he takes pains to point out – not only will that be his reward, it will be the reward for “all who have longed for his appearing.”

Paul knows that he has nothing to be ashamed of; because he has given everything, and has no regrets.

Unlike Paul, and my brother Chris, I can’t say I have the same fearlessness. Whereas Chris would shush toward the cliff face with his skis flashing, I would tend to stay a little while at the top, adjusting my goggles, gathering my nerve, studying the moguls, trying to figure out my path down the hill. I tended to be a little more conscious of the potential for disaster. Chris would fly down the slope as if he were weightless, while I would remain at the top, rehearsing in my mind the many ways in which this could end badly.

When it comes to my own death, my hope is that Paul was right: that while God might take special delight in the gymnastics of an expert skier, he’s got a trophy for everyone who makes it down the mountain.

That is my hope; but I can’t say that I fully believe it. And one reason why that’s difficult for me, I think, is because I’m a priest. In the middle of the night, I imagine a special circle in hell for the priests who didn’t live up to the expectations of their calling.

Garret Keizer, an Episcopal priest in Vermont, wrote about this in his beautiful memoir, A Dresser of Sycamore Trees. He writes,

The thought that I will one day be called to account for what I have done in this place often seizes me like the realization that I’ve failed to turn off an iron or stove, and that it was hours and miles ago. I can smell the smoke.”

I mean, I know that my God is a God of complete love and forgiveness. I know that in my bones. But I also can’t shake the feeling that I haven’t done enough; that I’m not worthy of this privilege, not strong enough to carry this burden, not good enough to wear this collar.

I believe in a god of forgiveness but I also believe in a God of accountability. And I believe that we priests will have much to account for.

That’s why, when I read this Gospel story for today, I identify much more with the tax collector than the Pharisee. And as I say that, I suppose some people would consider that a boast rather than a confession. But for me, it’s just the way it is. I’m not content with the way things are for me. I am too conscious of the saints who have gone before me; too sensible of my limitations; to aware of God’s expectations.

But in a weird kind of way, I think that’s okay; in fact I think that’s as it should be. I can’t say why but I think it’s kind of comforting to believe in a God who has high standards; I think it’s okay not to rest on our laurels.

Maybe it’s because I’m from Minnesota but I think a little humility is a good thing. I mean, between the chest-thumping athletes, the preening politicians, and the unrepentant Wall Street executives, I’m thinking the world might be a better place to live in if humility were as highly valued as expertise.

I've been wondering what disaster will have to befall our nation in order for us to remember that old and awful lesson of history: that "pride goeth before the fall." We’ve become so certain of God’s forgiveness that we consider pride a virtue and heaven our birthright; as if we were entitled to heaven; as if it were our just reward for a lifetime of self-serving pleasure.

Everyone gets a trophy? I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.

As a culture we are offended by the bare mention of things like sin or judgment. “Shame” is a dirty word these days - but I’m not so sure we couldn’t use a bit more of it.

Our God is a God of radical forgiveness, I know… But God is also a God of accountability.

A number of years ago, when a guy broke into my house in the middle of the night, and was caught by the police, I had the rare chance to forgive him. Which I did. But I didn’t for a moment think he shouldn’t also be prosecuted and go to jail.
Without some measure of accountability, everything falls apart. I heard this morning that in Mexico, the prosecution and conviction rate for murder is 2%. Who can live in a place like that? In the United States, we eased up on regulating the financial industry, and look what happened.

Human beings are not to be fully trusted.

And yet, this is what we do here at Incarnation. We live in trust: with one another, and with God – even when it’s not in our immediate interests.

The other day I heard about a church that has, on its bulletin board, the names of every member of the congregation, listed according to the percentage of their income that they give to the church. The church has been doing this for years and according to the pastor, it’s a great way of inspiring his members to give more.
Of course, what it says to me is that they’re not so sure they can trust their members to give adequately to the church, so they have to resort to peer pressure.

At Incarnation, we would never do that – but don’t think I’m not tempted! We would never use shame as a motivation to give. To do so is to create a culture that makes Pharisees of us all.

That said, I would bet my paycheck that if we did create such a list, most of you would be surprised by who rose to the top.

Some of our biggest pledgers are not the least bit wealthy – in fact, most of our biggest pledgers live extremely modestly. Of course, they would be horrified if their giving ever became public knowledge. But as one who has seen this list of pledgers, I can tell you that this is a document that would put most of us to shame.

But I also have to tell you that it is a beautiful thing – to witness these acts of generosity among people who give, not out of shame, or obligation, or fear, but out of the sheer joy of giving. It is my great privilege to get to know people who have found a new way of being in the world – a way of being that is not defined by anxiety over how much we don’t have, or how much we want, but rather a way of being that is defined by generosity and deep gratitude. As I get to know these people – these people who give out of their substance, not out of anxiety but with joy and thanksgiving – I become witness to something very rare and beautiful: I see people who are free.

Free from the anxiety that comes from a belief in scarcity rather than abundance; free from anxious calculations over what they have left over at the end of the month after they’ve paid for everything else they think they want or need.

These are people who have made one thing clear to themselves and to me: that God comes first, not last, not at the end of the month. God is not picking up the scraps from under the table, feeding on whatever is left over. God is at the table; God comes first. Because God is the source of all that is. These folks don’t just say that’s true; they live that truth; and as a result, they live in deep gratitude for everything that comes from God: the smell of the moist earth; the sound of the rain; the feeling of fresh air as we breathe it in.

I strive to be one of those people. I am still more of the tax collector than the Pharisee, I hope; I am still more aware of how much more I could; but Rose and I do give of our substance – that is, we give proportionally. We still don’t give as much as we would like; but we give out of our abundance, not our scarcity; inspired by the saints in this congregation who put us to shame; and we give with joyful hearts, filled with gratitude for all of you, and for the amazing ministries that you make possible.

Leaving Church

2010-08-09T21:09:00.000-07:00

…Cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Isaiah 1:16b-17

"Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms.” Luke 12:32

Five months ago, back in the rainy days of March, a radio and television personality named Glenn Beck received a fair amount of attention when he gave his listeners the following advice:

‘I beg you: look for the words, “Social Justice” or “Economic Justice” on your church’s website. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice are code words. If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish. Go alert your bishop and tell him…’

Mr. Beck even went so far as to link the term “social justice” with the Nazi Party and to the Communist Party. He actually held up a swastika in one hand, and a hammer and sickle in the other, as he told his audience that what both of these movements had in common was this sinister goal of social justice. So if you hear that kind of talk in your church, run away!

Of course, Mr. Beck’s amazing statements were met with hoots of derision from all corners of Christendom – from Catholic bishops to the heads of just about every mainline Protestant denomination to some leaders of his own Mormon Church, who made it clear that the concept of social justice is one of the pillars of the faith and, I dare say, desperately hoped Mr. Beck might follow his own advice.

Well, all that was five months ago, as I said; and I had almost forgotten all about it when the news this week brought word of another person talking about leaving the church. This time it was the famous author of all those vampire novels, Anne Rice – who had a conversion to the Catholic Church ten years ago, and now renounces the church.

While she would continue to be devoted to Jesus Christ, Ms. Rice said, she was renouncing the title “Christian.” But unlike Mr. Beck, it wasn’t because Christianity talks too much about “social justice” – it’s because Christians don’t talk enough about it, nor do they practice it.

She said, "In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life."

It kind of broke my heart that it apparently never occurred to her that there are actually many hundreds of churches and millions of Christians – Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Congregationalists, to name just a few – who also refuse to be all those things and nonetheless somehow manage to happily remain in church.

But the more striking thing about this was how her statement served as a kind of ideological book-end to Mr. Beck’s statement, each one outrageous for different reasons but both of them representing extreme right-wing and left-wing arguments for leaving church.

We even have one of our own - the Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor – who wrote a book entitled Leaving Church. In it she describes the impossible ironies and frustrations of life in a typical parish, and finally paints her decision to leave the church as a call to a more authentic life.

You know… In the good old days, people left church because they lost their faith, or finally found the courage to admit they never had much faith in the first place. But now, a guy can spend the morning in bed watching football and convince himself that he is doing it for the loftiest of reasons, even for the sake of loyalty to Christ himself!

So now leaving church has now become politically correct – for both liberals and conservatives.

How very convenient.

It takes courage to go to church these days; we who do are becoming counter-cultural oddities; museum-piece curiosities. We feel the pressure: how many of us think twice before we talk about church with our friends or co-workers? And this is having an effect on our own parish’s attendance figures. It’s not that any of us are leaving the church – some of us are just coming less often. It’s like this virus of church-leaving is spreading. And the less often we come to church, the more disconnected we feel from the community, and the more disconnected we feel, the more we wonder if this is the best use of our time.

I think some of us might feel kind of like the guy at the baseball game who got up to get a hot dog and when he got back he sees that the score has changed and he missed something important. If he’s lucky, he’s got a friend who can explain what happened while he was gone – but it’s nothing like being there yourself.

I’ve heard people say they’re just not sure what our church stands for anymore; what’s the mission, what’s the point? Why are we doing all this?

Which gets us back to this reading from Isaiah:

…cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Isaiah 1:16b-17

Back in the olden days – and now I’m talking about that short period of time between, oh, say about 3,000 B.C. to around 1980 – if you asked people what the purpose of the church or the temple was, you would get some variation on the following answer:

1. To worship God. The primary purpose has always been to worship God;

2. To bring spiritual comfort and nurture to the members of the church;

3. To teach and preach the Bible;

4. To engage in charitable acts of mercy, feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless;

5. To engage the world in the public sphere of social justice: to abolish slavery and segregation; to engage in prison reform and the treatment of the mentally ill; to be a public voice of conscience in our society – consistent with the prophets and with Jesus – protecting the vulnerable and the poor.

But what’s happened since about 1980 is that somehow, in the blink of an eye, it has become self-evident to many people that the entire public mission of the church – that whole #5 category - the mission that forced the Magna Carta on King John; the mission that invented hospitals; the mission that abolished slavery and gave African Americans the right to vote and stood up against the Ku Klux Klan; the very same mission that made it possible for me to marry the woman I love – this same public mission of the church is simply dismissed now with a wave of the hand as “political” and therefore inappropriate.

Somehow it has become self-evident to people that churches have no business engaging the world in the cause of social justice. It’s almost like the guy who got up in the middle of the game and by the time he got back he had forgotten which team he was cheering for!

But fortunately we have Holy Scripture, like these words from the prophet Isaiah, reminding us of the proper mission of the church once again.

…cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

We have our Lord Jesus, who asks us to do the impossible:

"Do not be afraid, little flock;… sell your possessions, and give alms.”

This is not an easy assignment. If these words from Scripture make us feel uncomfortable, that’s good, that’s what Scripture is supposed to do. If the words of the prophet make us clench our fists and want to shut him up, then we’re getting to the heart of what Scripture is there for.

Scripture should be making us uncomfortable. It should be making us angry. It should get us to think seriously about our lifestyles and our self-indulgent habits.

Because the Bible is not only about comfort. In fact, there is very little comfort in the Bible for those of us who are comfortable in the world. Jesus did not come into the world in order to make us feel good in our prosperity. Just about everything he says about people like us are words of challenge to our lifestyles and our priorities.

So the question is, and always has been, can we endure the discomfort that Jesus and the prophets bring into our lives? Can we grow from that discomfort, without leaving church? Can we, as a congregation, honor the words of Jesus and the prophets and find our public purpose in the world without everyone getting frustrated and doing the easy thing which is to leave the church? Do we have enough love to stay together, even when we disagree with one another?

Sometimes it feels like Christianity has gotten so fragile that it can’t tolerate its own message. It reminds me of the newborn puppy I heard about, who barked for the first time and scared herself half to death. Our sensibilities are so delicate that we can’t even admit that we have anything to repent of. We can only stand to have a God of comfort; the God that is uncomfortable – the God of justice – is just too much to bear.

But Jesus never said it was going to be easy.

And here’s the good news: this discomfort is only temporary; as we work past our discomfort we find that we grow closer together as brothers and sisters in Christ; we find new energy, newfound joy in fresh discoveries of the Gospel. We discover that there is something that unites us that is far deeper and more permanent than any political slogans or social agendas.

The experience of staying in church is the experience of discovering that there are people in our community with whom we couldn’t disagree more, and yet these are the very same people whom we love most deeply.

That’s gospel love.

In Christ there is no East nor West; no slave nor free, no Democrat nor Republican. What unites us is Christ himself, his love pouring out to us as freely as an ever-flowing stream.

I pray that, as we endure this uncomfortable Gospel together, we never forget this one simple fact: that God’s love transcends all boundaries; God’s love draws us closer together; and that any impulse to leave church, whether inspired by Anne Rice or Glenn Beck or Barbara Brown Taylor, is an impulse that draws us away from the heart of this wonderfully uncomfortable love, made real in the person of Jesus Christ.

Somebody say… Amen.

Martha v. Mary

2010-07-20T17:28:00.000-07:00

Luke 10: 38-42
Sermon Preached July 18, 2010

This morning we meet, once again, those two sisters Martha and Mary, who have become symbols of two different ways of being in the world – Martha, the active one, busily preparing the meal and cleaning the kitchen while her sister, Mary, is content to sit at the feet of Jesus and listen to his teaching. And when Martha complains that Mary isn’t helping out, Jesus gently chastises Martha:

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."

Which makes this story the most deeply resented story in the entire gospels. I know people who proclaim Jesus as their Lord and Savior with the deepest sincerity: Jesus knew no sin, they say; he lived a life of perfection, every word that fell from his lips, a pearl of wisdom – except for the perfectly horrible thing he said to Martha.

How could he have been so insensitive to Martha? Why was he so willing to encourage that slacker Mary?

Yesterday I was at home in my study working on this sermon – well, actually, I was surfing the web and answering emails and downloading music – when my wife called up and asked me if I wouldn’t come downstairs and help clean the kitchen. I said, “But honey; I’m a Mary, not a Martha!”

Let’s just say this was not a successful strategy on my part… This bruise on my backside didn't get there by accident...

The truth is that we are a nation of Martha’s and always have been. Way back in 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “Americans pursue their own welfare” with a “feverish ardor.” He described “this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance” (B00k 2, Ch. 13). [Thanks to Michael Parker for this quote: http://www.unitedparishbowie.org/parker/sermon_one_thing_is_necessary.html]

We are, in other words, “worried and distracted by many things.” We work more hours per year than any other major industrial nation. And now that we have Blackberries and iPhones and computers with all that email and the internet, we aren’t even at rest when we’re at rest –talking on Skype, tweeting our friends, updating our Facebook pages, never spending more than a few minutes on any one thing. Worried and distracted by many things? Martha had no idea.

Which is why I’ve put myself on a multi-tasking media diet. I was inspired to do this after hearing an interview between Stephen Colbert and a man named Nicholas Carr, who wrote a book called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. This guy Nicholas Carr also wrote an article which gets at the issue a bit more directly; the title of the article is “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

And apparently, according to the latest studies on the brain, the answer is “Yes.” Quite simply, “the better we get at multi-tasking, the worse we are at thinking deeply.” This research indicates that the more distracted we allow ourselves to become by all of our multi-tasking, the more shallow our thinking becomes – and that these changes are reflected in actual physical changes in our brains on the cellular level.

He said, “The internet pushes us to a skimming and scanning type form of thinking… what the internet doesn’t provide us any opportunity to do is attentive thinking; the types of thinking like contemplation; like introspection; like reflection; and a lot of our deepest thoughts and certainly our deepest perceptual knowledge only emerge when we’re able to pay attention to one thing…”

In other words, those of us who are immersed in the electronic media of our age – and that includes just about everyone under the age of 50 – are literally becoming incapable of doing what came naturally to Mary: sitting quietly at the feet of Jesus and listening deeply to his Word. Deep, quiet, contemplative reflection is not something we do anymore. Which is perhaps why our political debates have become so sensationalistic and unreflective. Major issues of public policy are being determined by which sound bite or visual image is able to capture our mercurial attention spans for the longest periods of time.

So this is why I’ve put myself on a multi-tasking diet: because if your priest becomes incapable of deep thought, well, we might as well just hang it up. So now, when I’m reading, I’m reading. When I’m answering emails, which will be no more often than twice a day, I’m answering emails. When I’m praying or meditating, my computer and my phone are turned off.

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things…”
; there is need of only one thing.

But we don’t need to be addicted to the internet to be worried and distracted by many things. Indeed, who among us is not worried and distracted by many things? This is not just a condition of the modern age; Jesus is, of course, pointing to a human condition.

And it all comes down, to use the great theologian Paul Tillich’s phrase, to our “ultimate concern.”

We all have an ultimate concern – that is, the one thing that we are living for, the one thing that gives our lives meaning and purpose.

Some of us make our jobs our ultimate concern – we get up in the morning thinking about work and we fall into bed at night thinking about work; and that’s all well and good until the day we get laid off or we retire, and suddenly our lives no longer have purpose or meaning. We don’t know what to do with ourselves. And so we turn our retirements into an imitation of our working lives; some of us work harder in retirement than we did when we worked for money – and by doing so, we hold the black dog of death at bay just a little bit longer. As long as we can remain active and be productive, we’re okay. It feels like staying busy is the only thing keeping us alive – because work is our ultimate concern.

But at some point we are no longer able to work. What then?

Some of us make leisure our ultimate concern – we work in order to live, we say; and by living we mean rest and recreation, hiking, golfing, dancing… And that serves us well as an ultimate concern, until we can no longer play golf or hike or dance.

What then?

Some of us then move on to making the simple act of staying alive our ultimate concern – until the only thing we are living for is drawing the next breath. And as the black dog of death approaches, we wonder, “What was the point?”

We look back over our lives and most of us can testify that we did the best we could; we worked hard and we did our bit to be good people and responsible citizens and we sweated the small stuff and then our spouse died and we found ourselves alone and barely surviving and pretty soon the ambulance comes and we’re gone. Our children sell the house and divide up the furniture and throw away the hundreds of little treasures we accumulated and have a funeral and the few people who still remembered us show up and talk about us with such platitudes that we wonder if they knew us at all, and then that’s it. We’re done. It’s over.

What was it all about?

What Jesus is suggesting to us Martha’s is this: not that cooking meals and doing the dishes is not important, but there is something even more important that is waiting for our attention. We are worried and distracted by many things; but some day all those things will be gone; meanwhile Mary has chosen the “one thing” that will never go away; the one thing that is the only thing worthy of ultimate devotion. The one thing that we might want to choose before we get out of bed in the morning and start our cooking and cleaning and running about.

The one thing that will be there, giving our lives purpose and meaning long after our careers are over and our to-do lists are checked off and our golf game has gone kaput and our very ability to get out of bed has come to an end.

The one thing that Martha would do well to find if she wants to live a life that has a greater purpose than holding the black dog at bay.

What is the one thing?

The answer, for many of us, comes too late; it comes at our funeral mass, when the priest processes down the center aisle carrying the Paschal candle and intoning these words:

For none of us has life in himself,
and none becomes his own master when he dies.
For if we have life, we are alive in the Lord,
and if we die, we die in the Lord.
So, then, whether we live or die,
we are the Lord's possession.

This is the only ultimate concern worthy of our devotion; the only concern that lifts us beyond the worries and distractions of our daily life. That we are alive in Christ. That we live for Christ. That we get out of bed for Christ; that we do the dishes for Christ; that all of it, the living and the dying, we do for Christ – who was in the beginning, and lives now and for everlasting, the Alpha and the Omega.

Only then will our worries and distractions fall away and our lives achieve ultimate meaning; only then will we find the peace of Christ, which passes all understanding. My prayer is that it may be so for all of us.

Somebody say…
AMEN.

Big Harvest... Few Laborers

2010-07-07T14:09:00.000-07:00

Sermon preached July 4, 2010
The Rev. Matthew Lawrence
Church of the Incarnation, Santa Rosa, CA

"The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Go on your way.” Luke 10:2

There are still some among us who remember the days when agriculture was just about the only major industry in Sonoma County, and agriculture in those days of course meant apples, prunes, hops, apricots and other fruits of the earth besides grapes.

In 1920, Sonoma County was declared the 8th most productive county in the country; and when it was time for harvest, everyone knew it. The word would go out that the harvest was ready and just about everyone in town played a hand in bringing it in. Kids would be let out of school and wouldn’t be expected back in until everything that needed to be brought in was brought in.

There was an urgency about the harvest, of course – because if the harvest wasn’t brought in soon enough the fruit could spoil on the vine. So even now, in just about every agricultural area imaginable, the harvest is a time of intense focus and sense of urgency.

And the last thing in the world you would want during the harvest is a shortage of laborers. A farmer can watch his entire crop go bad if there aren’t enough laborers to bring it in. No one rested until the job was done.

Which brings a note of urgency to Jesus’ saying that the “harvest is plentiful, but the laborers few.” Jesus is sounding an alarm bell here: this is a serious situation!

These days, of course, the harvest is mostly brought in by migrant laborers. Those of us who work at desks and cubicles don’t have much, if any, connection to the harvest. Sure, many of us have our personal gardens; but it’s nothing like it used to be when the entire community was working on and talking about just about nothing else.

Maybe this is one reason why migrant workers get so little respect in our culture – we are at such a distance from their labor, we don’t appreciate how important they are to our economy and our sense of abundance.

Regardless, I detect among us a nostalgia for those days when the harvest was everyone’s job. This isn’t a nostalgia for the back-breaking work necessarily, but for those days when the community was focused together on just one thing. There was one thing that we all had to do together; the case was clear and compelling; it was easy to understand; it brought the whole community together to work together.

Nowadays, there is little sense of common labor or common purpose. Everyone is off doing their own thing; we pass one another while driving down 101 on our way to Costco or the Outlet stores or whatever and don’t even notice.

I was talking to a former Marine the other day; he did three tours, including one in Iraq; and he said the hardest thing about being out of the military was missing that sense of being part of a larger, unified group like that. Having close buddies who would die for you and you for them; working on common missions together; being part of a team.

I hear that same longing from some of our more senior members, who remember the days of WWII: how the entire nation came together to fight that war; and more close to home, the Tea Room at the County Fair. The Tea Room was one of those projects that brought everyone together, over a very intense but limited time, to provide food and respite for the fair-goers. The whole parish was focused on nothing else, from the youth group to the old timers, and while it was exhausting it was also – at least in retrospect – very satisfying as well.

And so the question comes up: what is our version of the Tea Room? What is the activity that unites us to a common purpose? This is the perennial question, not only for us as a church, but for us as a culture, as a nation. On this 4th of July weekend, who are we as a people? What do we stand for? What is our mission? What unites us to a common purpose?

And here’s the challenge to us, both as a nation and as a church: we are so diverse a collection of souls that it’s unlikely any one single activity will unite us. At the State House, the Republicans and the Democrats are so deeply divided that they can’t even pass a budget when their own salaries depend on it. On the national level, we’re not any better – every vote goes through on party lines, virtually no bi-partisan support for anything. It’s pretty impossible to arrive at a common purpose if everything coming from one side is knocked down by the other side.

Meanwhile the national budget is soaring out of control, like the oil pouring into the gulf. Some days it feels like we’re on the Titanic headed for the iceberg, and the alarm has sounded, the iceberg is in sight, meanwhile the crew is arguing about whether to turn right or turn left.

In times like that, it’s important that there be a captain at the helm who says, “Ok folks, it’s time to stop arguing, this is what we’re gonna do now: turn left!” And the crew has to be willing to say, “Ok, the captain says ‘turn left,’ so everyone turn left!”

Right now, on our state and national level, that isn’t happening. We all see the problem; we all know that this is an urgent situation. And we are beginning to lose hope that there’s anything we can do about it.

What about here in the church? What is our common purpose here at Church of the Incarnation?

Well, one of the problems we have is that we have several common purposes at Incarnation. We don’t have one simple little soundbite that captures it all in one pithy little sentence. Our common purpose takes us in several different directions simultaneously. For example,

We worship together; and we believe in the importance of beauty and reverence in our worship. That’s one common purpose.

And, we care for one another. We believe that one of our highest priorities is to welcome one another, know one another, and support one another throughout our lives, especially when times are tough.

We care about the most vulnerable in our society; and we believe in translating that care into tangible acts of mercy, especially to the homeless women and children in the Living Room; the low-income and mostly Spanish-speaking children at the Luther Burbank School; the homeless men and women who wander in for coffee and pastries here on Sunday morning; the hungry residents of the Guerneville area who come to St. Andrew’s food program. So that’s another common purpose.

And we care about our experience of God, as mediated through fine music and art like the programs of Numina; and as mediated through our many small groups, where prayer, meditation, Bible Study, and deep personal sharing bring the power of the Gospel alive within us. There’s another one.

But what is the common thread that holds all of these activities together? What is our single purpose?

I believe the answer to that question is beautifully contained in the banner that hangs in our Parish Hall: “Christ has no body now but ours.” In all of these values, and all of these actions, we are embodying the life of Jesus in the world.

We are the Church of the Incarnation – God in the flesh. We are doing the things that Jesus himself did on this earth: healing; caring; listening; praying; reconciling; forgiving; prophesying; teaching; proclaiming the Kingdom of God.
We are living into the gospel by literally living into the Body of Christ. That is our single mission on this earth: taking seriously the call to be God’s hands and feet in this broken and deeply blessed world.

When Bob Gebhart goes out to a nursing home to bring Eucharist to a shut-in, it’s not Bob Gebhart who goes out, it’s the Body of Christ, alive in the world, working through him.

When the women of the Guild pull together a massive rummage sale to raise money for charities, it’s not just those women doing the work; it is Christ in the world, coming alive through their labor.

When the Numina Board puts on a performance that brings people from throughout the county to engage in art and prayer together, they are not doing this on their own; it is Christ working through them.

When you write a check to support the ministries of this parish, you are not just a random person writing a check: you are part of the Body of Christ, perpetuating the life of Christ through your support.

We are - all of us – a part of this Body of Christ. And I can’t tell you how proud I am to be a part of this with you.

We are the Body of Christ. I pray that we will continue to grow more deeply into our calling to be that Body in the world; and I give thanks to God for the indescribable joy that comes through this service.

In Christ we pray, AMEN.

"No where to lay one's head"

2010-06-27T12:26:00.000-07:00

We had a wonderful meeting last Tuesday night, when we invited everyone to come talk to the Vestry about whether or not they thought we should join the North Bay Sponsoring Committee.

And as it turns out – surprise, surprise –we actually had differences of opinion! Who woulda thunk it!

At the meeting I could see that some people were uncomfortable with the fact that there were differences of opinion being expressed. But I found it to be inspiring –because it’s not about whether or not we agree on everything – it’s about how we handle our differences.

The Episcopal Church has never been the kind of church that suppresses differences of opinion. In fact, we find the Holy Spirit in the process of exploring our differences. We are not a conformist church that insists that everyone believe the same thing. Sometimes I wish we were – and that I was the pope who could claim some kind of infallibility. Because really, all of this would be so much easier if y’all would just see things my way!

But no; we are a church that honors the authority of each person’s conscience. That can be a tricky thing when we have a church as diverse as ours. We are, after all, a very diverse group of Christians: conservatives and liberals, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, evangelicals, Catholics, neo-pagans – how is it possible that we might speak with one voice about anything?

Some people solve this problem by simply avoiding controversial subjects. Better that we not take a stand on, say, immigration reform, than to take a position that would offend one of our members.

And there’s the rub, isn’t it? Because the Episcopal Church has never been a church that avoided controversy for the sake of keeping the peace. A casual glance through the resolutions passed at General Convention will show anyone that we take positions on all the difficult issues: abortion, women’s rights, civil rights, the environment, immigration reform, health care reform, the war in the Middle East – these issues are all addressed very directly by our church at every General Convention.

And the beauty of it is that I doubt any one here agrees with every resolution passed by General Convention. I certainly don’t. And that’s okay – because we know that it’s not the job of the church to be infallible. Our job is only to be faithful.

In Luke’s gospel this morning (9:51-62), Jesus has “set his face to go to Jerusalem.” This is the turning point of the gospel. Everything changes once Jesus makes this turn toward the cross. We can sense it now in his whole aspect: he is heavier now; he’s deadly serious; he knows what he has to do.

And on their way they pass through a town of Samaritans. They are about as welcome there as a band of hippies passing through Alabama; or a busload of nuns driving through Las Vegas.

The disciples want to punish them for being so unwelcoming: James and John ask Jesus, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” And the text says, simply, Jesus rebuked them.

We don’t know exactly what Jesus said, but I imagine it was something like, “Are you kidding? You want to punish them - when I am about to go to Jerusalem to die for them?”

And then the text turns into a series of sayings about following Jesus. Someone says, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus points out that this is not an easy life – he is about to follow someone who has no place to lay his head. Another person says he will follow Jesus, but asks first, “let me go and bury my father.”

Jesus replies, “Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

Now what do you suppose Jesus is getting at here?

I think it’s fair to say that Jesus has nothing in principle against people burying their parents. It’s one of the ten commandments – to honor one’s father and mother. Jesus is all for that. But Jesus is also aware that something more important is being asked of him. This is not the time to be tending to the everyday concerns of your life. Something bigger is calling to you; something more important is happening right now and you need to be a part of it.

This happens to us all the time. Jesus, I will follow you – but first let me answer this one last email. Jesus, I will follow you – but first let me make sure I have a decent job with health benefits and dental insurance.

Or, as St. Augustine famously prayed, Jesus, make me chaste – but not today.
Throughout our history, we have been presented with opportunities to move forward with Jesus; and every step of the way, we have been saying, Okay, sure, but not today – today is not a good time; how about tomorrow?

When Dr. King led the civil rights marches in the South, most of the white churches were saying the same thing to him: “Sure, we sympathize with your cause – but not today. You have to go more slowly.”

The tension between the Episcopal Church and our larger Anglican Communion has the same quality: “Yes, let’s talk about full inclusion of gays and lesbians into our life – but let’s hold off on actually doing it. Let’s have a moratorium on ordaining any more gay and lesbian bishops; never mind that we’ve been talking about this now for almost forty years; we need to talk some more; and some more; and some more, and indefinitely, until everyone is of one mind.”

Some of us, I know, are extremely wary of this whole business. Many of us have been deeply hurt by church conflicts in the past. We have grown weary of the self-righteous pronouncements, the calls to action, the strident certainties of the activists.

We would rather that everything just stayed the way it is. But I wonder: what kind of church would we be today if we had shied away from women’s ordination, just to pick one issue that felt terribly divisive in its day. There’s no doubt that we would be a much smaller, more shriveled version of ourselves. And we would never have had the wonderful experience of Pat Moore’s priesthood, to name just one shining example.

There is no easy way through this business of following Jesus. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” When we agree to follow Jesus, we can’t expect to live lives of comfort and ease.
But when we take on these issues carefully, exhausting all the necessary cycles of prayer and listening and debate, searching our hearts and searching Scripture together, we might just find enough common ground to move forward together.

These are questions that Paul understood all too well. He came of age in a church at war with itself; indeed, he was one of the shining lieutenants in that war, bringing the battle to those heretics who dared to call Jesus of Nazareth the Messiah, the Son of God.

And then suddenly he was on the other side of the equation; suddenly the purpose of his life switched from tearing down heretical churches, to the much harder work of planting churches and building them up.

And he discovered that he had a problem on his hands: how were they going to be a community, how were they all going to get along, when they had pretty much thrown out the book of laws that governed them? Now that they had had no Torah, what did they believe? How would they live?

Paul addresses this situation in our reading this morning (Galatians 5:1,13-25) by being clear there was one law that had to guide everything they said and did: the law of love. “For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

What does that look like in our own church? Exactly the same as in the church in Galatia: we focus on the fruits of the spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.”

These are the behaviors that build up a healthy community. In the end, that’s what it means to follow Jesus for Paul, and for us: to be a community of patience and kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Not only to one another, but to those in our community who are not in our immediate circle. The Samaritans and the Romans; the lepers and the prostitutes; the Latinos and the homeless; the elderly and those in prison.

Jesus turned toward Jerusalem so that he would die for all of them and us. To follow Jesus is to be in deep relationship with one another, including our neighbors; to listen to them; to hear their stories; and do those things that build us up together, into a community of justice and peace.

I pray we may have the courage to follow Jesus today, and in the days ahead, practicing always the fruits of the Spirit.

Amen.

Listening to the Spirit

2010-05-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

Pentecost Sunday, 2010

In their own languages they heard them speaking about God’s deeds of power:
Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia;
Iraqis, Iranians, Israelis; and residents of Iowa;
Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, and followers of Ron Paul;
Geezers and teenagers, spinsters and spinners; teachers and learners; criminals and saints…

All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?"

What does this mean?

A young woman I’ll call Sally hadn’t seen her mother since she was 16 years old, not since the night when her mom came home from a bar with a big hairy man named Griz. It was the middle of the night and it was a school night too; Sally was up late doing her homework when they stumbled into the house; she came into the kitchen to check on her mom and there was this guy Griz, who looked like some kind of Hell’s Angel; they were both drunk and carrying on, drinking cheap vodka out of a bottle right there in the kitchen, hanging all over each other; and when Sally turned to go this guy Gris made a lewd remark about Sally’s backside and made a grab for her - right there in front of her mother; and instead of getting mad and standing up for her daughter, Sally’s mom laughed as if it were the funniest thing in the world.

Well, that was it; that did it; that was the last straw; never again, she said; 16 years growing up with that alcoholic irresponsible abusive woman – no more, she said, and so she called up her boyfriend Mark and drove away in his car and she never looked back.

And for ten years she didn’t even see her mom; not even when she graduated from high school; not even when her mom joined AA and got sober and called her to make amends; not even five years later when her mom, still sober, got re-married. Sally didn’t even go to the wedding.

By then Sally herself was drinking pretty heavily.

And hating herself for it. And blaming her mom for it. She had tried so hard to get free of her mom – hadn’t even seen her in ten years – but she was still caught up in her.

And then one night she woke up out of a dead sleep; a voice was calling to her – it was her mother’s voice, calling her name. She got up and started packing her bags for a trip; she didn’t even know where she was going. And then the phone rang; her mom was in the hospital.

Six hours later Sally had flown across the country to be with her.

When I walked into the hospital room they were holding hands and laughing and weeping as if nothing had ever come between them.

Sally’s mom said, “Fr. Matt, this is my daughter.” And all I could think was, “She sure is.”

Amazing things happen when we listen to the Spirit. But the truth of the matter is that all too often, the call from the hospital comes too late. We don’t hear the voice calling to us in the middle of the night; the alcoholic parent never gets sober; animosities and grudges and addictions and self-pitying judgments continue to define us.

I’ve seen the look on a man’s face, standing outside a hospital room, unable to even come in to say goodbye. It’s not a pretty sight.

The Spirit moves on her own accord. Sometimes she speaks very softly. And if we don’t let ourselves get quiet, we won’t hear her when she calls.

It takes courage to get quiet like that. Quiet enough to hear the soft, whispering voice; the voice that will change our lives.

The other day a man told me that over 20 years of drinking came to an end on the day he began to pray.

He said the hardest part about staying sober is not the rehab; it’s not going to all the meetings and having a sponsor and working the 12 steps. No, the hardest part about being sober is simply opening himself, every day, to the Spirit of God in prayer.

The spirit speaks to us in our personal lives; but the story of Pentecost is not just the story of individuals overcoming their personal demons. The story of Pentecost is really the story of the church.

The story of Pentecost is not about me, it’s about us; it’s not about you, it’s about us. All of us, residents of Judea and Cappadocia, Graton and Forestville, Kenwood and Glen Elyn; all of us, divided by language and by culture and age and station; all of us, liberals and conservatives and moderates; fervent believers and ardent skeptics and the simply confused; all of us – listening to the Spirit.

On Pentecost, the Spirit has us speaking to one another and listening to one another in a language we can all understand. Are we listening together?

In the ancient of days, when we were still living in the Bronze Age, we used to wonder why it was that we were so divided. Why is it that it’s so hard for us to get along? Why is it that we speak so many different languages; that we can’t even understand one another?

And we answered that question by telling the story of The Tower of Babel. It was our pride that made us want to build that great tower. “Let us make a name for ourselves,” we said; let us build a tower that reaches the heavens. And of course, this was threatening to God; and as punishment he divided us into different languages and cultures.

It’s hardly a satisfying explanation, for all sorts of reasons, is it? And so, in the Book of Acts, we changed that story; God is no longer the source of our division, God is the source of our unity; finally, everything that divides us has been overcome; finally, the Spirit of God is bringing us together; finally, there is the possibility of genuine understanding.

The Spirit of God helps us find our common language: those of us from Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Sebastopol, parts of Marin; Sonoma, Rome, some Cretans and Arabs, some Petalumans and citizens of Healdsburg.
In Sonoma County, we are whites and Latinos, rich and poor, Catholics and Jews and Protestants; old timers and newcomers. We all live here; but are we listening to one another? Are we honoring the Spirit of Pentecost?

Three years ago, our local historian Gaye LeBaron wrote this about Santa Rosa:

"There is a disconnect between the average Santa Rosan's perception of the town and reality. ... What we have are a lot of people, some old-timers, some fairly new residents, who never, ever intended to live in the fifth-largest city in any area. And, frightened by new crimes, stalled in old traffic, watching tall buildings rise, they're mad as hell! When you stop to think about it, this revelation explains a lot. We have spent decades wondering why we couldn't save the Carrillo Adobe or the Hoag House, why we can't have a plaza like Healdsburg's or Sonoma's, why we've never achieved a proper historical museum like all the other towns around, why it takes so long (20 years for ANYthing) to reach the simplest civic goal, why we have to hire an image consultant to tell us what we represent. It's because we have outgrown the hometown, small-town advantage. We've become a real city while we were busy complaining about our farm town."

Sounds like the Tower of Babel all over again: a confusion of tongues, making it impossible to complete an ambitious task.

So it sounds to me like maybe the Spirit of God – or Gaye LeBaron, anyway - is calling us to listen a little more closely to one another.

And that’s what we’ll be doing this Tuesday night, when over 800 of us – Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Jews – and us Episcopalians - will gather in one place to hear our stories.

This meeting is the culmination of many years of very careful work, getting members of nine different congregations to listen very carefully first to themselves, and then to one another. Now, finally, we are gathering in strength of numbers, to listen some more; to tell our stories of mutual concern and to listen for the Spirit of God.

We are invited to attend this meeting – and many of us are going, just to listen to our neighbors, and to seek that common language, that common understanding, which is the fruit of the Spirit of God.

The Day of Pentecost has arrived. The Spirit of God is calling. It might be a soft voice, whispering to us in the middle of the night. It might be a gentle, constant murmur deep inside our hearts, inviting us to reconcile with a friend or a relative; it might be the voice of an elderly neighbor, or the voice of a grandchild; the voice of a child speaking in Spanish. Or it might just be the voice of our own deepest longing – for a family that is reconciled, a community that knows its neighbors, and is kind; a world that is at peace.

My prayer is that, when the Spirit of God calls us, we will hear Her call, and find the courage to answer it. For in that, there is salvation.

May it be so, Amen.

Cream Puffs and Coffee

2010-05-04T14:30:00.000-07:00

Sermon Easter 5, Year C
May 2, 2010

I have a very simple message today.

Sometimes the gospel message is just very simple; and there’s no need for subtle interpretation or beautiful sentences or crafty story telling.

I’m talking about this word, from Jesus in John’s gospel: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

Or as that famous song puts it, “They shall know that we are Christians by our love.”

I notice that Jesus did not say, “They shall know that we are Christians by our beautiful building… they shall know we are Christians by our preaching.” Not even by our beautiful music.

No, it’s by our love.

As one preacher famously put it, “If we were arrested for the crime of being Christians, would there be enough evidence to convict us?”

Which raises the interesting question, How will they know? What is the evidence for this love?

This question was answered beautifully 2 weeks ago in Fr. Jamie’s sermon on John 21, in which Jesus asked Simon Peter three times, “Do you love me?” and each time Peter said “Yes, Lord, you know I love you,” to which each time Jesus said, “Then feed my sheep.”

Each time he asked Peter that question, Peter got more and more agitated; and Jesus had to say it three times - Feed my sheep; feed my sheep; feed my sheep – because he knew both how simple, and yet how very difficult, this proof of love is.

Our love is proven when we feed God’s sheep. And here at Church of the Incarnation, we actually kind of take that literally.

We prove our love, for example, at St. Andrew’s mission, giving away tons of food on Tuesday evenings, and putting on a community dinner twice a month.

We find proof of that love in Daphne V. and her kids, who on the Tuesday after Easter put on a beautiful Easter dinner out there at St. Andrew’s, with table cloths, flowers, decorations, Easter eggs and candies for the kids and gift bags for everyone, assembled by our youth group.

Proof of that love is found in the Rausch’s, and the Cramers, organizing the church pot luck suppers like the one we had last Friday night.

It’s Bob G. and Roger B. and the Nykamps and the Rausch’s and Lynn C. and everyone else who brings in donuts and homemade snacks on Sunday mornings – last week Ron brought in cream puffs even! Cream puffs! What greater proof for the love of God is there than cream puffs! And offering those treats in abundance, first for our homeless guests who come to Farlander on Sunday mornings, before anyone else.

It means being happy that we are privileged to feed our homeless friends; its having more than enough on hand, so those who are hungry need not be ashamed or ever made to feel inferior; it’s happily serving someone 3 or 4 servings if that’s what they want, before even thinking about feeding ourselves.

Proof of that love is found when no one ever is made to feel there’s not enough for them; and if there ever is a scarcity, it means always feeding our hungriest and youngest guests first. It means always treating our homeless guests with enormous respect and hospitality.

Proving our love is found in Marilyn P, cooking for The Living Room, our day shelter for homeless women and children; and Alice L. and everyone else who comes in to cook; and Peggy Z spending her mornings with the homeless children of The Living Room.

It’s Jose and Carla traveling to Honduras to serve the children there; it’s the women who run our thrift store, Heavenly Treasures, raising $15k a year for outreach, 50 cents at a time, and cheerfully giving clothes away to the homeless women.

It’s found in the Women of the Guild, putting on a rummage sale every summer and giving away the proceeds to charities.

And of course, proof of that love is not just found in food, but also in the food of relationship. It means, when we’re in Farlander Hall, actually daring to have a real conversation with someone we don’t know – like our homeless guests.

It means being in relationships that stretch us a little bit.

It means Mike and Patty H., and all the volunteers who give their time tutoring and offering support at the Luther Burbank School.

It’s never letting a newcomer feel ignored or unwelcome. It means that when we’re in Farlander Hall during coffee hour, we’re keeping an eye out for people on the edges of the room. It means that if we’re locked in a conversation with an old friend and we spy a visitor alone sipping coffee staring at the bulletin board, wondering if anyone would speak to him, it means letting go of our conversation, taking our friend with us, and going over to that person and introducing ourselves. And it means doing that, no matter if that person looks rich or poor, attractive to us or unattractive, and whether or not they look like a “good Episcopalian.”

It means offering the food of relationship beyond our comfort zones. It means getting to know one another on deeper levels; and reaching out beyond our boundaries to people of other faiths. It means responding to the offer of relationship that has been extended to us by the Unitarian Universalists, and the Roman Catholics, and the Jews, who all tell us they’d like to get to know us better and would like to work with us on issues of common concern. I believe it means saying yes to those relationships.

It means listening carefully to one another – especially to the poor, the marginal, the powerless. And it means not just giving them what we think they want (“Here have another donut!”) but giving them first of all the respect of a listening heart – understanding that they have something to offer us, just as we might have something to offer them. It means looking for relationships, not handouts.

It means taking those relationships seriously; which means taking the world seriously. It means that some people may not want our donuts; they may want to be able to drive down the street without being stopped by police because they look Hispanic – and they might want us to care about that, and help them do something about it.

It means that some people may not want our donuts, they might want to know we care about the fact that their child is sitting in the county jail because that's the only place he can get treatment for mental illness. It means actually wanting to help to change that horrible situation.

Its only because we are doing all of that, that we can enter into this gorgeous sanctuary and listen to this gorgeous music and know that all this beauty expresses our relationship to God; that, when we are done feeding the world, we can come home here, and be fed by this gorgeous building, this exquisite music, this Holy Communion.

It’s just that simple. The gospel is profoundly simple. Which is kind of bad news for those of us who would rather have something really complicated to think about, rather than have something very simple that we are expected to actually do.

My prayers is that we, who have so much to offer, will always have the grace and the courage to enter into these surprising gospel relationships, which come alive over bread and wine, as well as over coffee and cream puffs.

Somebody say… AMEN.

Living in a Both-And World

2010-05-04T13:16:00.000-07:00

Sermon April 25, 2010

Lately I’ve been reading in the paper the heartbreaking stories of abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. Once again, we are forced to hear horrible stories about the worst kind of crime – a crime of abuse by a predator posing as a priest of God – but also of the cover-ups by the bishops and archbishops and possibly even the Vatican itself.

All this makes me wonder – how is it that a church can be both things at once – both a sacred institution where God is found; and a sick institution that sometimes does unspeakable harm to its children?

How can it be both? Because it is both. I say that because there is a natural tendency in each of us toward either-or thinking: either the church is a sacred institution that we must defend and praise; or it’s a sick and corrupt institution that needs to be completely condemned. Many people want to be on one side or the other of that equation; but the truth is that it’s both.

How can that be? How can a church be a vessel of God, and also be such a vessel for woundedness? How is that possible?

The same question rises in me when I’m reading John’s gospel. This morning, our reading from John’s gospel presents us with “the Jews,” who are often portrayed in John’s gospel, as unbelieving and even hostile to Jesus.

So we have the same thing going on. On the one hand, the Gospel of John is one of the most profound and divinely inspired books of scripture ever written. And on the other hand, John’s gospel is flawed because it was written by an ordinary person – a person who was deeply wounded, and who could not help but pass that woundedness along, even as he also spread an inspired message grace and salvation.

We’ve talked about this before, and I don’t want to belabor the point, but it perhaps cannot be said often enough that John’s gospel was written in a time, considerably later than the other gospels, when the early Christians were in the middle of a very bitter divorce from the Jewish community that gave them their birth.

So in fact, in John’s gospel, we find that bitter divorce taking on the flesh of the scriptures themselves; we find the term “the Jews” 55 times; whereas in the 3 other gospels combined “the Jews” are mentioned only twice – and in both cases, the phrase seems to have been inserted parenthetically, by a later editor. [This is not counting the times when Jesus is mentioned as “the King of the Jews.]

In the synoptic gospels – that is, in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke – it’s assumed that just about everyone is Jewish. Jesus is Jewish, all the disciples are Jewish, everyone is Jewish unless identified otherwise. But in John’s Gospel, because it was written in a time when the followers of Jesus were being run out of the Synagogues as heretics, “the Jews” are identified as a separate group from Jesus and his disciples; they are portrayed in John’s gospel as skeptical, narrow-minded, eventually hostile to Jesus, and ultimately murderous, first trying to stone him themselves, and then handing Jesus over to be killed.

So just like the Roman Catholic Church, John’s gospel is a mixed bag, both the inspired Word of God, capable of lifting us to the spiritual heights of salvation itself; and an instrument for woundedness.

And it is our job, as proclaimers of the Gospel, to admit our own flaws. It is our job, as Christians, to understand the church, and the Bible, both with the eyes of faith, and with a critical eye, so that we use the gospels for the purposes that Jesus intended, which is to heal a broken world and bring us into relationship with God through Christ; and so, to the best of our ability, we don’t pass on the woundedness that comes with it.

My mother was deeply wounded; she was abused by her own father when she was a child. And one of the best things she did – and she did many, many wonderful things – is that she did not pass that woundedness on to her own children. The cycle stopped with her. I praise God for that. And just so, we are called to do the same.

Some people don’t want to admit that the Scriptures can be both/and – both a vehicle for salvation, and a flawed instrument of oppression. They fight for Scripture to be one thing or another – because it’s more comfortable to think like that. Just as many people don’t want to admit that the Roman Catholic Church is a both/and institution – they want it to be either hopelessly corrupt, or divinely inspired.

But the fact is, it’s both. Just as we are living both in the Kingdom of God, where people are healed and transformed by Christ, and in a world of brokenness, where people are actually harmed in the name of Christ. If our eyes are not open to both realities, we are in danger of perpetrating the very same crimes ourselves.

Which is why it is important for us to be honest about our church as well. It’s not just the Roman Catholic Church that has committed abuse. 25 years ago, we had a priest here at Church of the Incarnation who abused several teen-aged boys. His name was Alan Papworth. As far as we know, that abuse did not happen here, in this sanctuary or anywhere on campus, but rather at his home in Windsor, with boys who lived in his neighborhood. But he did commit some unspeakable crimes; our church, and the Diocese, was sued for several millions of dollars – as we should have been; and he was defrocked and sent to jail.

So once again, we have a both/and situation. It turns out that that priest was a very sick and wounded man – even as it is also true that he did some good things while he was here: he ministered to the sick, he tended his flock as best he could; he proclaimed the gospel with sincerity.

We have no choice, if we’re going to be grown-ups, but to accept this hard reality, that we live in a both/and world.

But we do have a choice. We can live in a world of brokenness and woundedness, and see everything through that lens; or we can live in a world of rose-colored glasses, and be blind to the realities of life; or we can live in both worlds simultaneously; we can be both, in Jesus’ words, “wise as serpents, and innocent as doves.” (Mt. 10:16)

Which is why it’s so important that we need to do everything in our power to be make our community as safe a community as we can possibly make it, for all of our children and all of us, together. Which is why it is so important for all our leaders and everyone we can get, to go to the training we conduct periodically, to help us keep this community safe.

But this is also true that when we enter into this space – this sacred sanctuary – there is only one thing that needs to be on our minds. Because when we step into this sacred space, we are stepping into the Kingdom of heaven.

A few months ago, there was a man – not a member of our parish – he came by, asked to speak with a priest. This happens quite often, actually. He told me that he had just learned that his wife was leaving him. I listened to his whole story and then I asked him if he wanted to go into the church to be alone and to pray and he said Yes; so we went into this church. And the moment when we stepped through that side door there into the Marian Chapel, he stopped, and he began to sob. He when he recovered himself, he said, “It’s just so beautiful here.”

Another person, who had just experienced a terrible tragedy in her family, stepped into this building for the first time and said, “You can just feel the energy in this place.”

She’s right.

There are people we know who feel that this whole campus radiates the grace of God; they say they can feel it; it’s all around us here. And I believe that, because I feel it as well.

I believe that this place has absorbed God’s sacred energy – the energy of lives in transformation and healing. There has been so much healing and so much love in this place that this building has become a container of grace. And the more healing that happens in here, the more healing that will happen here for others who enter this place.

Just as our Eucharistic elements absorb the grace of God when we pray over them, so this building absorbs all the healing, all that love, all that good will that happens here; all the good things that happen here; all the God that happens here. These walls, these pews, this brass, this stained glass – this is a hallowed place.
So sure, we live in a both/and world. But in here, there is only one reality: that is the Kingdom of heaven, alive and well, saturating us with divine grace, healing us and making us whole.

Whenever we open our hearts to that grace; without hesitation; fully, completely giving ourselves to God – no need for ambivalence here - we are fully giving ourselves to God.

It’s not easy living in a both-and world. But that’s what we’re called to do as Christians: Jesus, fully divine, and fully human; Kingdom of Heaven, both here, and not yet here; scripture, both inspired by God, and yet flawed; this church, both an instrument of healing and grace, and not perfect.

But we here, now, enter into that which is perfect, and beyond all understanding; the grace of God, alive here, in our hearts and in this room. We open our hearts to this grace; we give ourselves to God’s love, completely.

And we say, AMEN.

Practicing Resurrection

2010-04-04T18:36:00.000-07:00

Easter Morning, April 4, 2010

So here we are again! The stone is rolled away, the elements of Easter are revealed: the empty tomb, the burial linens on the ground, the angels; and those poor disciples - at first, uncomprehending, confused, astonished.

And here we are, still: uncomprehending, confused, astonished.

Many Christians think that the preacher’s job, on Easter morning, is to help eliminate our confusion; to sweep away the cobwebs of doubt and uncertainty so that we can fully believe in the resurrection. They think this because they think that our ultimate achievement as Christians is to believe in the resurrection.

But I stand before you this morning not to help you believe in the resurrection; I’m more interested in helping you do resurrection. In the words of Wendell Barry [“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”], my job this morning is to help us practice resurrection.

Because to be honest, it’s really hard to fully believe in the resurrection. I mean, really – let’s be honest. Maybe not impossible, but the thing is it’s missing the point.

For hundreds of years, preachers have been straining their voices, trying to get us to think that the whole point of Christianity is to believe the right ideas about Jesus; and they are so sincere and earnest that for the most part we’ve humored them; we’ve said, okay, sure; we believe in the resurrection; sure, we believe that somehow the natural biological processes that, in every other instance turn a dead body into a smelly, decomposing mess were somehow reversed in the case of our Lord Jesus; sure, we believe that, because we’re told that that’s what we have to do believe in order to get into heaven.

But I say to you this morning – and I’m not the only one, there’s others, trust, me, going back to Peter and to James the brother of Jesus and Jesus himself – I say to you that it’s not about believing in the resurrection. It’s about practicing resurrection.

Now, let me try to earnestly and sincerely get you to believe what I’m saying.

Back in the mid-1980s, when I was in seminary in Chicago, they had me spend a summer as a hospital chaplain at this enormous hospital on the Near West Side. They do this because they want young pastors to get used to the reality of death. Which is an important thing for pastors. So for one long summer I worked as a hospital chaplain and most of my time was spent going from one grieving family to another.

One day I think I dealt with four or five deaths in a single day, including a couple of devastating tragedies: a Filipino family who lost their teenaged daughter in a car accident; a young couple who lost their baby in childbirth; and then two or three of the more usual but no less important cases of old age and disease.

And I came home from the hospital that day feeling like a zombie; the smell of death was in my nose; the reality of death felt like an anvil, weighing me down from the inside. I felt absolutely depleted. So I walked into our apartment and I said to my wife, “Don’t worry; I’m not as bad as I look; but I need you to do something for me; I need you to not talk for awhile; don’t try to fix me; I just need you to hold me.”

And she did – for hours; into the wee hours of the morning. I remember falling asleep with my head on her chest, listening to her heartbeat and her breath. I felt like that famous statue of Michaelangelo’s – the Pieta – with Mary holding the dead body of Jesus in her lap; cradling him as if he were still a child. And slowly, as the night turned into morning, I came alive again.

That’s what I mean by practicing resurrection. My wife and I practiced resurrection; I was loved into new life.

As ideas go, resurrection is not an easy one to believe in. There’s nothing anyone can say to make another person believe in it. But as a practice, we all do it.

Parents do it when they raise their children to be happy, healthy, responsible human beings. Children do it whenever they give a grown-up a hug. Doctors do it when they practice healing; lovers do it when they listen deeply to one another; pastors do it when they teach their congregations to pray.

But – and I can hear your objections to this approach – what about Jesus? What about the miracle? What about the flash of lightning and the angels and Jesus, walking around on the beach eating fish?
Well, Yes! Of course! I’m sure all that happened – or something like it, something amazing, something absolutely incomprehensibly wonderful, something that turned an unimpressive bunch of depressed disciples into inspired preachers of love, marching off to the ends of the earth to die for the cause of love.

But why do you suppose - of all the people in the history of the planet - why do you suppose it was Jesus who was resurrected? Well, look at his life: way before he was resurrected from the dead, he was practicing resurrection. Healing the sick. Feeding the hungry. Listening to women and children and poor people; eating with outcasts and sinners.

Long before he was raised from the dead, he was giving life to others. So completely open was he to the power of love over the power of death that in the end, death could not contain him.

But Jesus’ resurrection didn’t just happen at the end of his life; Jesus’ resurrection was happening every day of his life; every day that he gave himself over to relationships of life-giving love he was practicing resurrection, so that in the end, he was resurrection.

Every time we look a homeless person in the eye and treat her with respect; every time we comfort a crying child; every time we feed a hungry person; every time we contribute to a just cause; every time we do anything to advance the cause of love – we become like those medieval alchemists, turning lead into gold; we are participating in this miraculous exchange; we take part in something like a chemical reaction that transforms death into life.

So in the end, resurrection is not something we need to believe in – because we know it. We practice it.

And this is why we say “Alleluia” on Easter morning. Because the Kingdom of Heaven is here. The dead are being raised to new life. The blind are receiving their sight; and our sin is being wiped away through the power of God’s love.

But that doesn’t mean resurrection just happens. It takes work and intentionality; it takes relationship. When I walked through the door of that apartment 25 years ago I had to bring a little bit of relational intelligence with me; I had to know what it was I needed; and I had to ask for it. And my wife had to decide whether or not she wanted to be there for me.

Resurrection doesn’t always just happen; it takes work and commitment and discipline and asking for what you need and taking turns.

Sometimes it means being the strong one; sometimes it means asking for help. Most of us would much rather give help than ask for it. But it doesn’t work that way. Resurrection is a 2-way street; it’s not something you give; it’s not something you control; it’s not a commodity that can be doled out like so many ladles of soup at the bread line.

No, resurrection is something that happens - when people meet in open honest loving relationship. It’s not some abstract thing that goes off in the privacy of your brain; it’s not something you will find in your “Fortress of Solitude”. No; resurrection involves relationship – most importantly, a relationship with the source of all life and love.

And by that, of course, I mean God; and not just any god, and certainly not any kind of vague, abstract distant god, but rather this particular God of scandalous physicality; this God of dangerous specificity: Jesus of Nazareth; born in the flesh; teacher, prophet, healer, champion for social justice [sorry Glenn Beck!], who died on the cross and is risen and who comes again into our lives every time we call upon his name.

I mean, sure, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing that says you have to believe in Jesus in order to practice resurrection; of course, billions of people do it every day. Anyone can put band-aids on scraped knees and hand-out sandwiches to homeless people; but what I can’t figure out is why they would never for a moment pause to consider the source of the love that they’re exchanging by means of those band-aids and sandwiches.

It’s kind of like the man who tries to cross a vast desert with a single canteen of water, when he has no idea there are springs of fresh running water beneath his feet, if he would only just take a moment to learn how to tap into it.

This is something I’ve never understood: why would someone insist on crossing the desert and only drinking the water from his canteen, and when that runs out, trying to make it across without any water at all – even unto death – when there are abundant springs of water right under his feet?

Well, maybe he doesn’t trust the water beneath the sand. Or maybe he just doesn’t know it’s there; or how to tap it. I dunno.

But what I will tell you is that not only is there an everflowing stream of fresh water right beneath his feet; there’s also a desert oasis, not far from where he is, with food, and friendly people, and a comfortable bed, and fellow travelers who have crossed this desert many times before – if only he would just pause for a second, take his bearings, get out his map, and look at it.

That’s what this church is: that oasis. We don’t need to be so alone. Our lives don’t need to be so hard. All we need to do is let go of this crazy, if not downright suicidal, idea that we can cross this desert all by ourselves with our one little canteen of water.

But, hey, if that’s how someone wants to go, well, more power to them; I mean, we’re Episcopalians; we wouldn’t try to stop them.

As for me, I will continue to come to this oasis; I will gladly continue to sink my bucket down into the fresh well of God’s resurrecting love; I will gladly accept the hospitality of God’s people; just as I promise to do my part to do the same for others.

That’s an easy promise to make; because I have come to trust this water; I have come to trust this oasis; and I have come to see that the only thing worth living for is the love found here; a love that is powerful enough to raise the dead to new life.

And in the Spirit of that love, I proclaim that He is risen!

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Joy

2010-03-22T08:07:00.000-07:00

This morning I'm struck by these lines from this perfect psalm, Psalm 126:

Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves. (v.6)

If it is true, as the author of the book of Ecclesiastes says, that “for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven… a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance…” (Ecc. 3:1) If that is true, then this is the season, at least for many of us, for mourning.

I don’t believe this has ever happened to me in my career before. Last Sunday afternoon I jumped in a car with the Reverend Chris Bell and his family and headed out to Camp Noel Porter, so that the next day we could go skiing. And it was perhaps the finest day of skiing I have ever had – maybe one of the finest days I’ve spent outdoors. And then, on Monday night, we were all resting our bones when I got the call that Betty Wallenius had died. I spoke with Shirley on the phone, and then went to bed, praying for the restful repose of Betty’s soul; and then the next morning I woke up to the phone ringing again; this time it was our friend, Jamie Knutsen, saying that his mom Elaine had died; after a long and epic journey through several illnesses.

So two deaths in about 12 hours.

I was able to get home in fairly short order and spent the remainder of the day with the families. Our hearts go out to S. R., Betty’s younger sister, and to J., Betty’s daughter, and to Fr. J. and M. and A., Elaine’s children; and to all those who loved Betty and Elaine and grieve their loss.

When we consider these two deaths, in addition to a couple emergency hospitalizations last week, and the continuing echoes of the 2 other deaths we’ve had since Lent began, combined with the usual surge of activity as we prepare for Holy Week and Easter, you will perhaps understand that it has been a busy time around the parish, with plenty of grief to go around.

But it’s also been a deeply joyful time for me; and I pray for you. Because grief is nothing but the outpouring of love; where grief is, there love is also, and where love is, there also is God.

The Bible knows this – when we consider our lives in their entirety it’s all about victory over adversity; that for all the pain and challenge of our lives, we end in joy. And so we find in Scripture that supreme confidence expressed in our Psalm today: Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.

It’s that confidence that I find so moving today; on this second day of Spring; that for every winter there is a Spring.

Well, yesterday was the first day of Spring; and in my enthusiasm I got a little ahead of myself – I showed up to our all-day training for the pastoral care team in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. I walked into Farlander and people didn’t recognize me. I heard someone say, “Who’s that old guy walking round in shorts?”

In truth it was a little cold yesterday for that outfit. But I say, we’re Episcopalians; we go by the calendar; and the calendar says it’s Spring, so I’m staking a claim on Spring today. I’m gonna wear shorts whether it’s 40 degrees or 80 – because it’s been a long, cold rainy winter, and it’s time for us to sing, “Here comes the Sun.”

I’m not sure why, but this year I didn't take on any particular Lenten discipline. I know that might be surprising – and even troubling - to some of you, but for some reason I just didn’t feel the call to give something up. In fact, this is the first Lent since my ordination 20 years ago that I haven’t given something up, usually something significant, during Lent.

Instead, I entered Lent with a decision to just open up a little bit; just be a little bit more open to the world around me. And what I found is that as I opened myself just a little bit, I found myself more engaged in the world; and as the world emerged into Spring, so did I.

So this renewal around us - this renewal of the first day of Spring - feels more like my own renewal. This awakening, as it pours through nature in the form of green grass and blue sky and bright sun and the prospect of many more long perfect days ahead, feels like my awakening.

The earth has come alive, and so have I.

This is the resurrection, folks; plain and simple, this is how life's renewal works, through chlorophyll and oxygen and the moist, fertile ground.

Rose and I have been living in Santa Rosa now for almost 7 years and just yesterday I discovered a walking trail in Annadale, no more than a mile and a half from my house, that weaves into the woods for about a mile along a burbling natural creek.
I am not sure that it is possible to walk along that trail and not believe in God.

It’s walks like that that help me understand why people worshiped mountains and lakes and forests. When I was on the mountain at Lake Tahoe, my skis strapped to my feet and with that massive blue lake spread out at my feet, I thought "It’s the womb of the earth" and I almost wanted to get on my knees.

Its moments like that that make me think that the sun and the moon and the stars and all the trees on the earth are all singing songs of praise to God. As our capacity for awe deepens - and who cannot feel awe in front of Lake Tahoe – it seems as if the lake herself is giving praise to God; that all of nature sings of a power beyond all nature and sustaining all nature. Nature sings with the love of God, the way the wind sings through the sails of a clipper ship.

Not to get too theological about all this but this is the difference pantheism, which has traditionally been considered a heresy in our church, and panentheism, which is not. Pantheism is the idea that God is in the world but does not transcend the world. In other words, what you see is what you get. So why not worship it? Pantheists find God in nature and see nothing wrong with keeping God in that box of the natural world. But panentheists believe that the God is found in nature but is not contained by nature - that God is greater, infinitely greater than nature. God transcends nature, but God is in nature too; and everything, from the plants and animals to the angels themselves are swimming in the same substance of God’s Body which we know as the Body of Christ.

And so we proclaim, with John’s gospel, that “all things came into being through him.” And we see that creation itself is a kind of brokenness – all of matter is made up of time that is broken. Just before the big bang happened something broke; something gave way and the energy of the universe was released in brokenness and so the universe itself bears the image of Christ; the Body of Christ broken open the way we break open a loaf of bread; broken open the way morning is broken.

Christ is broken the way morning is broken. And so at the altar we raise the bread and break it; and we proclaim Christ, broken and risen and coming again. Christ is broken the way morning is broken; and we, in the midst of our pain and grief, are broken into joy.

This idea of panentheism is important because it allows us to have a complete spirituality of the Incarnation. Because nothing is left out of the sphere of God's active life; we find God in the flesh; in the midst of our real lives and our real bodies, which grow old and break into new life. This is what it means to have an Incarnational theology: it allows us to sink more fully into the real world; so that we can sink into this Creation fully confident that we can trust it; all of it.

Every aspect of our lives can be trusted because every aspect of our lives is inhabited by God; in the birthing and in the dying and everything in between, God is being born.

Of course, it might not always feel like it at the time; at any given time in our lives we might be struggling with despair or fear or pain. But we trust this God; just as we trust this Earth and this renewal of life; and with the ancient ancestors who have gone before us, we are confident in the outcome; we know that new life comes from being broken open; who go out weeping shall come home with shouts of joy.

AMEN.

Hey Glenn Beck

2010-03-16T23:27:00.000-07:00

Dear Glenn Beck:

I'm a Social Justice Priest.
Social justice is at the very heart of Scripture.
Without social justice there is no Bible.
Without social justice there is no church.
Except maybe a church that just doesn't care.
Is that your church?

Without social justice there is no law.
Except maybe the law of the strong.
Do you like being strong?

The original remarks by Glenn Beck on You Tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c4DqdleJuY

I applaud Jim Wallis for calling this man out on this attack on American and Christian values:
http://blog.sojo.net/2010/03/10/tell-glenn-beck-im-a-social-justice-christian

[For some reason I can't get my hyperlinks to work on my blog today. You'll have to copy and paste until I figure it out.]

See also NY Times article:
March 11, 2010 by Laurie Goodstein

God Needs to Move In Order To Live.

2010-03-13T04:59:00.000-08:00

Back about 100 years ago, when my son Tom was in the 2nd grade, his best friend was a boy I'll call "Jeffrey."

Jeffrey was one of those kids that was always smiling and laughing and talking, and always in motion: running, riding his bike, roller blading everywhere. And for a seven year-old, he was an amazing athlete. He could do a standing back flip: one minute he’d be standing in front of you, and then all of a sudden he’d say, “Watch this,” and then he would jump into the air, flip backwards, and land back on his feet.

He loved to see the look on my face when he did that.

And Jeffrey always had trouble in school.

One day Tom got on the school bus without his lunch so I stopped by his school later that morning to drop it off; and that’s when I found Jeffrey sitting on the floor in the hallway outside his classroom. I knew something was wrong because I called his name and he didn’t look up at me with his usual big grin. Instead he kept his head down; and when I knelt to talk to him I could see he was crying.

I said, “Jeffrey, what’s the matter?” And he said, “I’m so stupid! I keep getting into trouble! I don’t know why! I’m so stupid!”

I said, “Hey, Jeffrey. You are NOT stupid! Don’t you ever believe that!”
Later that day I spoke to his mom. Usually, when you see a good kid like that, who has trouble controlling his impulses, you think maybe he’s got ADHD or some other learning problem. I asked if she had ever had him tested. Well, the color rose up in her face and she said, “There’s nothing wrong with my son!”

I agreed with her. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with him. But he is having problems. But she couldn’t see the difference. “If I have him tested he’s just gonna get labeled for the rest of his life,” she said.

The next day I ran into Jeffrey’s teacher and shared my concerns. I mean, I didn’t want to meddle, but here’s a talented boy who thinks he’s stupid. She just shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve got 28 kids in there,” she said. “I can’t be giving everyone special treatment.” It seemed to me she was more interested in punishing a bad boy than treating a kid who was having problems.

Jeffrey and his mom moved at the end of that year. I think about him now and wonder: did he ever graduate from high school? Did he ever make it to college on that football scholarship he used to dream about?

Jeffrey, for me, illustrates the difference between having a problem, and thinking you are the problem.

Anyone can have a problem; and if you have a problem, that means the problem might be fixed. But if you are the problem, what solution is there for you? Millions of youngsters like Jeffrey just take themselves out of the equation: they are taught to think they are the problem; and long before they’ve given up on school, they’ve given up on themselves.

If a kid genuinely believes he’s stupid, what hope does he have? But if he sees that he’s having trouble controlling his impulses; that maybe his brain is firing off confusing signals – well, that’s a different story. That’s a situation that can be fixed.

You see what I’m talking about here? It’s the difference between being and doing; between being the problem and having the problem.

That’s exactly what’s going on in today’s parable. There’s this fig tree that has a problem – it isn’t producing figs. The owner is convinced that the problem is in the being of the fig tree. It’s just a bad fig tree! “Cut it down!” he says.

But the gardener sees something different going on. It’s not a bad fig tree; it’s just having problems. “Don’t cut it down just yet,” he begs. “Let me loosen the soil around its roots. Let me lay in some fertilizer. Let’s see what happens if we stop blaming the tree and instead start looking instead at what’s really going on.”

One way of thinking about this difference is the difference between people who think primarily in terms of nouns, and those who think in terms of verbs. Now, I know that sounds pretty strange or simplistic but hear me out. When we think in terms of nouns, we focus our attention on things and their attributes. We see a boy and we give him an attribute: Oh, he’s not very bright. Or he’s ADHD. Or he’s gifted. He’s good; he’s bad.

Like Jeffrey’s mom was afraid of: we label things – even a 7 year-old boy; we treat him as an object frozen for all time with a certain set of attributes.

But nobody is fixed; we are all changing and responding to various influences in our environment. Kids especially! Psychologists have proven this time and again: kids who are told they are stupid will underperform; kids who are told they are smart will achieve more. It’s not that they are stupid or smart – those are fixed categories. It’s that they are in motion, constantly responding to expectations and influences.

Kids are in motion; we are in motion, the world is in motion.

The truth is that the world is much better understood when we focus on the verbs than the nouns; when we focus more on what is happening than on what is. He’s having trouble concentrating. His brain is sending mixed signals. His teacher is feeling overwhelmed. His mom is feeling defensive.

The fig tree is not a bad fig tree. It’s not a good fig tree. It’s a fig tree that is having problems.

Some people might think this is just a matter of semantics but in fact there is a profound distinction here: Quantum physics tells us that at the deepest heart of reality, sub-atomic particles are not particles at all but better understood as "occurrences". In other words, at the most fundamental level of reality, there really are no nouns – only verbs. It turns out that reality is a verb! Matter is nothing but time slowed down. Or something like that.

I’m no physicist but this is what the physicists are telling us. We used to think of the smallest elements of matter as a bunch of nouns – a vast field of tiny billiard balls bouncing off each other. But it turns out this is utterly wrong. Elements of energy/time/space come into existence because they are in constant fluid relationship with other elements of energy/time/space; and nothing simply “is.” Instead, everything is happening.

Focus, in other words, on the verbs, not the nouns; on the doing, not the being.

In theological circles this way of thinking is called Process Theology. Process theology encourages us to think about God as a Verb rather than a noun.
In other words, don’t ask, “What is God,” but instead ask, “What is God doing?” “How is the divine breaking into my life? How am I responding to God?”

Whenever we start talking about God as a fixed object with certain attributes, we start putting God into a box. And God doesn’t live in a box. God needs to move in order to live.

I was talking to a homeless man the other day; he was asking me for money and I could smell alcohol on his breath. When I asked him if he’d been drinking he said, “Look, man, I’m just a drunk, alright?”

“I’m just a drunk.” To me that sounded like a man who was begging to be treated as a noun instead of a verb: I’m just a drunk. Because he didn’t want to change; he didn’t want to cast himself into the dangerous waters of God’s possibilities; he couldn’t take on the action verbs of repenting and healing and growing; instead he was begging me to just let him be… a drunk.

But the bad news for him, and for all of us, is that life is all about change. The only things that don’t change are dead. We can’t escape change because our very existence is defined by change.

Churches that define God as a fixed object want the world to just stop turning. This is natural - we all want this – we want something stable and permanent that we can hold onto. Sometimes it feels like we’re in the middle of the ocean, clinging to a buoy – we want something solid; something that won’t change on us.

But we know that’s an illusion. Our bodies are changing, our families are changing, our society is changing, our world is changing. Even at the end, at our own burial service, the priest will declare that in death, life is “changed, not ended.”

And that’s where we find God, too. God is in the change. When we refuse to accept change as the only constant in life, we are not only denying reality; we’re denying God as well.

So we ask ourselves: Where is God in the changes of our lives? Jesus says, God is in the gardener: loosening up the soil; digging around the roots; laying in the fertilizer.

And we are in motion: we are turning toward God; we are opening; we are taking in God’s life and light; we are giving thanks.

Our bishop has a favorite prayer; it memorized it many years ago; and as he is fond of reminding us, it appears in the Prayer Book no fewer than four times. And it’s all about finding God in the change:

O God, we pray: look favorably on your whole church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord….

May this be our prayer today, on this day of divine change.

AMEN.

At the brink of the grave

2010-02-15T22:00:00.000-08:00

Sermon February 14 2010
Most of you have heard, by now, the sad news of MLS’s death on Friday morning. It goes without saying that this has been a heart wrenching time for J and J and all of ML’s family and friends; that time of dreadful grace; when our gratitude and our love pours out with our tears and our hugs.

The funeral is scheduled for Tues Feb 23, 11:30

I am very sorry to have to report that another tragedy broke into our community on the same day that ML died: HC’s younger sister R died, quite unexpectedly. She had gone off to work on Friday morning, didn’t feel well, went back home to Sebastopol and went to bed, and apparently did not wake up. The shock to Heather and her family is of course most severe; she was still a young woman in her 40’s; the cause has not yet been determined.

I spent some time with H yesterday; her family was on its way, she is surrounded by good friends and the love of this community. Our blessings and prayers go out to her.

So here we are, appropriately enough, approaching Lent, with Ash Wed coming this Wednesday. It feels to me like we've entered that territory already.

It was, of course, on Ash Wed two years ago that ML received her diagnosis. I will never forget the sight of her, coming in through the side chapel just as we were finishing up the imposition of ashes. She kind of rushed in; DW was with her as she has been every step of the way since. She knelt at the altar rail and looked up at me with a knowing in her eyes that was deep and wild. Then she closed her eyes and I imposed those ashes on her forehead, saying those grave words, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return,” And I thought, “Never have those words been more unnecessary.”

Last Friday, on the morning ML died, I drove down to join the 8 o’clock morning prayer group here gathered around the altar. Everyone there, of course, knew ML well and long and the fresh news of her death hung in the air like smoke.

When we got to the psalm appointed for the day, these were the words we read:
O Lord, my god, my Savior, by day and night I cry to you. Let my prayer enter into your presence; incline your ear to my lamentation. For I am full of trouble; my life is at the brink of the grave.

This psalm, Psalm 88, is a song of despair and mortality; the psalmist goes on at length about the finality of death: he speaks about the depths of the Pit, the dark places, the abyss. God feels very far away in this psalm, and the trials of life feel like punishment: “Your anger weighs upon me heavily, and all your great waves overwhelm me.”

This is also a psalm of questions, not answers:

“Why have you rejected me? Why have you hidden your face from me?” “Do you work wonders for the dead? Will those who have died stand up and give you thanks?”

Some of the questions seem almost sarcastic, or ironic. “Will your loving-kindness be declared in the grave?... Will your wonders be known in the dark?”

This, indeed, is a song sung at the brink of the grave.

Sometimes, when our lives feel full of trouble and loneliness, reading psalms like this can be a comfort. It’s comforting to know that we are not the only ones who feel this way. But if we are looking for answers to our bitter questions, psalms like this might not be the best place to go.

It’s like our church in that way. If we’re looking for facile clichés and easy answers, the Episcopal Church is not necessarily a good fit. We are not a church that tends toward strident, simplistic proclamations; we do not pretend that the howling depths of our grief can be answered by a cheerful verse of Scripture quoted out of context.

So many churches seem so determined to run from the ambiguous and, at times, frightening questions; they fill their music with cheerful tunes of praise as if the purpose of a church is to collude with its parishioners in a magnificent denial of death.

Not so the Episcopal Church. But oh, don’t get me wrong: we find our answers, eventually; and then when we find them, we continue to test them; and modify them; and test them some more against our reason, against our Scripture; against the great traditions of our church. When times are good, like everyone else we might forget them, but when the Ash Wednesdays of our life roll around and we find ourselves once again standing at the brink of the grave, the answers we find are solid.

Today, as we do every Sunday just before Lent begins, we hear the story of Jesus on the mountaintop with his favorite disciples; suddenly he is bathed in an unearthly light; and those two figures appear, Moses and Elijah, representing the law and the prophets.

And what do you suppose they are talking about, up there on the mountain top?
Not about the weather, that’s for sure; nor are they singing God’s praises at that moment, as we might expect them to be doing.

No, they are talking about death. Jesus’ death, to be precise.

In the fullness of the glory of the transfiguration, on the top of the mountain with beams of light shooting out like the sun from the face of Jesus, Jesus is talking to these heavenly beings about his death.

Which, of course, his disciples have no interest in hearing about. In fact, they practically slept through the entire experience.

Just eight days earlier, in this same chapter of Luke’s Gospel (ch. 9), Jesus performs the miracle of the loaves and fishes – this amazing miracle, which had come on the heels of the spectacular mission of the twelve, when they went out into the countryside healing the sick and casting out demons. They had just returned from this great success; the air was alive with excitement; the disciples were just beside themselves, giddy with all this new life bursting out all over, the Kingdom of God literally blooming before their eyes in the name of Jesus – and what does Jesus talk to them about?

He sits them down and tells them, plainly, "The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed....” (Luke 9:22)

Well, talk about a buzz-kill. You can almost hear them wondering, “What is it about this guy – why does he have to talk about death? This is all about life! Healings! Miracles!”

Why do you suppose it is that Jesus himself brings us to the brink of the grave? At his moment of full glory he takes us there – to the cross. Why?

I think it’s so we might finally see what lies beyond the cross.

So we might finally see the truth of what this is; and who we are.

That we are not only made of dust and ashes; we are made of light. If we are dust at all, it is stardust. The grave cannot contain us. We are alive - always and for all time.

Time and again Jesus keeps taking us there. At the height of his glory Jesus shows us his death - so that in the face of our death we will see his glory.

So we will finally get it. So we will see the grave for what it is – a mere hole in the ground that cannot contain us - and so we will see ourselves for what we are.
How else could he make us see, it? You can hear them on the mountaintop, Moses and Elijah, mulling that question over to Jerusalem, and reaching a decision. You will go to Jerusalem. You will stand at the brink of the grave. You will be lifted in weakness and humility high up on the cross and die for all the world to see: so that on the third day, you will be raised in blinding light for all the world to see.

And we, who are witnesses to that glory, are transformed by it.

Just as Moses was transformed by the sight of God on the mountaintop; and his face shone with this uncreated light so that he had to put a veil over his face when he went among his people.

Just as Paul was transformed by this light, but unlike Moses, refused to put a veil on his face; but instead encouraged all of us to bear witness to this light. So that in this 2nd letter to the Corinthians that we read today, way before the gospels were written, Paul writes:

And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Cor 3:18)

We know this light. We are witnesses to this light. We have seen the face of God. As John’s gospel says, we have seen the light and we testify to the light; and we have become children of this light. We see it in each other; and we are transformed by it.

You know, this congregation is not just some random collection of aging Santa Rosans, complaining to one another about our wrinkles and our wilting bodies. We see past all that! Because we see that light - there, in our eyes; like a light shining with the force of creation itself.

It is the light of Christ, transfigured on the mountaintop; it is the light of Christ, bursting from the grave. Proclaiming to all the world what we know most deeply in our bones: that we are made of this light.

That is why we can talk about death without flinching; because we have seen death defeated.

And so we stand at the brink of Lent; we stand at the brink of the grave; and with one voice we sing alleluia. We join our voices with ages past; with countless generations who have testified to this light; we are connected to them beyond time and space, joining with them and singing alleluia!

Somebody say it with me: Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Pray for Haiti

2010-01-14T07:01:00.000-08:00

The stories coming out of Haiti are horrific. Many have had no water going on 3 days. This will be one of the worst disasters of our generation. Pray that water and medical aid can get there very soon.

Episcopal Relief and Development has set-up a fund for emergency relief. You can be assured that your donation will go directly to Haiti relief through this charity. Go to https://www.er-d.org/donate-select.php

Almighty and most merciful God, we remember before you all poor and neglected persons whom it would be easy for us to forget: the homeless and the destitute, the old and the sick, and all who have none to care for them. Help us to heal those who are broken in body or spirit, and to turn their sorrow into joy. Grant this, Father, for the love of your Son, who for our sake became poor, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP p.826)

Almighty God our heavenly Father, guide the nations of the world into the way of justice and truth, and establish among them that peace which is the fruit of righteousness, that they may become the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. (BCP p.816)

2010-01-12T10:56:00.000-08:00

First Sunday after Epiphany
January 10, 2010

So here we are. We’ve celebrated our 12 days of Christmas; Epiphany is in the past; the Three Kings have come and have left their gifts behind; the special Oreo Rice Krispie Treats that my son’s girlfriend made for me are all consumed; and so I suppose it is time for us now to face facts and admit that the holidays are over.

You will notice, however, that the Christmas tree in Farlander Hall is still standing. Well, it just so happens that Eric, our Sexton, has been on vacation since the first of the year; and he’s the only one who knows how to take the tree down so I guess, logically speaking, as long as the Christmas tree is standing Christmastide cannot be over. We’re just going to have to continue celebrating Christmas until he returns.

That would make today the 17th day of Christmas – which is fine by me. There’s no need to be in any rush about this.

I hate to see the holidays go; I’ve always been attached to them – maybe it’s because I was conceived sometime around the beginning of Advent.
I’d like to think this accounts for my cheerful demeanor and my affection for champagne.

Five months after I was born, my sister Rebecca was conceived. Legend attributes this event to a very persuasive box of chocolates delivered to my mother’s bedside on Valentine’s Day. I think this explains why my sister, as an adult, spent a year in Paris learning how to make chocolate cakes.

Rebecca was the fifth and final child for my parents. God bless my mom, they had five children in 6 years. In other words, they were Roman Catholics…. Catholics, that is, until Rebecca came along.

So while I like to say I’m a cradle Episcopalian, technically speaking I started out as a Roman Catholic, having been baptized by a Catholic priest. I’m sure if I had had a say in the matter, I would have wriggled out of his grip and crawled on my hands and knees to the Episcopal Church down the street, but the priest had hands like iron.

It wasn’t until a few months later that my parents saw things my way. It was the middle of summer in a sweltering church; my mother, five months pregnant with Rebecca, fighting morning sickness, sleep deprived, bone weary, juggling me in her lap and trying to keep the three other children quiet and entertained, listened while a celibate Catholic priest preached a sermon on the evils of birth control.
Legend has it that in the middle of the sermon the baby in my mother’s womb kicked her so hard she took it as a sign from God. We very politely marched out of the church and became faithful Episcopalians the very next Sunday.

So I stand here today, a priest in the Episcopal Church, thanks to a box of chocolates and a poorly timed sermon on birth control. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Most of us were baptized as infants or young children. When the priest poured the water over our heads and uttered the ancient formula of baptism, we didn’t have much say in the matter. I have baptized many babies who were wiggling and screaming in protest – but they never stopped me from doing my job. I have hands of iron...

Jesus, on the other hand, chose to be baptized as an adult. He knew exactly what he was doing – and he knew exactly what he would be facing after his baptism.

I wonder if he had any secret regrets, as he rose up from out of that river soaking wet and thought about the future he was facing. I wonder if he wanted to go back to the time before baptism – kind of like how I want to go back to Christmastide; or like a man who has just gotten a tattoo he wasn’t sure about. Did he hear the words of commitment coming out of his mouth and think, “Is it too late? Can I take it back?”

Or did the very act of baptism give him the courage to face his destiny?

The ritual of baptism involves the giving of a name; and more than that, it involves being called by name by God, into covenant with God.

The prophet Isaiah speaks in the name of God: “O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.”

The writer Lawrence Wood talks about how God finds very special ways to call us by name. He tells the story of a doctor he knew, who fought all his life against the idea of a personal God:

He sought refuge instead in music; Bach particularly appealed to him because of the mathematical precision of the fugues. Meanwhile, his life was falling apart. His first wife left him; he started drinking too much. One day as he was driving, he pounded the steering wheel with his open palms and cried out, “God, if you’re really there, you’re going t have to say something! And you know what kind of man I am! … You’re going to have to talk my language!” Just then on the radio came, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” My friend sobbed, and laughed at what an idiotic but wonderful word this was to him.
[The Christian Century, “The Living Word,” Dec. 26, 2006]

And it wasn’t even a classical music station. The next song was “The Girl from Ipanema”! He doesn’t say why – maybe his wife was from Brazil, I don’t know, but somehow that sealed the deal for the doctor. God had spoken his particular language. The Word of God had become so custom-made at that moment that it was if God had called him by name.

It’s a powerful thing to be called by name. We’re in the 2rd grade, in the middle of a busy classroom surrounded by 30 other chattering children. The teacher calls our name. Something happens to us; our attention goes up; the room becomes clarified; our hand goes up; we say, “Here I am.”

For Jesus, his baptism had a similar effect; called by name, his world is clarified; everything else falls away; he stands, and says, “Yes. Here I am.”

Being called by name can have another kind of effect. We’re in a lecture hall in graduate school with 75 other students. The famously cranky professor is known to randomly choose students from the class list to answer notoriously difficult questions. You have deliberately placed yourself in the back of the lecture hall hoping this protect you; you have spent the entire semester hunched over your desk trying to look as small as possible.

And then you are called by name. “Matthew Lawrence! Please explain to us the origins of the Categorical Imperative!”

This is why we also associate baptism with repentance. Sometimes, in the name of a presence so awesome and vast as God, or even just somebody like a college professor who thinks he's God, the calling of our name is enough to make us feel unworthy of the attention.

The Methodist bishop Peter Storey points out that most of us have at least two names: our given name, and our family name. Our given name is what makes us unique: “Hey, Matt, how you doin’?” “Well, George, I’m doin’ just fine.”

Our given name is our own – we can do whatever we want with it. We can shorten it, take a nickname, whatever we want. Our family name, on the other hand, is not flexible; because it associates us with our people. Our family name does not belong to us – it belongs to the family. Through it, we represent our ancestors; our tribe. If our family name appears in the newspaper, we hope it doesn’t bring shame on the family name.

The family name, in other words, carries with it a set of responsibilities; obligations; sometimes even a life-long vocation.

This week I was privileged to serve at the Memorial Service of Betty Grove’s husband, Al, or C.A., as he was known. He was a third generation Santa Rosan, as were many of the people who came to remember him. The service was a Who’s Who of Santa Rosa’s most established families, including even the third generation of the Daniels family, who buried him.

I noticed that Al’s given name was not fixed – some people referred to him as Al, some as C.A. – it didn’t seem to matter (although nobody referred to him as Clarence Albert). But to everyone in that room, his family name - Grove - meant something special. Everyone in that room knew what the name Grove meant to Santa Rosa’s agricultural community; the name is important. It stands for something; it gives those who are lucky enough to bear the name something to live up to and be worthy of.

In our baptism, we are given the name Christian; for us perhaps the most worthy family name of all. To take on this name, Christian, carries certain responsibilities, certain obligations - to the God who calls us by name; and to the Christians ancestors who have gone before us. Those obligations and responsibilities are summarized for us in the Baptismal Covenant.

In a few moments, you will be invited to stand and affirm your commitment to this Covenant. In that re-affirmation, we’re invited to go back to those first moments of baptism. But of course there’s a big difference. We’re grown-ups now. You are not a baby wriggling against a priest with iron hands. You don’t need to affirm these words; nobody is making you. So think about it carefully. If you don't mean it, I suggest you not say it.

And this morning, as you come up for Communion, you will have an opportunity to dip your hand into the baptismal water, and make the sign of the cross over yourself, and remember these commitments as you receive the Eucharist. Again, this is an invitation, not a commandment.

If you choose to make this re-affirmation, I suggest you pray with me on this: May God, who has given us the will to do these things, give us the strength and the love and the courage to achieve them, also.

AMEN.

The Baptismal Covenant (pp.304-5, Book of Common Prayer)

Do you believe in God the Father?
I believe in God, the Father almighty,creator of heaven and earth.

Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God?
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.

Do you believe in God the Holy Spirit?
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.

Will you continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?
I will, with God's help.

Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.
I will, with God's help.

Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?
I will, with God's help.

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?
I will, with God's help.

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
I will, with God's help.

On Flicking Your BIC: Christmas Eve Sermon

2009-12-31T10:52:00.000-08:00

In Chicago, in the summer time every year, the city hosts a Blues Festival. Thousands of people turn out for this festival; they gather in Grant Park and listen to some of the all time great blues musicians in the world. People like Coco Taylor, BB King, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells....

Now this is a festival for the blues; a festival of sorrows, if you will; because the blues were invented to help people deal with the pain in their lives. In other words, this is not the kind of crowd that stands up and flicks their lighters and holds them aloft during the concert, is what I’m saying.

So about a hundred years ago, or more precisely some time back in the mid-80s, Rose and I were at the Blues Festival and we were sitting behind this young teen-aged boy; he was all alone at the concert; and by the looks of him – all freshly scrubbed and carefully dressed - we knew he was from the suburbs. But it was clear that he had been to a rock concert before, because half way through the performance he got out his BIC lighter and flicked it and held it up in the air.

And this young man did not appear discouraged when no one else flicked their BICs. For the entire remainder of the concert, he kept at it, holding up that lighter and looking over his shoulder with a hopeful look on his face, waiting for that magical moment when the entire crowd of thousands would be waving their lighters and swaying side to side, inspired by his example.

And as the night wore on, the look on his face grew only more and more determined; he didn’t give up – not until the very end, when the final chord was struck. And as the applause died down my heart went out to him, that lonely hero of hope; that brave soldier, shining his light against the darkness, come what may and no matter how silly he seemed to a jaded and cynical world of blues.

Since those days, the world has only grown more full of the blues; it seems to me that the world needs that young man now more than ever.

But some days, if you look hard enough, you can see that little BIC lighter out there. When the nights are darkest, the stars are their most brilliant.
It was in the middle of one of the darkest moments of Israel’s history that the prophet Isaiah caught sight of that light - but it wasn’t a little flickering BIC that he was describing when he said, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

The year was 735 BC; the kingdom of Judah was facing annihilation by Assyria – the greatest power in the known world. What hope could they have? The prophet Isaiah saw the look on the king’s face; he saw that the king was without hope and that he was more aware of his weakness than of his strength. And so Isaiah spoke these words to help King Ahaz get things in perspective. Don’t forget, Isaiah was saying, that the Lord your God is a great God; don’t forget the promises that he made to us. Keep your hope alive, Isaiah was saying. Assyria is nothing compared to the kingdom promised to us under the house of David.

But the king didn’t listen to Isaiah, and instead basically gave away his kingdom to the Assyrians.

Isaiah must have felt a little like the young man at the blues festival, looking out over a sea of darkness: am I the only one around here who is willing to hope?

When the nights are darkest, the stars are their most brilliant. I imagine it was a dark night, indeed, in that little town of Bethlehem so many years ago, when the star appeared from the East. The people of Israel were desperately poor, living under a brutal army occupation. Torture and terrorism were commonplace; and hope was in very short supply. And yet, in that darkness, the star appeared.

On the night of September 11, 2001, I was among a few religious leaders invited to address a crowd of over 12,000 students who had come to the center of campus to pray. Somehow, there were enough candles for everyone – the Catholics brought them. Where they got their hands on 12,000 candles I will never know. And while we prayed for peace on that very dark night, the candles were lit – at the front of the crowd, first, and then spreading toward the back until it looked like a vast galaxy of stars.

If you were alive then you might remember the pit in your stomach; the sense of panic just beneath the surface; the fear and the grief and the uncertainty. But as those candles were lit; when we took in the sight of just how much light can be thrown against the night when people decide that it is time to hope – well, it was a sight to see.

But toward the end of the prayer vigil we ran into a slight problem; we hadn’t quite thought through a fitting way to end it; as the last prayer was spoken there was a moment of uncertainty; the crowd started to shift their feet; no one wanted to leave. And that’s when a priest among us on the stage took a step toward the crowd, and in the silence and the confusion, lifted his candle high above his head.
I don’t believe I will ever see anything more beautiful than the sight of all 12,000 of those candles lifted up. It was, to me, as if an angel appeared over a sea of shepherds, and said, “Take heart. Do not be afraid.”

There are days when I read the newspaper and my memory of that voice seems very distant indeed.

Just yesterday there was a crowd of Muslim pilgrims in Iraq, reverently marching to a holy shrine in Karbala. They endured five separate bomb attacks; 47 pilgrims were injured; five were killed.

In November, 88 Iraqi civilians died at the hands of terrorists. The good news is that this is the lowest number of civilians killed since the invasion in 2003.

In Mosul, Christian churches have been bombed six times during the past month. Three people have been killed so far, including a baby.

It’s enough to make you forget the voice of that angel, speaking words of peace.

And so tonight, when I hold my candle against the darkness, I will be praying for the victims of warfare and terrorism, wherever they may be, whatever their creed.

Tonight, when you hold your candle against the darkness, what will you be praying for?

Closer to home, we have our own challenges. Many of us are reminded, every Christmas, of what we have lost. We can’t stop thinking about Christmases past, when times were better: when we were healthier, when our beloved families were still intact; when our loved ones were still counted as among the living.

When I raise my candle tonight, I will be praying with my brother, who on the other side of the earth is praying that this will not be his last Christmas. I will be thinking of my Mom, and all the ways she made Christmas so special; and I will be thinking of our beloved Bernese Mountain Dog, who died last Christmas.

Tonight, when you hold your candle against the darkness, what will you be praying for?

Many of us have lost jobs, some of us have lost our homes; some of us are struggling against addiction or depression. Tonight, when I raise my candle against the darkness, I will pray for my loved ones’ economic relief.

What will you be praying for?

Let your prayers be heard tonight; this of all nights – because Christ comes to a homeless couple living in a barn – to give us hope even in the face of poverty; Christ comes to us in fullness and light, to heal us even in the midst of our illness. Christ comes to us in wartime, to teach us how to find peace even in a world of violence and desperation.

Let your prayers be heard tonight - of all nights.

Sometimes I wonder about that young man, that hero of hope who held his BIC lighter up at the concert. I wonder if he ever found the courage to flick his BIC ever again.

Sometimes, when things haven’t gone our way, we will decide never to hope again. We might think we are alone in a vast sea of cynical people, all of them battling the blues, and we might decide just to join them; give up on hope; not embarrass ourselves again. But maybe what it means is that we’ve been flicking our BICs in the wrong place; maybe instead of a blues festival, we might try flicking our BICs somewhere else – like maybe in a church. Maybe it wouldn’t feel so different if we surrounded by people who have learned to pray rather than to complain.

Maybe that is what brought you here tonight. Led by your own star to this sacred place; surrounded on all sides by other heroes of hope.

Tonight, when you lift your candle, you can trust you are not alone. So let that hope that is within you, that uncreated flame of God that burns inside you, raise you up. Join your voice with angels and archangels; proclaim the goodness of God; and rejoice that here, in this place, Christ our savior is born.

AMEN.

Note: at the end of the worship service, the lights went out and we all lit our candles while singing "Silent Night." At the end of the hymn, I stood at the altar and silently raised my candle. Gradually, everyone else did also. It was a gorgeous thing to see.

Gospel Truth - Hard Truth

2009-12-15T16:43:00.000-08:00

Advent 3, 2009

In my sermon two weeks ago, I talked about all the themes of repentance and coming apocalypse that are contained in the readings for Advent; after the service one of our members said, “You know, I never noticed that before. And to be honest, I just ignore all that stuff anyway.”

I suddenly got a vision of John the Baptist 2,000 years ago; it’s a clear, sunny day in a village in Galilee and he arrives in the town square and starts fulminating with this sermon we hear this morning. A group of shoppers gathers around him and listens politely while he wades in on them: “You brood of vipers, the wrath to come, the winnowing hook, the ax laid at the roots…”

When he’s done there’s a moment of silence; the crowd blinks, someone says, “Eh,” and everyone walks away.

“Who was that guy,” someone says? “Eh, who knows? Some guy, talking crazy…”

In other words, what I’m getting at is that we tend to hear the sermons we want to hear; we tend to believe what we’ve decided to believe ahead of time. When someone comes along with an inconvenient truth – some fact or bit of evidence that doesn’t fit with what we already have decided to believe, we will simply not notice it – literally in many cases. Social psychologists call this “confirmation bias.”

We all do this – no one’s immune. The other day our deacon, Pamela, told me that [name of delicious candy withheld] – which happens to be one of my favorite foods – have, of all the candies, the highest quantities of insect parts inside them. She even told me the story of how, on two successive occasions, she bit into one and found – well, I don’t want to spoil your breakfast, but it’s like the old joke: what’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?

Half a worm...

Now, I have no reason to think she made that story up… but on the other hand, you know what? “Eh!” I’m not giving up my favorite food.

We hear what we want to hear – and if we are unfortunate enough to be stuck in church while the preacher goes on a John-the-Baptist rant about broods of vipers and winnowing hooks, we’ll just wait him out and then say, “Eh.”

It’s a tricky thing, being a preacher – you hate the idea of people saying “Eh” while you’re preaching… you want people to actually hear the truth of God as it has been revealed to you… you know that it doesn’t do anyone any good to get all John-the-Baptist-y on your people because it’s only going to drive them away – but on the other hand there is this truth as you understand it; and you’ve made a sacred vow to represent that truth.

How much to challenge, how much to comfort – a tricky question. It’s especially tricky because we’ve learned a few things since the days of John the Baptist. We’ve learned, for example, that anger and shaming almost never helps a situation. Neither does fear. John the Baptist had no problem pointing his finger in anger, scaring them into listening, shaming them into repentance.

But even the gloomiest of the gloom-and-doom prophets tended to balance their messages with visions of sweetness and light; it’s as if they knew, intuitively, that anger and punishment only gets us so far. Even Zephaniah, as gloomy a prophet as ever there was, has this section that we read this morning (Zeph. 3:14-20), full of exultation and joy and the promise of a better tomorrow.

I think it’s this knowledge that anger and fear and shame only get us so far that leads some of us to dismiss the judgmental words of the prophets so quickly – maybe a little too quickly.

Some of us grew up in households dominated by an angry, punishing person. The image of John the Baptist yelling and ranting only serves to reignite the traumatic experiences of our childhood and we have no hesitation to dismiss it.
Of course. That makes perfect sense.

Except, of course, the truth is that whatever John the Baptist was angry about, it had nothing to do our childhood traumas. I wonder if for some of us a different response might be possible; I wonder what might happen if we were able to not get triggered by our own issues and consider whatever it was that John the Baptist was really angry about. Maybe we would discover that it was something that we, too, were angry about – and rightly so. And this then would invite us to explore our own issues with anger.

Most of us have anger issues of one kind or another. The anger of the prophets might just alienate and frighten us. But there is such a thing as healthy anger, isn’t there – when it is expressed appropriately and safely? Of course, we are Episcopalians – we are, if nothing else, polite unto death. But there is such a thing as righteous anger, like the anger of the prophets.

I don’t mind saying I get angry. I get angry over the way our immigrants are treated; I get angry when people I love can’t get basic health care; I get angry at the millions of dollars the drug companies are spending to keep it that way. I get angry that no one seems to get angry anymore.

Maybe you have your own righteous anger. I hope you do. The Bible is clear: anger at injustice is no sin; righteous anger is a blessing.

And Jesus, also, is clear: shame and fear are never helpful.

When Jesus comes across the mob about to stone the adulteress – this is the ultimate act of shaming, isn’t it? - he says, “Those without sin: cast the first stone.” (John 8:7)

He doesn’t shame anyone; not even the people with the rocks in their hands. Instead he points to the fact that we all sin; we all are in need of repentance.

I knew a man back in Boston – a good man, a member of this big prestigious church I was going to at the time. He lived in a nice house in a wealthy suburb outside Boston; but he had a shameful secret, which was that he grew up in a violent home. He was physically abused often by his angry and shaming father; and as an adult, to his enormous grief and shame, he found himself hurting his wife.

Then one day his priest – a mentor of mine – got a call from this man’s wife. So he paid them a visit. This priest was a gentle man. He didn’t threaten and he didn’t scold. He made sure that the wife was safe; and then he made sure the man understood three things: first, that his secret was out; second, that there was no need for shame; and third, that help was available.

Somehow that priest told the truth in a way that the man could hear; and on that day three things happened: he confessed his sins and asked for forgiveness; he moved out so he would no longer be a threat to his wife; and he started getting some help.

This was the good news gospel truth for that man and his wife: that they were not alone – everyone is imperfect and there is no shame in admitting that, no matter how nice your house is – and that there was a way out. They did not need to be trapped in their cycles of anger, shame, and loathing. They were blessed.

Sometimes the good news is hard news. But this is the good news of Jesus Christ: that no matter how much shame we feel, we are blessed. No matter how loathsome we think we are, we are loved. In our deepest failings and our worst sins, we are forgiven.

This is what gives us the courage to face our failings. That’s all that God asks of us: that we take a breath, and confess the truth of our lives, ask for help, and accept the help that is offered. God takes care of the rest.

This is the Good News: it is what inspires Paul to say these words of joy:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.

AMEN.

Hope in a cynical age

2009-12-08T16:49:00.000-08:00

Sermon: Advent 2 (Year C)
December 6, 2009

Last Friday, David Brooks in the New York Times wrote about the difference between how Democrats felt during the presidential campaign and how they feel now. He said "Many Democrats are nostalgic for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign - for the passion, the clarity, the bliss-to-be-alive fervor. They argue that these things are missing in a cautious and emotionless White House."

Well, I don't know what Democrats Mr. Brooks has been talking to, but his remark got me thinking about hope and disillusionment; and about John the Baptist.

Some of us have experienced the ups and downs of hope and disillusionment more than once in our lives. In the 1960’s, baby boomers like me experienced an almost eschatological hope – a hope so strong and so widely shared that it seemed to be driving history and leading us to a kind of ultimate fulfillment – and then we all experienced deep disappointment when the ideals of that time didn’t materialize.

It’s no secret that I was a child of the sixties – and I literally mean “child.” In February, 1964, I was 7 years old and my life was permanently changed when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. From then on, my siblings and I spent hours strumming tennis rackets and listening to Beatles records.

The summer before I turned into an official teenager I saw a news report about Woodstock on the CBS Evening News and I thought that this really was the dawning of a New Age - that the entire world was about to break out into a giant festival of peace and love. It seemed that this force for goodness was so massive, so irresistible, that soon we would all be singing our way back to the Garden.

Four years later I was somewhere north of here, hitchhiking along a country road looking for a commune I had heard about. A guy with long hair – a hippy, I thought, and therefore completely trustworthy - stopped to give me a ride. I'll never forget my confusion when it turned out the guy was a complete jerk –ill tempered, cynical, and inclined toward not very nice criminal behavior.

How can this be, I thought. He's a hippy ... But he's mean! How is this possible? It took me a while to make sense of this: that anyone could grow his hair long.

Disillusionment. Whether it came in the form of Martin Luther King’s assassination, or Altamont, or just some trash-talking creep with long hair, disillusionment is as much a part of the 1960s experience as was the Age of Aquarius. And yet, we don’t talk as much about it. By the time 1980 rolled around and the former yippee Jerry Rubin was found working on Wall Street, the heady days of Woodstock seemed like a hopelessly naïve, and sadly distant, dream.

In our readings for this morning you might have noticed the Canticle which took the place of the psalm. This is the famous Canticle 16, the Song of Zechariah – John the Baptist’s father. And it is as exquisite an expression of Woodstock idealism that we will ever hear in the Bible.

Remember the context of this event. It has been 500 years since there last was a prophet in the land of Israel – 500 years since the spirit of God raised up a leader who could convincingly speak for God with words of power and truth. The land of Israel has been occupied for far longer than that – a nearly unbroken chain of disasters as army after army occupied the land - Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and now the Romans – who are just about breaking the back of the people.

But now, stories of a coming divine intervention are being told again – subversive stories, whispered at the risk of being arrested for sedition. As in days of old, the people are beginning to hope again. This Canticle, sung with glee by John the Baptist’s father Zechariah at the time of his birth - is a song of hope – an outpouring of hope after 500 years of despair:

“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; He has come to his people and set them free. He has raised up for us a mighty savior, born of the house of his servant David…. This was the oath he swore to our father Abraham, to set us free from the hands of our enemies, Free to worship him without fear…”

And with hope comes resistance against the Romans – mostly rag-tag groups of guerilla warriors who wage hit and run operations against the foreigners.
Most of these guerillas were religious zealots, inspired by the prophecies of old and ready to believe again that God would bring a new covenant to his people along with a Messiah to restore the fortunes of Zion by chasing out the oppressors. The guerilla warriors got their ideas from groups like the Essenes, those spiritual athletes who famously preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The core of the Essene community was based in remote parts of the desert, far from where the Romans could find them; they were the original desert monastics, spending their days in study and prayer and fasting and rituals, including a ritual with water that may have been where John the Baptist got his idea. They may not have been warriors themselves, but their preaching throughout the land of Judea certainly inspired the warriors, who were desperate for something to hope for; eager to believe in a Messiah who would overthrow the Empire.

Scholars believe it is highly possible that John the Baptist came out of these one of these communities.

We have an extremely rare, independent historical record of John the Baptist, written by the historian Josephus, who himself led an uprising in Gallilee. As a prisoner of the Romans he was an eyewitness to the final destruction of the Temple in AD 70.

According to Josephus, John the Baptist was extremely popular and successful as a preacher; so popular, in fact, that Herod worried he would lead an uprising. So Herod had John the Baptist arrested and killed.

Little did Herod know – that once that hope was unleashed, it could not be crushed so easily.

Hope is a dangerous thing. It can make us wildly naïve; it can inspire us to do stupid things; it can set people up for profound disappointment. And it can inspire a people to do things they never before thought was possible; it can change the course of history.

These days, it feels to me that hope is the most important thing in the world. And something of a rare commodity. It is so important for us to believe that we can meet all the challenges that confront us. Hope is so instrumental in our ability to turn the corner on all of our challenges: the economy, the environment, health care, you name it. And there are so many voices of fear and doom trying so hard to drag us down to a place of disillusionment and cynicism.

And for those of us who have been deeply disappointed by big hopes in the past, it is easy for us to give a little too much credence to the voices of fear and cynicism. But positive change never comes about from cynicism.

If it is true that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, it is also true that hope is our only hope. It need not be a naïve hope; there is such a thing as a realistic hope. Once we get in the practice of hoping, and in the practice of being disappointed, we can actually learn from our hoping, and we achieve what Reinhold Niebuhr would have called a realistic hope.

We are a religion of hope. For all of these centuries, we have been telling stories of hope. And when our hope is fixated on a very particular end, often times we’ll be disappointed. But hope is not about the particular thing we think we’re moving toward; no, hope is far deeper than that; hope is the very life of our soul; hope is this engine within us that is fed by a living God; hope gives us the capacity to stand up, look to the future, and address the challenges that are coming our way with a positive and fearless energy. That’s what hope is.

I would say that hope is the presence of the Holy Spirit within us; it is that which has, over the centuries, given our particular religion its momentum and force; and in this season of Advent it is a particularly compelling thing for us to focus on.

So during this season of Advent, I invite us into a deeper exploration of the sources of our hope; so that as life’s ultimate disappointments come our way, we have the strength and the courage to meet them head on, with joy and with trust.

Somebody say, AMEN.

Getting Beyond the Santa Claus God

2009-12-01T14:17:00.000-08:00

Sermon Nov.29, 2009

Last week I was at one of our local establishments on 4th St. with my friend, the Buddhist Unitarian pastor. I was quite pleased to find beers on sale there that are named after Christian theological concepts: Redemption, Salvation, Consecration Temptation, even Perdition.

I said to my friend, “Aha! This proves that my religion is better than yours! My religion is so great, they named their best beers after our central concepts.”

He replied, “No, this proves the opposite - that my religion is better.”

“How’s that? Nothing of your religion is represented here.”

“Exactly.” he said. “It’s a Zen thing.”

So anyway I was happy to learn there was plenty of Redemption on hand and that it was reasonably priced. Hoping he’d take the hint, I bought my Unitarian Buddhist friend a pint of Perdition. He drank it down with alarming equanimity.

So this is the first Sunday of Advent – the season that teaches us all about the discipline of spiritual waiting. Henri Nouwen called it “active waiting” – the kind of waiting that involves paying attention, especially to what is changing in us, to what is being born, and to what is becoming possible.

This is the kind of waiting that pregnant women know so well. During Advent, this sanctuary becomes a kind of womb; we pay attention to the terrifying mystery of all that is changing within us and around us. We sense that there’s something big happening. God is looming somewhere – or is he lurking? We dare to trust the possibility that as terrifying as life may seem, God is in the change.

In the Bible readings during Advent, there’s a lot of talk about apocalypse – like our reading from Luke this morning.

I hope it isn’t absolutely necessary for me to say this, but I suppose it is important that periodically I remind us that Episcopalians do not tend to think of the apocalypse as a real historical event that is going to happen on some date certain. Not that there’s anything wrong with believing that, of course, and there are perfectly faithful Episcopalians who do hold that belief. But it’s safe to say that for most of us, the apocalypse makes more sense as a metaphor for how we experience God breaking through.

This morning we hear the story of Jesus telling his disciples about the day of apocalypse:
People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. (Luke 21:26)

Most of us know something about “fear and foreboding.” Cancer diagnoses, financial catastrophes, teenagers – we all have had our own little apocalypses, our moments of divine catastrophe, when the veil is lifted; those moments that find us on our knees, begging for a miracle, asking “Where is God in this?”

And sometimes we get an answer: Wait.

And then, in a prayer, in a dream, out of the corner of our eye, we sense it coming. There’s ozone in the air; a flash of lightning on the horizon. We sense the possibility that there might be blessing in what we were sure could only be catastrophe. On that day, Jesus says, “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” (Luke 21:28)

And just to be clear now, I’m not talking about beer anymore.

I’m talking about active waiting.

Our children learn the discipline of active waiting very well during Advent - because there is no event more actively waited upon than Christmas. Our children are living in keen anticipation, counting every day ‘til he comes “in a cloud (well, okay, in a sleigh) with power and great glory.” (Luke 21:27)

When I was a child during Advent the first thing I would do every morning was go to my Advent Calendar and peel off the little door for the day. Inside there would be a little chocolate surprise – this is why I love Belgian chocolate so much - and there would be a little picture and a Bible saying, and then, stepping back, you could take in the whole calendar and see the progress you were making toward the day of his coming.

And for four solid weeks we would be singing that song of Active Waiting: "Oh, you better watch out, you better not cry, you better not shout I'm telling you why...."
Thanks to Santa Claus, Advent and Christmas has become a little religion unto itself, complete with its own sacred scriptures, scrupulous rituals, moral codes, and pantheon of deities (Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus, all those elves and reindeer).

In fact, I think that if Santa Claus didn't exist, we would definitely have to invent him. Now, I know some people complain that Santa Claus has become more important to our children than Jesus – and I agree that’s troubling. But on the other hand, any religious cult that inspires a 5-year old to make his bed is not all bad.

But at some point we grow up and find other reasons for making our beds. In my case, it’s my marriage - which I wish to preserve.

I heard Karen Armstrong the other day, talking about her new book called The Case for God. She said that Christianity’s problem is that so many people learned about God around the same time they learned about Santa Claus. When we’re children, God is just the big Santa Claus in the sky; and then we grow up, our ideas about Santa mature, but our ideas about God don’t.

I think she’s absolutely right; I see this all the time: as long as our lives are going well and we’re getting our little gifts under the tree, we think God likes us and we like God. And then one day we wake up and we’ve got a lump in our breast and it feels like a lump of coal in our stocking. And we say “Hey! What’s the deal! I’ve been good! Where are my gifts?” And when we don’t get a satisfying answer we blame our Santa Claus God, and we blame our religion for having lied to us.

This is perfectly normal. The truth is that we all cling to the god of our childhood as long as we possibly can; we can spend our entire lives listening to grown up sermons and reading the gospels, the pages of which are packed with stories of a grown-up God, and we will nonetheless continue to believe in a Santa Claus god until we have our little apocalypse, and we are forced to find a God that is appropriate for grown-ups.

Most of us are here because this is where we’ve found that grown-up God.

Many of you have been asking about my brother, who has been enduring his own little apocalypse recently in the form of some rather aggressive brain tumors. I want to thank you again for all the prayers and cards and inquiries about him. Just to give you an update, he survived the surgery well, which removed one tumor; there’s another one that they couldn’t operate on; thankfully it hasn’t grown since he began chemo and radiation treatments. But we were sorry to learn that two more lesions showed up in the last brain scan.

This is my brother’s apocalypse; and because we are connected to him by our love, it is ours as well. By our love, we all share in one another’s apocalypses; and collectively, globally, through hundreds and millions of individual apocalypses shared in love, the great cosmic revealing occurs. The entirety of human experience stands before God as if on the plains of Megido; the trumpet sounds; the veil lifts; we hold hands and lift our heads; and our God bears down upon us like the seven horsemen. Our illusions disintegrate; and what we find on the other side depends on our ability to express our love; hold fast to one another and to the blessings we find here, and to trust.

And so we stand with all of humanity: we raise our heads; we pay attention to the good; we honor our relationships; we find our redemption.

By so doing, our post-apocalyptic God – suitable for grown-ups - is born.

2009-11-28T13:25:00.000-08:00

It's customary for pastors to send out a Christmas letter every year. Here's mine for 2009.

Christmas letter, 2009

The news this evening is that unemployment in California is now the worst since the Great Depression. Add this fact to the usual woes and worries (wars, flues, ungrateful children) and Christmas cheer starts to feel more like Christmas jeer – a joke played on us by the god of irony.

It seems that more and more of my friends are either taking anti-depressants, or should. It’s downright depressing! And it actually makes me wonder: “What good is this religion if it doesn’t make them happy?”

And then I wonder how Mary would have answered that question. Thankfully, after hearing the angel’s invitation and foreseeing her own heartbreak, she shifted her gaze up – to the difference she could make, and she said “Yes.”

I have studied the religions of the world somewhat seriously and I have yet to find a magical formula that causes bluebirds to break into song and encircle my head. The purpose of life is not defined by how we feel. True religion is about, well, the truth; and while the truth will set us free, it will also set our feet gently onto the ground, where we can be of use to others.

When everything seems bleak, it’s easy to let our feelings take over. We might even think we will always feel this bad – but that’s just the blues talking. Advent teaches us a truer lesson, which is that sometimes life involves what Henri Nouwen called “active waiting.” “The secret of waiting,” he said, “is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has begun.”

Advent teaches active waiting. Yes, things are tough – and yes, God is happening. Life is change; goodness erupts; tough times pass. Meanwhile, we join with Mary. We breathe the labor pains of love. We nurture the fragile lives in our care, including our own. We open our doors to the homeless. We feed the hungry children. We say “Yes” to our divine purpose – and in the process, we find a joy that would shame a bluebird.

I pray you might join us this Christmas – and discover the real joy of the season. I say this in the name of God, who, like me, rejoices at the sight of you.

The Rev. Matthew Lawrence, Rector

Note:
According to Mental Health America, “on average, people living with depression go for nearly a decade before receiving treatment, and less than one-third of people who seek help receive minimally adequate care.”

Depression is neither a moral nor a spiritual failing. Your blues may be nothing more than a bio-chemical condition, or the product of perfectly natural factors like stress, anger, fatigue, or unemployment. Sometimes good counseling makes all the difference; you might also benefit from a pill. Why not take advantage of what modern science has to offer?

Last Measure of Devotion

2009-11-10T17:15:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday afternoon a 34 year-old police officer named Kimberly Munley was on her way to getting her car repaired when she heard over the radio that shots were being fired. According to the news reports, she was there within three minutes; she saw the suspect chasing down a wounded soldier; she fired at him, he returned fire, and then, as she was trained, she started running toward the man who was shooting at her.

Sergeant Munley is five feet four inches tall; by the looks of her she weighs less than a bird. But she has the spirit of a lion. Yesterday she was recovering from her three bullet wounds, calling friends, and expressing regret that she hadn’t gotten there sooner to save more lives.

This morning we will add the names of the 13 men and women who were killed at Ft. Hood to our usual litany of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. And following the command of Jesus, we will also pray for the enemies of peace, wherever they may be, at home and abroad - because the world could use the mercy.

So this Wednesday is Veteran’s Day – a time for us to honor all those who, like Sergeant Munley, have faced into the fire. Some, like the fallen soldiers at Gettysburg that Abraham Lincoln honored, have “given their last full measure of devotion.”

That line is so stirring and poetic – “Their last full measure of devotion.” President Obama used the same line when he honored the 18 soldiers who died in Afghanistan almost two weeks ago.

The phrase hits home, I think, because, while very few of us can imagine what it’s like to be in combat, we all know what it means to give our devotion.

Yesterday on the radio I heard the true story of a young woman who was in a relationship with a married man. She was 22; she was young and beautiful and impressionable; and he was very rich. He bought her a Mercedes convertible, a luxury townhouse in Greenwich Village; magnificent jewels and furs. And he lied to her, all the time.

She soon found out about his lies, and they shamed her. But the biggest shame came from the look on her parents’ face when they came for a visit. They stepped into her million-dollar home, they looked around, and right away they knew what was going on - and they could barely speak, they were so embarrassed for her. In the presence of her parents, her guilt came home to her; she realized how much she had lost, by gaining so much.

She tried to break up with the man but he kept drawing her back in. She felt miserable and trapped and powerless over him. And then one day she got word that her parents were in a terrible car accident. Her mom had broken 80 bones; her dad was in a coma. Within minutes she was packed and out the door to be with them. And, she said, at that moment she knew she would leave him for good.

Sometimes our devotion lies dormant, asleep beneath the surface, until something happens to wake it up. And then, we’re in the air; or like Sergeant Munley we’re in the car, flying to the edge of everything. We find ourselves running toward our truth; running toward the moment that our lives were made for; we have found the object of our devotion, even the cause worth dying for, and we are pouring ourselves out; we pouring out our devotion, and in the process finding the truth of who we are and why we were born.

In our Gospel story Jesus is standing opposite the Temple, watching the rich people put in their huge donations. Then he watches a poor widow put in her two copper coins, worth a penny.

Jesus praises her – "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on."

The Greek word used here is “bios” – the same root as “biology” – it means living. In other words, she is giving not just her possessions – she is giving her whole life. The full measure of her devotion.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, whenever Jesus talks about money he is talking about the state of our spiritual life. He is not impressed by those who give out of our abundance. No, Jesus pays attention to the beggars among us; those who have nothing left; those who have flown to the edge of everything – everything that stands between them and God.

Inside, in our deepest hearts, in our truest selves, in that place where nothing separates us from our life in God, we, too, are beggars. When we pray, we go to that place – or we’re simply not praying.

Yesterday Rose and I drove out to Jenner and watched the waves rolling in – massive waves, crashing on the rocks, water flying up in every direction, spectacular explosions. There we saw a woman, a small woman, way out there, standing on the beach very close to the rocks. At the edge of everything. We watched with dread and amazement as the waves crashed around her, each wave threatening to overwhelm her. She was magnificent; she was strong; she was crazy, we thought. She got drenched and she was fully alive.

As Ireneus said, “The glory of God is a [person] fully alive.”

Someone recently came to me and asked to be baptized. She didn’t want to be politely sprinkled with a few drops of water; she said she wanted to dive in to the waters of baptism; to be completely immersed in God’s ocean; to let the waves of God completely roll over her; so that she could give herself completely to God.
She is called to give the full measure of her devotion.

We are all here, standing at the edge. This is why we are here. We have found a God worthy of our full devotion. And so we give it.

When I was 17 I had only one question on my mind: is there a God? It seemed to me the only question in the world. If there wasn’t a God, that was fine – I could go ahead and make my parents happy by becoming a journalist or a doctor – but if there was a God, there was no choice; I would have to become a priest, or a monk, or join an ashram, or travel to Tibet – wherever I needed to go; whatever I needed to do. Because why would you do anything else?

And so that summer I was standing by the side of a road in Oregon hitchhiking to Portland and all of a sudden I was swept up in a brilliant swirling power of energy and love; it was my Road to Damascus moment and I knew: Yes! God is alive! So what else could I do?

It’s like, there’s a man outside handing out diamonds – what are you going to do, sit down and read a book?

People sometimes ask me about my prayer life; they seem to think that as a priest I should be sitting in a corner somewhere saying some special words. But I say my whole life is a prayer; this is why I got ordained; this is why I stand before you today; I am giving God my devotion with every breath.

Prayer is not something you do with words; it’s what you do with your life. It’s jumping out of your car and running toward a man who is shooting at you. It’s standing before the fire.

And of course it’s countless small things, too. It’s visiting a loved one in the hospital. It’s saying a kind word. It’s making a phone call.

This is the secret – to fly to the edge of everything, and give ourselves up to the Holy God. We turn our backs on this ordinary world and all that is in it; because all the luxury cars and mansions and pearls and diamonds in all the world are worth nothing compared to a copper coin given in full devotion. We fly to the very edge… and say Yes.

I heard someone recently say that after a very long and full life he had finally discovered the secret of happiness – but by then he was senile and forgot.

I am here to remind us. It is devotion. Devotion is a practice; it is a way of being in the world; it is a way of deep giving.

The Sufi poet Rumi said it well:

If you are here unfaithfully with us,
You’re causing terrible damage.
If you’ve opened your loving to God’s love,
You’re helping people you don’t know
And have never seen.
Is what I say true? Say yes quickly,
If you know, if you’ve known it
From before the beginning of the universe.

So says, Rumi, to which I say, “Amen."

Beggars of Mercy

2009-10-26T16:50:00.000-07:00

Sermon: Oct. 25, 2009
Text: Mark 10:46-52

I need to begin with a word of thanks to all of you who sent your words of support and offered your prayers for my brother’s surgery – it means a great deal to me. Having been away as much as I have, I return all the more grateful for you, and to you.

My brother came through the surgery very well. He has always been athletic, and at the age of 55 he was healthy and strong before the tumors in his brain showed up. That health is making his recovery much easier. His prognosis, however, is still very sobering. So I thank you for your prayers, and beg you to keep them coming.

The waiting room at Veteran’s General Hospital in Taiwan is not like waiting rooms in the United States. First, it’s not really a room; it’s more like an airport terminal: a large open space with probably 100 or so chairs all facing in one direction, lined-up in rows and bolted to the floor. The walls are high and white; at the front of the area is a large flat-screen TV which, thankfully, never gets turned on. A large sign with lights and numbers on the wall tells you when your loved one is out of surgery, and a very loud voice on a loudspeaker tells you where to go to see him or her.

But in one respect, at least, it is just like every other hospital waiting room anywhere in the world; because it is filled with people praying, almost always silently, privately, and desperately, to whatever God that will listen.
And in that respect it’s no different from this room here, saturated, as it is, with our sometimes desperate prayers.

Over the years, these walls have absorbed countless cries for help. Like Bartimeaus in our gospel reading this morning, we become beggars of God’s mercy: “Son of David,” we cry, “have mercy!”

Over the past two weeks, sitting for hours on end in that hospital, I’ve been reminded, once again, of what it’s like to pray those desperate words. My siblings, my brother’s wife, and my father have all entered into a kind of sober fellowship with other beggars for mercy.

One day while we were waiting to go into the intensive care unit a family came into the hallway – 8 or 10 people, Chinese, of course, at least 3 generations. My father and I stood up to offer them our seats, they politely refused; and we refused to sit down. So we just stood around for awhile, awkwardly staring at the floor and the walls and the empty seats – for a moment it was just like being back in Minnesota, we were all being so polite. After a time we exchanged friendly glances; someone in their group who spoke a tiny amount of English asked me where I was from; I said, “California;” and they all recognized that word and repeated it, and someone said “Surfing!” and everyone laughed. And then, having exhausted our shared vocabulary, we grew silent again. After a few minutes I noticed one of the daughters in the corner, weeping quietly.

That was the sum total of the words we exchanged. I don’t know if they were Christians or Buddhists or what, but in that silence I knew we were sharing the same prayer: “Lord, have mercy!” We could have been monks at that moment; or beggars by the side of the road, who, no matter what was going on around us, kept up that quiet chant, “Lord, have mercy!”

When Bartimeaus, the blind beggar, gets his chance for mercy, he takes it; and he doesn’t take it quietly. He shouts out his chance, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” He has reached that point of desperation; he doesn’t care about propriety; people tell him to pipe down but he shouts it out, all the louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

And then Jesus stands still, and speaks to one of his disciples, and the disciple comes to him and says, “Take heart, he is calling for you,” and – this is my favorite part - immediately Bartimeaus leaps up, and throws off his cloak, and runs to Jesus.

It is my conviction that this story is given to us as a kind of contrast to the story of the rich young man, which is found earlier in this same chapter of Mark’s gospel. In that story, as you will remember, the rich young man, full of propriety and wearing beautiful clothes, completely confident in his ability to meet any challenge, asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life.

Notice: his language of ownership - as if salvation were just another thing to acquire; and something due him. He doesn’t ask for mercy; he doesn’t need healing of any kind; he is strong and rich and the world is his oyster – just point the way, he says, full of confidence and competency: tell me what to do and I’ll do it.
So when Jesus says, “Take all that you own, and sell it, and give the money to the poor, and follow me,” the rich young man immediately does the opposite of the blind beggar; rather than throwing off his cloak and following Jesus, he clings even more tightly to his cloak; he takes a step back, and withdraws into a life of emptiness.
I have always had a fondness for the rich young man; I imagine his clothes so beautiful, just as they are illustrated in our stained-glass window behind the organ; that beautiful jewel perched on his velvet hat. His dilemma is so poignant and sad. I’ve always imagined that, many years later, after the young man had grown older and wiser, he finds another community of Christians, and this time he doesn’t ask to inherit eternal riches, but rather asks, simply, for mercy.

You see, in the Gospels, wealth is never about money; wealth is about attachments, and pride; wealth is about the ways in which money separates us from God by feeding our illusions. Jesus is constantly pointing out to us the illusions that money brings: the illusion that we own it, rather than that it owns us. What better illustration of that than the rich young man, whose possessions control him so completely as to deny him the ultimate joy?

Money gives us the illusion that we are deserving of our wealth; which is the opposite of gratitude, isn’t it?

The neurosurgeon who operated on my brother’s brain in Taiwan, one of the top neurosurgeons in Taiwan, makes a tiny fraction of the salary an average brain surgeon in the U.S. makes; he works 7 days a week, he gets no vacation time, and he lives in a dormitory next to the hospital. A dormitory! By any professional American standard he is poor and oppressed – and it doesn’t occur to him that there’s anything wrong with that. He is grateful for his work and his life. Meanwhile, his counterpart in the U.S. is richer than God, and strides the earth like a Titan; and for him, gratitude is a nice idea.

The poor have so much to teach us. In our own poverty, whether it’s a poverty of spirit or a material poverty, God is so near.

In the gospels, wealth and poverty are symbols for the spiritual life. And more than symbols: our relationship with money is a living testimony to who we are as people. Someone once said that a checkbook is a moral document. Jesus would agree with that. How we spend our money speaks volumes about our values.

And so you can see how I’m working my way toward Pledge Sunday…

Yes, today is Pledge Sunday and in a moment we’re going to hear Pat and Linelle encourage us to reflect for a moment on our giving to this church. And, I guarantee you, unless we are the greatest of saints, we will all have our little “rich young man” moment. A variety of thoughts will come into our heads. Some of them will be downright cynical: “Oh, here we go again, how much will they want this time?” We will find ourselves clutching our cloaks just a little more tightly and we will instinctively withdraw.

We all do this. “Here comes the preacher with his hand out.” Even I think this! While I’m writing this sermon I’m thinking this: “What’s he gonna ask of me this year?”

And of course, they will ask of us what they ask of us every year, which is to pray over our giving. That might be the hardest thing. They will ask us to reflect on what this church means to us; what our life in God means to us; what our checkbooks say about us. They will ask us to take a breath; and to move beyond the rich young man moment of resistance, into something more closely approximating Bartimeaus, flinging off his cloak and running, unrestrained, unrestricted, with joy in his heart, to the feet of Jesus.

And they will also mention something called proportional giving. This is of a piece with everything else we’ve been talking about. Proportional giving has to do with the ancient practice of acknowledging that everything we have comes from God, and to God we offer the first fruits of our lives. Instead of looking at what we have left at the end of the month after we’ve paid all our bills, proportional giving asks us to think about the whole of our income – whether we’re rich or poor – and dedicating some portion of that to God.

You will notice that they will not suggest to us what portion of the whole to give; whether that be 10% or 1% is entirely up to us; they will not advise us as to whether we should calculate this on pre-tax or after-tax income; they will not even suggest that we give this portion to the church. Indeed, there are many worthy charities begging for our money. They will simply suggest that we consider our giving as our first fruits, acknowledging God as the source of all that we have, resisting the clutches of our possessions on us.

But Pat and Linelle will suggest that the Biblical standard of 10% is a goal worthy of our striving; and they might even suggest that we consider making the commitment to working toward that goal, increasing our giving by 1% each year: so that if I am giving 4% today, I might strive toward 5% next year.

Rose and I have prayed over this, and despite the fact that our income has taken a hit with this recession and we still have a child in college, we will once again, as we have before, increase our giving along that continuum. We do so joyfully, and with deep gratitude for all the riches of this life, and we encourage each of you to do the same.

We give thanks to you; we are grateful for all that you bring to this church and all that you do to the glory of God; and we give thanks to our most generous God, to whose glory we are dedicated.

AMEN.

Living a Life of Promise

2009-09-29T07:29:00.000-07:00

Sermon Sept 20

James: "Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom."

Last Sunday we were talking about promises: what are the promises that define your life – what are the promises that you have made to yourself, or your spouse, your children, your parents, your community, your God?

In the wisdom of the Church, we say that it is a good and life-giving thing to periodically review the promises that we have made. The promises of our lives are like the tires on our cars: it’s a good idea to inspect them once in a while, before they blow out while we’re driving down the highway at 70 mph.

Sometimes we outgrow the promises we’ve made and we need to recognize that. When my son was born I held him in my arms and looked into those miraculous eyes and made a sacred promise to him: that I would never let anything or anyone hurt him. Then one day he learned to walk, and the next day he learned to run - full tilt into the corner of our dining room table. I realized how impossible that promise was; but I still tried. By the time he was old enough to make his own decisions I was still trying – still trying to protect him from anything that would hurt him – until I realized that no one grows up who has never been hurt.

I needed to re-evaluate that sacred promise I made to him.

So what about our promises to God?

65 years ago, on a cold winter night in France during the Battle of the Bulge, my dad was huddled in a foxhole, shivering with cold and terror while artillery shells rained down around him. Death was as close as his breath; he could taste it on his teeth. He began to pray as he never had before; desperately, deeply, as if his life depended on it; and he found himself promising God that if he ever got through this war alive, he would become a doctor and dedicate his life to saving others.

This became a sacred promise that was to shape the rest of his life.

Once when I was a little boy I asked my mom, "What does daddy do all day?" She didn’t say, “He’s a doctor.” Instead, this very fierce look came over her, and she said, “He saves lives. Every day, he saves lives.” This made quite an impression on me.

That sacred promise that my dad made defined the rest of his life. It set the bar for the level of excellence that he would strive toward. It called him out of himself, from being a cocky, self-centered and smart-alecky kid into a deeply disciplined and caring man. Every day for the rest of his working life he rose before dawn, and got home long after sunset, and was often called back to the hospital in the middle of the night; and he never once complained - because he knew he was one of the lucky ones. He had survived the war - and he had found a purpose for his life. He had found a way to give back to God just a little bit of what God had given him.

But he didn’t accomplish this on his own. By making that promise to God, he enlisted God’s support; God met him half-way; God helped him keep his promise – because it was a sacred promise. That's the nature of a sacred promise - God meets you half-way.

In the letter of James this morning, we hear these words of advice: "Submit yourselves therefore to God… Draw near to God; and he will draw near to you."
When we make a sacred promise to God, we take a step toward God; and God takes a step toward us. We never make it alone; God is making it with us; as we draw near to God, God draws near to us.

What are the sacred promises of your life?

I have to confess I have never been able to understand people who have never made a sacred promise; whose lives are not guided by a sacred promise. To me they are like a tent without tent poles – what holds them up? What sustains them? What gives their life structure? Without tent poles, a tent is just a formless mass of nylon lying on the ground. But with the right tent poles, our lives take shape; our lives become the lives that God intended.

Now, I suppose you could make a tent without tent poles - with just the stuff you might find lying around – sticks or branches or what not – but they won’t fit us; they won’t stretch us. Truly sacred promises, like tent poles, are made exactly to fit the tent. When we make the right sacred promise to God, our lives expand to their maximum capacity. And our lives become a shelter for others.

Some of us raise ordinary promises to the level of the sacred - we promise to be good according to some Sunday School notion of the good: we promise not to stand out, not to ask too many questions; not to ask too much of anyone: we promise to make money: we promise to obey someone else’s promise that we never fully believed in.

When we do that our lives become tents with tent poles that are too short - our tent sags, blows in the wind, falls down often, never reaches its full height: leaks in the rain. Our promises are too small; we have been living too much for ourselves; we are not stretched to our true proportions.

Instead we lie awake at night listening to the water dripping through our walls, haunted by the question: is this it? Is this all there is? We get up in the morning and we notice in the clear light of day the tent sagging even more, despite our best efforts, and we feel gravity pulling us down into a resigned accommodation. Because we have not made a promise worthy of our life in God.

Even when things seem perfect we are haunted by the knowledge that perfect isn't good enough. We remember the old TV commercial: old friends gathered around a dinner table somewhere in Maine; lobsters steaming on a plate; beer glasses cold and full to the brim, laughter and love flowing; and someone says, "Here's to good friends - it doesn't get any better than this," and they clink their glasses and you think, "Really? Is that it?" Because as good as it is, it feels like there's still something missing. It isn't enough.

And the next day our tent just sags a little more.

And life goes on; our sacred promises become like stars dimmed by the lights of the city; our life as it was meant to be becomes a fragile memory: something impossible and theoretical, like a faded sketch that has been lost.

What is to be done?

And now at this point in the sermon I have to beg your indulgence because it might feel like I've stretched this tent pole analogy just about as far as possible but I'm going to take it just a little further:

What is to be done? Easy - we just write away to the manufacturer - we place an order for new tent poles - new sacred promises to give our lives structure. We pray to the Creator that the sustaining purpose of our lives will be revealed to use before we die; and that we will have the courage to let that promise define the remainder of our days.

But as we write that letter to the manufacturer, we realize we will have to enclose a check. We will have to decide, How much are these tent poles worth to us?

And we hear the voice of Jesus: “How about your whole life?”

“For what does it profit us if we gain our life, and lose our soul? For those who would save their lives will lose it, and those who lose their lives for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, shall gain it.”

We write away to the manufacturer for those new tent poles; but if we put in a check for a dollar, or five, or any amount that looks like we have not considered what these tent poles are worth to us, our check will be returned uncashed.

Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you.

When we're at church around stewardship season and someone suggests that we give to the church proportionally; that the visible and real extension of our promise - our pledge - to God might begin to bear some relationship to the value of our life: if, instead, we respond to that invitation by becoming smaller, or cynical, or worse, by saying to ourselves, "Well what's in it for me?" – then I suggest we are pitching our tent with sticks.

Your tent is better than that – your tent is bigger than that.

On the bottom of page 304 and the top of page 305 of our prayer books [and listed below], we find five tent poles, if you will; five sacred promises that, when made seriously and prayerfully, give our lives structure and purpose. These are promises that are God’s way of drawing closer to us, as we draw closer to God. I’d like us to take a moment to look at them. And as we go through them, I’d like you to ask yourself two questions: Which of these five promises seem like the easiest for me to keep, and which would be the most difficult?

“Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?”

“Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?”

“Will you proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ?”

“Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?”

“Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?”

[Discussion follows - congregation breaks into pairs - what some people identify as the most difficult, others identify as the easiest; we realize that as we live together in community, we can honor all of these promises collectively, and with joy.]

Pray that we may find the sacred purpose that God has for us; pray that God will provide us with the strength and courage to hold up our end of our promises to God and to one another; pray that in all things, we will find our completion in Christ.

Amen.

Returning, refreshed and ready to go

2009-09-12T11:23:00.000-07:00

Sermon: September 6, 2009

Good morning!

The last time I stood in this pulpit was way back on April 12 - Easter Sunday, 4.5 months ago. Since then I have been away on an amazing sabbatical. And the first thing I have to say to you upon my return is this: thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for this incredible gift that you have made possible.

I feel a little bit like the man who went on a journey in search of treasure, and he found it, but it was too heavy for him to carry home, so that when he got home he could only talk about it; and the more he tried to convince his audience of the fabulous treasure he found, the more unbelievable he began to sound.

Nonetheless I am going to try.

Some aspects of my sabbatical are quantifiable: I traveled about 30,000 miles – 5,000 miles more than the circumference of the Earth. I spent at least one week in 9 different cities or towns. I finished 12 books – six for pleasure, including three Jane Austen novels, and six books related to my studies in congregational development. I wrote five academic papers and endured 200 weary hours inside a classroom.

But I also spent countless hours walking through the desert canyons in Utah, the woods near Tahoe, the forests in Minnesota, and the absolutely stunning mountains and valleys of New Zealand. And best of all, I spent a whole lot of time just sitting, alone, quietly, for hours at a time, in the presence of trees, and rivers, and lakes, and mountains, and oceans. I can’t tell you how precious that time was.

A lot of my sabbatical time felt like waiting – waiting for the big moment, the stunning revelation, the bolt of lightening. So I’m a little bit disappointed, and also quite relieved, to report that I did not see any angels descending on beams of sunlight; no unicorn emerged from a forest; I did not slay any dragons or rescue any maidens. I’m pretty much the same person I was when I left, except for one very important difference:

I think God has finally answered for me the question of what I’m supposed to be doing here in Santa Rosa, California.

Next week I’ll go into more detail about what exactly I mean by this – it’s too long of a story for just one sermon. (At the coffee hour this morning, someone said she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I said, `Oh, it’s not a shoe. It’s more like a mukluk.’)

This morning I just want you to get a sense that something important has happened to me.

And part of it has to do with the simple magic that happens when you can finally get some perspective on your life. For me, this sabbatical has reminded of what it is that is ultimately important to me; what I most deeply care about; what it is I’m willing to live for and fight for and maybe even die for.

All I’ll say about that right now is that this is what it means to be a Christian. To be a Christian means that you have clarity about the divine purpose of your life. To be a Christian means to know that you have work to do in this world; and that deep down inside you, where God lives, you know exactly what that is.

But it’s so easy to lose sight of that. You know how it is – in the busy, day-to-day dimension of our lives, running from work to family to bed to work again, unless you’re retired, in which case you’re even busier – you know how easy it is for one day to blend into the next and a week turns into a year turns into five and before you know it you have grandchildren and great grandchildren and you’re wondering what it was all about. And maybe like me you remember back to the days when you had dreams and passions and ideals; and while you know you’re wiser now, you can’t remember when the last time was that you had a passionate certainty about the purpose of your life.

I have to confess that before I went on sabbatical I was more confused about this than I knew. I was so close to my work here for five and half years that on any given day I could show you my calendar full of meetings and conferences and appointments, but I couldn’t say with any conviction that any of it expressed the divine purpose of my life.

I had let all the busy-ness of my life crowd out the divine purpose of my life. So getting away from the office and the streets and the cars and the emails has helped me remember why I am a priest and why it is that in the course of God’s strange and mysterious plan he created Matthew Lawrence.

And by now some of you are probably wondering, “Oh God, what’s he going to ask us to do now?” I think maybe a lot of rectors come back from their sabbaticals full of new ideas that they can’t wait to inflict on their unsuspecting congregations. But don’t worry, my particular epiphany doesn’t necessarily involve lots of new programs and new enthusiasms. It’s more about who I am as a child of God, and what God would have me do with the time I have left on this planet.

I spent quite a lot of time reflecting on the difference between what I say is important to me, and how I spend my time. For example, it’s not unusual to hear me complain that I don’t have enough time to visit members of the congregation, when I seem to have all the time it takes to sit at my desk answering hundreds of emails and attending dozens of meetings. Having gotten away from the office for four and a half months has proven to me that the church can actually do quite well without me running around chasing my tail; so I’m going to find a way to spend less time in the office and more time in face-to-face visits with you.

In a similar vein, I frequently complain that I don’t have time for getting exercise – but I seem to have time for television. I have plenty of time to complain about politicians, but not enough time to write a letter to my congresswoman. I have lots of time to spend worrying about climate change – but I’ve never bothered to invest my money in carbon offset projects. I have time to complain about the criminality of our criminal justice system and the insanity of our mental health system - and yet I've done precious little to translate those concerns into meaningful action.

What's going on with all of that?

How is it that we can spend so little amount of time and money on the things we say are most important to us?

This is exactly what James is asking us in our reading this morning. How is it, he asks, that we can claim to love our neighbors as ourselves, and yet do so little for our neighbors who are poor? “What good is it,” he says, “if you say you have faith but you do not have works?”

This, of course, is the great issue of the religious life – the distance that we can see in our lives between the values and commitments that we claim to have, and the ways in which we do our day-to-day business. This is the classic tension between faith and works. How is it that we can claim to love the poor, but we never seem to have time to help out at The Living Room or the Mission’s feeding program? What is it within us that prevents us from living our lives according to the values we claim to hold?

Of course, both Paul and James struggled mightily with this problem between faith and works; Paul being as honest about this as anyone ever has when he said, in Romans, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.... Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7: 14-25)

This is the eternal problem. And of course it isn’t solved overnight by some self-righteous preacher fresh from sabbatical sermonizing about how we need to be doing more. If I had heard this sermon before I went off on sabbatical, my first instinct would have been to say, “Hey, no thank you, you’re about to ask me to do more and I’ve got too much on my plate already!” But the thing is, it would have been untrue! Because I hadn't been doing enough. I'd been living a life in which the priorities and values that I proclaimed as sacred to me were taking second place to that which was convenient and comfortable and immediately demanding of my time and attention.

So on that level – and just speaking for myself – things are going to change. I claim to be worried about global climate change, but never gave a thought to how much CO2 my 30,000 miles of travel was releasing into the atmosphere. It turns out to have been 23 metric tons. And it turns out that for $240, I could invest in a carbon offset project that recaptured that amount of CO2. So yesterday I went ahead and purchased that carbon offset.

I claim to care about the mentally ill in the prison system, so this Thursday I’m driving down to Monterey again to visit our friend who is in prison there for the crime of being mentally ill. Normally we have a staff meeting on Thursdays but something tells me they will get along fine without me.

I claim to have a keen interest in the vitality and growth of this Episcopal Church; the health of this institution is a sacred cause for me – and so, despite the fact that the Governor has decreased our household income by over 10%, we will once again be increasing our pledge this year. Because this congregation is more important to us than just about anything.

I could go on – but we’ve run out of time. Let me close by simply asking you to pray with me.

Holy and gracious God, we call upon your Holy Spirit to bring your blessing upon us as we seek to do those things that you have called us to do. Give us the courage to follow the path you have laid out for us; give us clarity of mind and heart to discern that path; and in all things empower us to bring your love into this world. All this we pray through your Son our Lord, Jesus Christ, Amen.

Aoraki - Mt. Cook Sunrise

2009-08-27T20:13:00.000-07:00

Sunrise on Aoraki - Mt. Cook, the highest peak in New Zealand, as seen from our hotel room. The Hermitage Hotel there is the nicest hotel we stayed at during our month in New Zealand; the restaurant there is first rate; lots of great hiking; and the views are unbelievable.

Queenstown, New Zealand

2009-08-27T20:06:00.000-07:00

This was the view from our apartment window in Queenstown, as the sun set in the west and set the sky a gorgeous pink. The mountains are appropriately called "The Remarkables."

Study and Reflection in the Sunrise Forest

2009-06-17T21:17:00.001-07:00

This is the Geodesic Dome in the woods that my family built in the early 1970's. A very special place on a river north of Minneapolis.

2009-06-17T21:00:00.000-07:00

This bench was installed in memory of my mother, who liked to sit at this spot and watch the river go by.

At Seminary

2009-06-17T20:03:00.000-07:00

A wonderful Sunday afternoon at Wrigley Field. The Minnesota Twins were playing a very rare game against the Cubs. They lost this one in the 9th, but won the other two.
The classroom at Seabury-Western. Fabulous presentation by Eric Law.

Petroglyphs

2009-05-19T14:34:00.000-07:00

I encountered many ancient petroglyphs on my trip through Utah and Nevada. They spoke to me of the ancient calling to communicate across generations and cultures. Here are a couple.

Tahoe

2009-05-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

I spent 8 glorious days at Lake Tahoe, thanks to the generosity of Camp Noel Porter and St. Nicholas' Church. I did some good writing and wonderful hiking. Rose joined me for the weekend. Here are some pix from there.

2009-05-01T15:14:00.000-07:00

Sunset from my campsite.

Sabbatical Journal: Entry #1

2009-04-26T01:23:00.000-07:00

The drive from Salt Lake City to the little resort town of Moab takes you through big-sky vistas of red buttes spreading out for mile upon mile and soaring into surprising shapes, some narrow and blunt, some broad and sloped, all of them standing like stubborn soldiers in a war against time. Like everything else that takes the form of being, of course, they are losing that war, but so slowly as to win our admiration.

Snow-capped mountains line the distant horizon; they are impassive and imperial and glamorous, like celebrities or gods shining against the bright blue sky. I flatter myself by imagining them watching me as I drive across this enormous landscape, but of course they have bigger things on their minds. They converse with the sun, and whisper to the moon; they gossip about the Himalayas. I am nothing to them, just one of a thousand unremarkable ants making its way across their back yards.

If a mountain ever did deign to observe my progress, what would it see? A sadly unremarkable specimen: a middle-aged human sporting a week-old beard that has been overrun by grey hair. The man is hunched over the wheel of a mini-van filled with camping supplies; he pulls into a gas station and gets out to stretch. The mountain would observe a little paunch that the man takes pains to conceal by tucking his shirt in just so; he would observe a face wincing in pain as the man stretches his lower back.

If the mountain got to know him better, it would learn that he is a priest of a pitiably anthrocentric religion (“Everyone knows God is a mountain,” it would sniff).

This particular priest is, this very day, launching his first real sabbatical in 20 years of ordained ministry. I will be away from my parish for four and a half months, splitting my time between formal studies, conferences, and over 9 weeks of pure down time, beginning with this solo 2 1/2 week camping trip to Southeastern Utah.

I wanted to begin my sabbatical with silence, and prayer, and talking to the mountains, and listening to the earth.

While I’m in the desert I will be asking a lot of questions. I've made an inventory of them - and am happy to note that none of them have to do with my marriage. This is the only thing in my life that I have never questioned. My wife of 26 years is as beautiful as she is quick-witted and open-hearted. She is a psychologist who works with extremely difficult people; somehow she bears this exhausting work with grace and good humor. She is a wonder to me.

I will be away from her for most of this sabbatical time. I miss her already. She will join me for a month in New Zealand at the end of the sabbatical – a place we have both always wanted to visit. We can hardly believe our good fortune.

The air is warm on this mid-April day. Ponderosa pines and red bluffs make this look for all the world like a Western movie set. I turn on the air-conditioning in my minivan and fret about increasing my carbon footprint. I also feel guilty about the fact that as I drive I am simultaneously listening to my iPod and charging my Kindle and checking my Blackberry for a signal. I am embarrassed by all this but not enough to have left them behind. I plan on a gradual withdrawal.

This is what sabbatical is for, I think – to loose the bonds of our ordinary habits. I am eager to see what rises to the surface when the waters are more still. I dreamed last night of ominous panthers and friendly hounds. The night before I dreamed I was a god who could not decide what form to take. I briefly became a plump and complacent man, then said, no, not that. I then became glorious and strong, an Apollo, and I wondered, “How long can this last?”

Before I set off for my camp in the desert, I stayed at a wonderful bed and breakfast at Mt. Peale, Utah and inadvertently left my laundry behind. After 4 days in the desert I returned to pick it up. The hostess said, “You look like you’ve been reborn!” I said, “Not quite yet, but I’m making progress.”

I’ve been praying for Spirit to keep showing up. Please join me in that prayer.

Sabbatical Journal: Canyonlands

2009-04-25T22:02:00.000-07:00

A few pictures: My campsite just outside Canyonlands National Park; my thanks to Louisville Institute, which funded this sabbatical; the bus station in Reno that I spent a night in when I was 17 years old, hitch-hiking across the country.

Breaking into Blossom

2009-04-13T11:17:00.000-07:00

Sermon Easter 2009

Good morning and Happy Easter!

We got two pieces of good news yesterday. The first one has to do with that rule – you know the one – the rule that says that everything that tastes good is bad for you. Apparently that rule has been overturned! This is true: Scientists have discovered that eating chocolate improves your math scores. So that’s great news – but the bad news is that after you eat your Easter bunny, I guess today would be a great day to finish your taxes.

The second bit of good news is that scientists have also discovered the exact chemical reasons why bacon tastes so good. It turns out it’s some kind of complicated interaction of amino acids and enzymes or something. They said on the radio that this now replaces what used to be the accepted theory, which was that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
(Heard on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" Sat April 11 2009

I liked the old theory better...

I know a lot of you were here two days ago, on Good Friday – seems like a long time ago now... With the 3 services and all that praying, I did a lot of kneeling on Good Friday. Then on Saturday morning I got out of bed and began to climb down the stairs and my knees almost buckled under me.

Now I get to add my knees to the list of creaky body parts that are going south.

My body's descent into old age and death feels closer and more certain with every passing Good Friday. So what do I do? I go to the gym, of course; I get on the Stairmaster to try to reverse this descent and the Stairmaster becomes a cruel symbol of the aging process – climbing all those stairs, and getting nowhere.

I don’t mean to get maudlin here but the other day I stumbled across some old pictures of my wife and me, from 25 years ago. We were newly married. It had been years since I had seen these photos and they hit me with such force - my God, look at how young we were! Somehow it seemed like a fresh revelation that we ever looked that good. Of course my wife hasn't aged a day but the contrast to my present condition was rather sobering, to say the least. Sobering like a cold shower after a wedding reception. Sobering like the first time they stopped putting all the birthday candles on your birthday cake because of the fire hazard.

So in light of all this evidence of our certain mortality, how could anyone possibly believe these ancient stories about resurrection?

When I was younger, back in the good old days when I knew everything, I used to think that Christianity was nothing more than a random collection of myths and fairy tales. It was so obvious: how could any intelligent person possibly believe such fantasies?

But then my understanding of belief shifted; I discovered a more subtle intelligence lying beneath the surface of my rational mind; an intelligence of poetry and sacred story and music and imagination.

It is not very interesting to me what your theory of Christ's resurrection is - what actually happened on that first Easter morning 2,000 years ago is hidden forever in the shroud of time and archaeologists are never going to uncover a long-lost surveillance video from the tomb to settle the question. All we will ever know is that whatever happened, it was an event of enough force that it inspired a self-centered and none too bright collection of disciples to recklessly spend their lives proclaiming the significance of this event to the four corners of the known world. That should give the most ardent of skeptics pause. But in the end we would all be missing the point if we spent too much time trying to figure it out.

Far more rewarding, if you dare, is to travel to that region of your soul where your thinking ends and your all your striving for sense and order is at rest. It is as if you are standing on a dock overlooking a calm and placid lake; it is a warm summer day. It feels like the lake is calling to you, inviting you, and you kick off your shoes and dive off the dock into the water of your deepest longings, your warmest currents; your dark and murky depths. This is the area where the sacred stories of religion live and make sense; they are like treasures sunk in the sea; you can only find them by diving in.

People who, like me when I was younger, criticize religion from the outside are like people who think they know all about the ocean but have stuck their toe in it – have never felt the thrill of the waves rushing over their feet; have never felt the dangerous undertow pulling them further out.

For some strange reason they think that swimming in these waters is beside the point – but that’s the only point.

The great Sufi poet Rumi said,

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

50 years ago, a man and his traveling companion were driving through the Midwest and just outside of Rochester, Minnesota they pulled off the highway. It was coming on to twilight and they got out of the car to stretch their legs; looking up the man saw two Indian ponies in a pasture, trotting toward them.

Later, he would write a poem about these ponies:
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me...
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other."

One of the ponies, black and white, approaches him and nuzzles his hand:

"Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom."
-James Wright, from "A Blessing"
from "The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart", p.435

When’s the last time you felt like you were about to “break into blossom”?

They don’t come often, but some of us, if we’ve learned to swim in the deep waters, have these moments; these moments when the world seems to stop and everything comes to balance on this one still point of knowing: and we know what it means to be resurrected.

There is something deep inside us that knows all about resurrection – if it didn’t, the idea of resurrection would bounce off our brains like so many other impossible ideas.

No, deep down we know.

And deep down, we know we are not alone.
The Nobel prize winning poet, Juan Ramon Jimenez, wrote this:
I am not I.
I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And at other times I forget.
The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
The one who will remain standing when I die.
translated by Robert Blye
in "The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart", p. 367

Deep down, we know what it means to be resurrected; we know it in our bones, in our flesh and blood. We can feel it, in our bodies. It is a secret knowing, discovered in the region of dreams and prayers.

This knowing begins to surface in the places we might least expect it – in our futility, our weakness, our woundedness, our dying. With every ache and pain, there is a cry for relief that comes from a place where we are healed; with every wrinkle that appears in the mirror there is a memory of timeless youth; with every bit of news of injustice and murder there is a protest that comes from the knowledge that the world should not be this way; that it doesn’t need to be this way.

We know this because in the deepest part of where we live, we have seen God’s Kingdom; not only have we seen that Kingdom, we have come from there; we are citizens of that Eternal City; and we know that this is where we will return one day.

In the midst of our brief and painful lives we feel the resurrection rising within us.

It starts in our woundedness: our aging, our disappointment, our despair; it begins in pain and protest against the dying of the light.

But it doesn’t need to end there. If we dare to lift our hearts; if we dare to lift our prayers of yearning to the Source of light and the Spring of love, a connection is made; the uncreated energy of the Holy One is awakened in our bodies comes alive; and we rise; we rise and our souls are lifted up; we rise and our wounds are left behind; we rise and we awaken to what we have known all along:
that God is alive;
God has defeated death.
We understand now, this ancient story that is written on our hearts;
We are in the garden at the empty tomb, and the tomb is ours;
we are standing, now, in the presence this curious angel, who is pointing the way to the resurrection;
we are present, now, to this risen Christ, who is wounded and walking among us;
And now we know because he is alive;
Alive within us!
And we stand –
stand up! stand up!
And we raise our hands
and we raise our voices; and we shout it to the morning;
and we shout it to our souls:
Christ is alive!
Christ is alive!
And so are we!

Praise be to God, Alleluia, Alleluia, the Lord is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia, Alleluia!

Win Twins!

2009-04-09T09:44:00.000-07:00

As the Hopeful Priest goes into sabbatical mode, he would like to leave his readers with these important words of comfort and good cheer:

*The Win! Twins! Fight Song*

We’re gonna win Twins, we’re gonna score!
We’re gonna win Twins, watch that baseball soar!
Knock out a homerun, shout a hip-hooray!
Cheer for the Minnesota Twins today!

We’re gonna win Twins, give it our all!
We’ve got the guys who’ll knock the cover off the ball!
Let’s hear it now for the team that came to play!
Cheer for the Minnesota Twins today!

Lyrics by Dick Wilson
(music by Ray Charles, but not THAT Ray Charles.)

Shhh

2009-03-29T19:11:00.000-07:00

Sermon Lent 5
March 29, 2009

My wife, Rose, tells the story of how, in the summertime when she was a little girl, her parents used to send her to stay with Ma Bolden down the road. This was out East, in Maryland, out in the country where she lived in Prince George County. Ma Bolden had a little house with chickens and rabbits in the back yard; and in the summertime there would be days and days of stifling heat and humidity; 95 degrees with humidity so thick they used to say it was like living inside a dog’s mouth. And then, every once in a while, at night, when they were sitting out on the porch talking and watching the neighbors, Ma Bolden would get up and without a word go inside the house and turn off the radio and all the lights, and then take her seat, in the dark, in the corner of the house.

The first time this happened Rose was a just a little girl who loved to chatter away as little girls do; and when Ma Bolden turned off all the lights she said, “Whatcha doin’, Ma Bolden?” and Ma Bolden just said, “Shhh.”

“But watcha doin?”

And she said, “Shhh. God’s talkin’”

And as they sat there in the silence, she heard the thunder, way out in the distance: the thunderheads were coming, from miles and miles away, rolling over the graves of Gettysburg and the cities of Baltimore and Washington, DC until they were right on top of them and they were in the middle of the storm and the house was shaking with a fearsome sound.

Shh. God’s talkin.

We have seasons and moments in our lives when we are busy and we are stressed and our ears are full of the noise of everyday life, radios and tvs and people talking and children chattering and everyone having an opinion about this or that.

And then there are moments when we would do well to turn it all off, and sit still, and listen.

In the 9th Century BC, the prophet Elijah was on the run from Jezebel, the Phoenician princess and queen over Israel; she had purged the kingdom of all the prophets of YHWH who had spoken out against all her foreign gods and pagan practices; there had been a great slaughter on both sides; and now Elijah was running for his life. (1 Kings 19: 9-12) He ran for 40 days through the wilderness and came to a cave on Mt. Horeb, where he sat down and listened for the voice of God. There was a terrible wind, so powerful as to break mountains, but God was not in the wind; there was a terrible earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake; a terrific fire, but Elijah heard nothing.

And then there was the sound of sheer silence.

Shh. God’s talking.

200 years later, the prophet Jeremiah was listening. His people had either been at war or been occupied by foreign armies for at least 150 years. Nearly all of those wars had been lost; generation after generation had endured terrible humiliations from the occupying armies, especially the Arameans, and for the past 100 years, the Assyrians. The Assyrian empire was one of the first great conquering world powers, and everybody hated them.

And during this entire terrible time of war and loss, the people of Israel had been asking God “Why?” Why are you punishing us? What have we done wrong? What do we have to do to get you on your good side again?

Well, the prophets had the answer: “Obey the covenant established by Moses. Follow the rules. Do what God has told you to do and God will protect you.” But that was not so easy; after all the people of Israel were under occupation by foreign armies who had imposed their foreign gods. And every time Israel and Judah stood up to them, they were crushed. So they couldn’t win for losing; and now the whole idea of a covenant with God was being questioned. Maybe we’re not so special, they began to think; maybe we’re not the chosen people after all; maybe it doesn’t matter if we worship Baal or YHWH.

And then something new happened. Nobody really thought this day would ever come but finally the Assyrian empire started to crumble. The Assyrians, finally, were learning the terrible lesson that so many other conquering empires over time would learn: that it was possible for an empire to be too big; that there was only so much territory an occupying army could control; there were only so many resources available to feed and equip an army that enormous; and now they were fighting rear guard actions in distant lands, and the occupying army that had controlled Israel and Judah had to retreat, and for the first time since the days of Solomon, the people of Israel and Judah were free.

And into this new moment of history stepped a young, talented, ambitious king named Josiah. Josiah consolidated his forces; he gathered his army, and riding his chariot in the name of YHWH, he took control, finally, of his land – all of it, the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom, reunited for the first time since Solomon; and finally, there was peace.

Josiah believed he had heard God’s answer to the great question his people had been asking; now, finally, they could purge their nation of foreign gods; and finally they could restore the Temple in Jerusalem to its pure and holy state. They even, in the course of their renovations of the Temple, found an ancient scroll from the time of Solomon, upon which was written the holiness codes of King David’s priests. This, Josiah believed, was the great answer to his people; finally, they had found the rule book written by God; all they had to do was follow these rules, now, they could restore the ancient covenant with God that was given to Moses; and God would protect the nation once again; finally, as long as they obeyed these rules, this peace would last.

And so a terrific and terrible zeal seized Josiah and all the people; they routed out all impurities from the land; which meant that anyone who was married to a foreigner was forced to chase their spouse away or be killed; anyone who was caught worshiping a foreign god was killed; all the priests of YHWH, spread out across the kingdom, were told they had to move to Jerusalem and become part of the centralized Temple priesthood, all the better to control them and keep them from foreign influences. All the local shrines – whether to YWHW or to foreign gods – were destroyed and everyone was told that from now on they would worship only in Jerusalem, where they do everything according to the book. This would become known in history as Josiah’s reforms.

For the most part, the people went along with all this – because this was the answer they had been waiting for: the great promise of a restored kingdom was finally coming to pass, because the covenant with God was re-established and God would protect them now. And among the most enthusiastic of the reformers was a young man named Jeremiah. He cheered on Josiah as the purity of God’s law was established. And then, for almost 30 years, he watched what happens when you try to force people to conform. He watched as the Temple priests competed for power and influence; he watched as the people resisted being told what to do; and he saw, with his own eyes, that even a country with the very best of intentions would fall very short of its dreams.

Back in Ann Arbor, a friend of mine, who was a very cynical and world-weary lawyer, made the decision to change his membership from one church to another. A little while later I asked him, how was it going at his new church; and he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, you know, the law of jerks.”

I said, “The law of jerks? What’s that? He said, “Oh, it’s simple - no matter where you go, the ratio of jerks to non-jerks remains constant.”

In a way, this was Jeremiah’s insight: no matter what you do to impose reforms in a community, there will always be people who will use those rules to gain advantage, exploit the weaknesses in the system, seize control of assets, and take power. And so, over time, Jeremiah became more and more critical of Josiah. Then he experienced the final disillusion: the armies of Babylon were now on the march, taking over the vacuum left be Assyria’s fall, and nothing would protect them. No amount of perfectly conducted sacrifices on the altar, no heights of ritual purity, would keep the armies of Babylon from crushing Israel.

So Jeremiah sat down and listened for the word of God; he turned off the lights, so to speak; he sat very still; and he heard the thunder, coming his way.

He was one of the first to see that what was needed was a new covenant; a different kind of covenant entirely; not something imposed from above but something established within our hearts:

The days are surely coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.... I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts...

Armies will come, and armies will go; empires will rise and fall; the covenant is not found there. The covenant is found here, inside us.

The thunder is not out there; the thunder is in here.

Shh. God’s talkin’.

600 years later, Jesus came along; of course he knew the story of Elijah and Jeremiah. He had taken a good long look at the Temple and the holiness codes and the jerk ratio was plain to see.

He saw that something new was needed.

So he marched into Jerusalem; he came to the Garden of Gethsemene; he stayed awake through the night; he listened; and he heard thunder in the distance.

Jesus had a sense about moments. “This is moment,” he said.

Shhh.

Our Anger, Our Bodies

2009-03-18T16:57:00.000-07:00

Lent 3
March 15, 2009

We’ve been together now for five and a half years; we’ve gotten to know each other pretty well. Some of you know that I have anger issues.

The other day I was telling my therapist about the time, ten years ago, when in the middle of the night this guy broke into my house while my family and I were sleeping on the 2nd floor. I woke up to the sounds of him moving around downstairs. I got out of bed; when he heard my feet hit the floorboards he flew out the front door. The police caught him a few minutes later with our money (8 dollars) and our maxed-out credit card stuffed in his pockets. It turned out this was his third strike; they told me he could go away for life - I didn’t feel right about his going away for life for stealing 8 dollars and a credit card so at his sentencing I intervened and asked for mercy on the man.

Which he got – his sentence was reduced to 6 years. He was out in three.

After I told the story my therapist looked at me with these very peaceful blue eyes that he has and said, “And what did you do with your outrage?”

My outrage?

Yes, your outrage. The man broke into your house! It would be normal for you to feel some outrage, wouldn’t it?

Well, you see, of course I had outrage; but I didn’t allow myself to feel it – because, I told myself, I had to be a Christian; I had to be a priest; I had to do the right thing and wear my collar to the sentencing hearing and even visit the man in jail and hear his confession ... and somehow I thought that meant I didn’t get to have my outrage.

Or maybe the outrage just frightened me.

Therapists say that depression is anger turned inward. That’s true in my case; it’s also true for all the brooding Norwegians and self-destructive Irishmen and persecuted Huguenots who were my ancestors.

I grew up living in my head. I know I’m not alone in that – many of us live in our heads far too much; we associate our selves with our thoughts; we make our livings with our minds; we spend endless hours staring at disembodied words made out of electricity on a computer screen and the rest of our time watching disembodied electronic images on a TV.

In the meantime these feelings – which live in our bodies – in our chest and our gut and our voice – have no place to go, so they turn against their host.
But as I get older I realize that I can’t continue to ignore my body without experiencing some pain – coming from my body. Pain is the body’s way of getting our attention and teaching us its ancient wisdom. As I ignore my body I ignore my emotions – because our emotions live in our bodies.

When we’re living in our bodies, our emotions come easily; they rise and fall and we become more human; when we’re living in our heads we can go for days without even knowing what we’re feeling – this is of course especially true for us men - until we find ourselves acting out:getting snarky, or snide, or resentful, or depressed, or withdrawn, or gossipy, or cynical, or blowing up over little things, barking at our children or our dogs or drivers on the road.

It is for this reason that I give thanks for our Gospel story this morning. Jesus is overturning the tables in the temple and driving out the moneychangers. It seems that Jesus was in touch with his anger. It seems he had no difficulty feeling outrage over what the temple authorities were doing in his house; the blood rose in him and before anyone could stop him he was changing history.
Come to think of it, I don’t suppose Jesus had much trouble with any of his emotions, nor with the generalized practice of living fully in his body. After all, he traveled a great distance just to have one.

This is why it’s a very good thing that we have been called to the Church of the Incarnation. Because here we honor the fact that God lives in the body. My body. Your body. This body – the Body of Christ. And because God has a body, God has emotions.

I’ve been making copies of this article by Barbara Brown Taylor – there are some copies available in Farlander. This article speaks to me of the heart of what it means to be a member of the Church of the Incarnation. It’s entitled “Practicing Incarnation.” She says,
...After years of watching bodies being dug out of craters in Manhattan and caves in Afghanistan, after the body counts coming from Southeast Asia, Gaza and Iraq, most of us could use a reminder that God comes to us not beyond the flesh but in the flesh, at the hands of a teacher who will not be spiritualized...

Now the words of my therapist return: what, then, do we do with our outrage? What, I wonder, would Jesus be outraged over if he in his body now? What holy outrage would be animating his sacred flesh?

I wonder: what feelings come up for us as we consider that question? Are we so busy trying to be good Christians that this question frightens us? As a church, have we retreated so far into our heads that we’ve forgotten how to be angry?

Some months ago, during a Sunday coffee hour, a homeless woman who is known to many of us went into the women’s restroom in Farlander Hall, turned off all the lights, locked herself in the stall and started talking to herself.

When someone walked in and turned on the lights, she got very upset; when a few of us tried to intervene she came out into Farlander, started yelling, threw a chair, then stormed out, kicking over a statue of one of our saints in the process.

Well, we felt we had to, we called the police, she was escorted away. But that’s not what I’m outraged about. After all, the woman is mentally ill. She suffers from an illness; she isn’t a criminal; she isn’t evil or morally depraved; in fact she is a lovely and good person who happens to have a chemical imbalance in her brain, which, we often forget, is a part of the body.

If she had a heart condition, she could get treatment; but because her disease is in the brain, she gets to live and sleep on the streets, in cold and rain, and be routinely subjected to predators, assaults, and the criminal justice system.

And even that isn’t exactly what I’m outraged about. What I’m really outraged about – what rises in me as a holy outrage – is the fact that it’s only after she commits a crime and goes to jail – a crime that is caused by her illness – it’s only then, in jail, where she will finally receive a bit of medical treatment for her illness. In other words, the only way she can find treatment for her disease is to be treated like a criminal.

That outrages me. And because it feels to me like a holy outrage, a sacred anger, I feel it is Jesus’ outrage too. And if that doesn’t outrage every one of us, I would be so bold as to say that we are living so far out of our bodies we might as well be walking on the moon.

As a church, what do we do with our anger? Our holy anger?

Some of us know about [name deleted] and what has happened to him. A former member of our staff whom we know and love, now in prison for the crime of being sick. We know about this; how do we feel about it?

Barbara Brown Taylor says,
When I hear people talk about what is wrong with organized religion, or why their mainline churches are failing, I hear about bad music, inept clergy, mean congregations and preoccupation with institutional maintenance. I almost never hear about the intellectualization of faith, which strikes me as a far greater danger than anything else on the list. In an age of information overload, ...the last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, [emphasis mine] by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned as dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies. Not more about God. More God.” [The Christian Century, January 27, 2009, p.24-5]

To be a member of the Body of Christ, especially an arm of the Body of Christ called the Church of the Incarnation, means living into the truth of our bodies; and sometimes that means dealing honestly – and tenderly, always tenderly – with our feelings. That’s why I know that while it can be risky for a priest to talk about the truth of his anger or his depression, there is no such risk for me here.

Right?

Until I try to buy life insurance, that is; or health insurance if I don’t have any. That’s when living into the truth can make your life difficult. And yet, if I don’t speak of it, and if none of us speaks the truth of our lives, who else would ever be moved to get help for their own issues?

It’s just that easy to pick up your cross and follow Jesus.

To have a body is to bear weight – and sometimes that feels like the weight of the cross. The early church fathers and mothers knew this; they knew that Jesus’ death would have had no meaning if he had not had a real body that died a real death on a real piece of wood.

These bodies that we have been given – these everyday miracles that we inhabit – they are pathways to God. We can trust them. Sure, they might be getting a little rusty and tired and worn out – they can even be dying on a cross of shame – but they are still our best pathway in to the heart of God and to the meaning of life.

This is crazy talk among the wise, as Paul said in our reading this morning, “but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to [some] and foolishness to [others], but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Cor. 1:23-24)

The wisdom of God; the power of God; right here, in our bodies. For that and for all things, we give thanks to the Lord our God as found in the body of Christ Jesus. Amen.

“Letter to a Christian sister, troubled”

2009-03-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

You are not your car
You are not your house
You are not your job
You are not your children
You are not your face
You are not your thoughts
You are nothing
But a body, breathing
Life into soul.

You may have to fight for all these things
- These things you love but are not.
Fight then, like a wounded bear:
She turns, and roars, and fights on
not because she ought to
but because she is her body.

You can trust your body
You can trust your breath
You can trust the animation of your flesh
Because you are nothing
But a body, breathing,
By virtue of your virtue,
Having died to self.
And here you are.
Risen.

You carry God within your body
He is crucified in your pain
He is risen in your breath.

Of course you know this.
And that doesn't matter.
Matter has weight.
Even air weighs more than thought.
Breathe this.
Breathe that.

Fight on.

-Matthew Lawrence
March 15, 2009

Thresholds and Stars

2009-03-08T12:55:00.000-07:00

Lent 2, Year B
March 8, 2009

It’s late at night; my best friend and I have been staring up at the stars for three hours, sitting on the back porch of a comfortable house in a rural suburb of Boston. The stars have emerged from the dusk into a brilliant spray of diamonds glittering against the black sky. For hours we’ve been watching the sky and talking nonstop; and now it’s around midnight and we’ve fallen into silence.

We sit for some time like that, enjoying what only the best of friends can achieve, which is silence between them.

After a while, I hear my friend let out a long sigh, and then I realize that he is weeping.

He turns to me, despair on his face, and says, “I’m dying inside.”

My friend had been living a life that many of us would envy. I certainly envied it, anyway, though I tried not to show it. He had an impressive job, a beautiful home, a lovely girlfriend of six years whom everyone knew he would marry. He was the wunderkind of his company, a brilliant and rising star in the corporate world: and he was dying inside.

He was like a man who hadn’t stopped growing and his clothes, which used to fit him fine, were now too small.

Over the course of the next year, my friend did what we do when we’re desperately unhappy: he got into therapy. And for a while this only made things worse – because it only made him more aware of his problem. His clothes just felt tighter and tighter.

Then he went to a monastery on a retreat. And again he found himself looking up at the stars and weeping. But this time he also had a prayer: “Help me,” he said. “I can’t do this without you.”

And he felt something shift. Deep down inside, something changed. Later, when he told me about it, he said he felt like he was standing in front of a threshold, and all this time – for years, really – he thought he had to walk through it alone, and he had no idea what was on the other side, and the prospect was completely terrifying.

And then, that night, it felt as if there was a hand reaching out toward him from the other side of the threshold; and he felt a sense of peace and certainty come over him; and he knew at that moment that when he crossed over to the other side, he would not be alone; that, in fact, his long loneliness would be over; and that he would be fine.

It’s a dangerous and beautiful thing, to look up at those stars.

“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Jesus said that.

Lao Tsu said it with different words, “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”

All of us have thresholds we must cross; all of us have moments when we have to let go of what we are, in order to become what we might be. Some of us are facing the final threshold. Others among us are just getting started. Some among us have found their peace with this crossing; they have seen the hand reaching out; and they know, deep down inside them, that when the time comes, they will be fine.

Others among us are not so sure; they have some more praying to do, and more talking with trusted friends to do, and more star-gazing to do.

We are not alone. As Paul said, “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.”

Abram and Sarai think they know exactly who they are; they are desert people, wandering Arameans; they have scraped together a living out of the sand and sun for almost a hundred years; they are reaching the end of their lives and they are not unhappy.

And then, while Abram is looking up at the stars, an entirely new future opens up.

Sometimes this star-gazing can be surprising.

13 years ago, long before I even heard about the Church of the Incarnation in Santa Rosa, I found myself on a pilgrimage to Assisi. It was one of those threshold times in my life and I knew it. My ministry up to that point had gone well enough, but I was restless, and I needed new direction.

And so it was that on a bright sunny day I walked up a hill to the Basilica of St. Claire, and planted myself in front of the cross of San Damiano and began to pray. This of course, was the same cross that St. Francis had prayed before when he, as a young man, was at a threshold time of his life; when God spoke to him through the cross and said, “Francis, rebuild my church.”

I found myself praying for my vocation as a priest; I thought about this beautiful, historic institution we call the Episcopal Church; I thought about how it was losing members, like a patient whose bleeding wouldn’t stop; like the woman in the gospel story who comes to Jesus and asks for her bleeding to stop.

I felt my deep love for our church welling up within me. I thought about all the young people I knew, who had no interest in going to church, and I felt sadness for them, for what they were missing; and I felt a great sadness for the church, for what the church was missing by not having their creativity and fresh energy.

I must have been there about two hours, just sitting before the cross, and breathing, and praying, and feeling all these feelings; and it took that long for the words to come to me, and when they did, they felt like the hand reaching to me from the other side: “Matthew, rebuild my church.”

When I got home from Italy there was a message for me: I had been called as the chaplain at the University of Michigan. I had been called to represent the Episcopal Church to our lost generation of young people.

When I came to that job I brought those words and that passion with me. The campus ministry I inherited had given up on reaching the students on campus. There, at one of the largest universities in the country, in the middle of a place teeming with young people, the Episcopal Church stood empty and impotent, completely confused and stuck and unable to even imagine what kind of a ministry might succeed with the students there.

Within two years we were one of the largest and most active campus ministries in the Episcopal Church.

Seven years passed, and I interviewed for this job, and I spoke about my moment in Assisi, and about my passion for young people, and heads nodded, and the call was made. So I carried that sense of calling here.
But I made a mistake along the way. I thought I could just re-create my experience in Ann Arbor; I didn’t take enough time to figure out how my passion met your passion; how my sense of calling fit with your sense of calling.

And along the way, I never paused to wonder whether, in this particular place, with this particular ministry at Church of the Incarnation in Santa Rosa, God might have a different word for me. When I traveled across the country to be with you, I knew that God was calling me here. And I thought I knew how that calling might become real in the world. I busily applied myself to the Sanctuary Project, which morphed into CenterPoint, and in retrospect this felt a little like forcing the parish's foot into a shoe two sizes too small, or maybe, to use a more apt analogy inspired by the story of Abraham and Sarah, it felt a little like Sarah trying to have a child through a in-vitro fertilization. Meanwhile, this parish, at the tender age of 137 years of age, woke up one day to find itself pregnant the natural way, and gave birth to a beautiful new child, the Numina Center for Spirituality and the Arts.

And Sarah laughed.

The fact that Numina’s birth came so easily and so naturally is a testament to its fit with Incarnation. Going to the Rilke poetry reading last Saturday was so deeply satisfying; to see this sanctuary filled with lovers of poetry and the spiritual journey. What a thing.

And to be fair, there is a little bit of CenterPoint’s genes in Numina; the Friday night Taize service that Kayleen and Robin are doing is really a continuation and adaptation of our work with CenterPoint. This is a good thing.

And so now we stand at another threshold. What is God calling us to next? In five weeks I will begin my sabbatical with a trip to Utah and Arizona, where I'll be camping in the desert. For three weeks I will be living simply, hiking in the canyons and ravines, and spending my nights alone, staring up at the stars. I will be asking some questions: what's next for us? Where is God calling us to now? And I pray that you, too, as a congregation, will be spending some time with the stars.

We are in this together; we are on a journey of discovery and of blessing. We are not alone; there is God; there is Spirit; there is Jesus, reaching out to us. We will hear God’s voice; we will see that helping hand reaching across the threshold; and we will say, together, Amen.

The Temptation

2009-03-02T09:58:00.000-08:00

I read this story rather than preach a sermon on the First Sunday of Lent, 2009. The image of Jesus at the pinnacle of the Temple with the devil, tempting him to jump, had been on my mind for a few days. I wanted to approach that particular temptation from a fresh perspective. I wrote this on Saturday, February 28.

“The Temptation”

Mrs. Sanders watched as the pretty little girl, all of three years old, marched across the hospital waiting room and hit the Mexican boy squarely on the back of his head. The boy, no bigger than the girl, turned with a face full of outrage and wonder. He looked at the girl, and then looked up at Mrs. Sanders, as if she, somehow, was responsible. Then he let out a scream of admirable pitch and considerable force.

Mrs. Sanders instinctively moved to cover her ears, but then lowered her hands. She did not want to appear impolite. But Good God how she hated these waiting rooms. The families were so randomly thrown together; there was never enough room to ignore one another like decent human beings; and always there were the unruly children, more often than not speaking incomprehensible languages, and everyone worrying themselves sick over matters beyond their control.

She looked away from the boy, unable to bear witness to the chaos any further. She had her own problems.

She had been shopping at the Safeway when the call came in on her cell phone. It was Mildred, at the church. Why is Mildred calling, she wondered; she hardly knew the woman, though they were friendly enough, exchanging pleasantries at coffee hour every Sunday.

And then, before another word was spoken, she knew.

Mildred said, “I know how close you are to Christine”

Christine was as close to a daughter as Mrs. Sanders ever had. They had met at church, after Christine had left her drug-dealing creep of a husband and gone into rehab. She was a lovely girl who knew, way before her time, what it was like to lose everything and start over. Of course, she wasn’t perfect; she had relapsed once or twice; but she had held on to the same job now for three years and was twenty-three months clean and sober. They looked after one another’s cats; and every Sunday after the 8 o’clock service they went out for breakfast.

Over the cell phone, Mildred was trying to get the words out. “Some kind of accident on 101,” she said.

“Where is she?”

“I thought you would want to know ...”

“Where IS SHE?!” Mrs. Sanders shouted into the phone.

As she drove to the hospital she had a one-word prayer: “NO.” As in, Oh no you don’t, oh no you don’t, don’t you even dare, not on my watch, not this time, no sir-ee. No! No no NO!

The stupid elevator was too slow. She took the stairs and when she got to the ICU they wouldn’t even let her in. “Only immediate family, I’m sorry,” said the nurse, with what sounded like fake concern.

“She doesn’t have any family,” said Mrs. Sanders, in a desperate lie.

“Well, the rules are very strict,” the nurse said.

“But I’m her best friend!”

“Sorry.”

So Mrs. Sanders entered the waiting room and began her wait.

After a little while the priest came by, clutching his red leather book and looking harried. He kissed Mrs. Sanders on the cheek and told her to pray and then hurried into the ICU. He was in there a pretty long time. When he came back he held her hands in his. It looked like he might have been crying.

“They don’t know a lot,” he said. “She doesn’t look good. Time will tell. All we can do is pray.”

Around midnight, one of the nurses brought Mrs. Sanders a hospital blanket and a pillow. They had given up telling her to go home and get some rest. The room was empty now; the horrid fluorescents were turned off. An ordinary lamp on the other side of the room gave out a weak yellow glow.

She dozed for a time.

For some reason that she would never be able to explain, she wasn’t surprised when she opened her eyes and saw the visitor, seated across from her. He was studying her face.

There was no doubt in her mind who he was. Her grandmother had talked about visions and things beyond explaining that she never had reason to doubt.
He looked just as she had imagined: an intelligent brow, large eyes, a kind face. His hair wasn’t really all that long.

“Gloria,” he said. “I’ve always loved that name.”

Mrs. Sanders sat up. “What’s happened to Christine?” she said.

The visitor didn’t speak.

“Please! Tell me.”

He seemed to be waiting for something.

Mrs. Sanders met his gaze. In the silence, a heat rose up in her. “You have to save her,” she said. Still, he did not answer. She was trembling now. “She’s young,” she said. “You can save her!”

Finally, the visitor spoke. “You love her so much.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“And you want her to be the exception,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You want a miracle. You want a suspension of the laws of physics and chemistry. You want the laws of nature to be put on hold. Everyone and everything else lives and dies by these laws; but you want Christine to be the Exception.”

“Yes,” she said.

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” he said, gently.

Mrs. Sanders glared at him; she bunched her hands into fists. She thought she might hit him.

Finally, he said, “Let me show you something.”

Suddenly there was a brilliant, hot light; they were outdoors; the heat was nearly overwhelming. They were high up in the air; she saw thousands of buildings below them; they could see for miles in every direction. Mrs. Sanders thought they were flying but then she felt something hard under her feet and realized they were standing on top of a tower, looking down.

Someone else was with them, standing next to the visitor. He was short and thin and smelled bad. His head was bald and he looked miserable, like a soldier losing a battle. He was talking to the visitor; he had a high, raspy voice.

He said, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here. After all, Scripture says that the angels will bear you up."

The visitor replied, “Do you mean, the laws of gravity would not apply to me?”
“Yes, that’s right” said the little man, eagerly. “You would be the Exception.”
The visitor considered the ugly little man for a moment. Then a smile crept over his face.

“Little man, did you think I came into this world to escape gravity? Did you think I came so that I might be rescued from this earth?” The strangest, most intense expression came over his face – Mrs. Sanders couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh or cry. He bent down; for the longest time nobody spoke, but she could feel it: something indescribable was happening.

Finally the visitor let out a long sigh; he picked up a stone he stood, then tossed the stone. All of them watched the elegant arc of its fall. Mrs. Sanders remembered a geometry class, when the teacher effortlessly drew a perfect curve across the chalkboard.

“Look, what beauty,” he said. “You don’t get the beauty without it falling.”

In the ICU, Christine lay beneath a tangle of tubes and cords.

She was motionless, but for the steady rise and fall of her chest. The ventilator and its tape covered most of her face.

The priest had been there earlier. He had whispered prayers into her ear, and sung some psalms, and anointed her with some oil. She had fallen asleep in the middle of it all, a psalm dancing around inside her.

When she woke, the priest was gone. She didn’t know how much time had passed. It felt like night.

She closed her eyes, and the psalm came back to her. She saw herself, with long dark hair and a white dress, dancing, swirling, laughing and singing in a strange language.

Before she opened her eyes, she felt the visitor come into the room. She did not show any fear.

She recognized him by his perfect teeth. She had always imagined he would have teeth like this, straight and gleaming white.

His breath was close. It smelled like honey.

You know who I am, he said.

She nodded.

You know what time it is, he said.

She shut her eyes, looking for the dancing woman... and instead, found herself in a desert; all around was a vast wasteland of rock and sun. She was sitting under a canopy of palm branches. It was perfectly quiet. She felt very still, as if she had been meditating.

He was there.

He was wearing something loose-fitting, made out of linen. His hair was dark and shiny, and not all that long. He smiled at her.

George Clooney would envy those teeth, she thought.

I gave him those teeth, he said.

She laughed.

And then she was gone.

At the cemetery, with the sun pouring down, Christine’s remains were lowered into the ground. Mrs. Sanders waited while the people walked away. She stood alone at the edge of the grave for a while. Then she tossed her rose into the dark earth. She watched the curve of its arc as it fell, and gave thanks.